Dear Concerned Citizen,

Science investigates the natural world as it can be known by natural reason.

That is a harmless truism: natural science is natural, and it looks to evidence about nature's order in nature. On this view, nature is the teacher, whatever the implications, and human beings are the docile students. As such, it neither decides in advance for or against theism. If the study of nature implies that it has been created by a super-intelligent being, then so be it.

But there is another sense, the more regnant and pregnant sense, that puts the "ism" in Secularism, and it is far from mild or neutral. On this view, science must be secularized; that is, it must adhere to a kind of principled animosity toward any and all religious implications.

Secularism's approach to scientific theory and evidence is "Anythingbuttery." It will allow any theory, no matter how wild and unsubstantiated, but those that have theistic implications. It will allow any evidence but evidence that might lead to theistic conclusions.

This principled animosity is itself a kind of dogma of Secularism that has infected science. Far from keeping science free from the distortions of religion, it imposes a hidden agenda upon science with all the evangelical fervor of religion, and hence brings about its own peculiar distortions.

A few weeks ago, we provided a particularly egregious example, uttered by Richard Lewontin at Harvard. "Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs...because we have a prior commitment...to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door."

Note that the prior commitment to materialism is exactly what keeps the Divine Foot from gaining any foothold. And it isn't just a worry about the disruption of miracles. Materialism as a philosophy simply denies any and all spiritual realities. It doesn't just lay them outside the realm of science, as is sometimes said. It wipes them out of any and all consideration, and that can both mislead and distort science.

Let's provide an interesting, but little known example. Ivanovich Oparin and J. S. B. Haldane, considered the 20th century fathers of origin of life research, made the attempt to demonstrate that life arose from a fortuitous mix of chemicals. Of Oparin and Haldane, Nobel Laureate Christian de Duve dryly remarked that since they were both "confirmed Marxists...one may wonder to what extent ideology had something to do with their desire to explain life as a naturally emerging phenomenon in the evolution of the Earth."

One doesn't have to wonder in Oparin's case. As he himself made clear in his now famous book Origin of Life (1938), Marxist atheism demanded that life had to have arisen by chance. In fact, Oparin was convinced that Marxist philosopher Friedrich Engels (an amateur biologist, to say the least) had shown in his Dialectics of Nature that "a consistent materialistic philosophy can follow only a single path in the attempt to solve the problem of life.... It must have...resulted from a long evolution of matter" That ideological necessity drove Oparin's research.

As Oparin accurately states, materialism must follow a single path. Even if that path leads nowhere, at least it doesn't lead to God. Almost 70 years later, after millions of research hours and billions of dollars, origin of life research has little if anything but confusion and frustration to show for its efforts.

The sole victory of its efforts, the famous Miller-Urey experiment that still appears in science textbooks, is actually a defeat. As we now know, the conditions of the experiment that allegedly produced some amino acids and other prebiotic building blocks, do not match the conditions of the early Earth. (Readers interested in the failures of origin of life research should grab Robert Shapiro's Origins: A Skeptic's Guide to the Creation of Life on Earth.)

Yet the belief that life must have arisen by a happy accident (that is, by anything but a Creator) continues to be tightly held, and also to receive heavy funding despite its peerless track record of failure, as the recent announcement by Harvard's origin of life diehard's makes clear.

There are other examples, my personal favorite being Multiverse Theory. Beginning about mid-20^th century, scientists began to discover more and more instances of extraordinary fine-tuning in regard to the fundamental forces of nature. It began to look more and more as if our universe was precisely organized from the very beginning, and more and more evidence of fine-tuning has only piled up since then.

The response of Secularist-bound scientists? They conjured up the notion--without any evidence whatsoever--that there were actually an infinite number of other universes, and we just happened to be the lucky one that didn't collapse into a smoldering implosion or blow into cosmic bits. Pure chance (i.e., no God).

But Secularism doesn't just support unsupportable theories. Sometimes it punishes those who don't subscribe to its orthodoxy. Consider the case of Dr. Dr. Richard von Sternberg. He has, not one, but two Ph.D.'s in evolutionary biology, and divides his time between the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NIH) and the Smithsonian. He has published over 30 very technical papers in eminent biological journals.

In his off hours, he also happened to be the managing editor the Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, and had the temerity to accept a scientific paper critical of neo-Darwinism. The paper, "The Origin of Biological Information and the Higher Taxonomic Categories," was written by Dr. Steven Meyer. Dr. Meyer is a proponent of Intelligent Design.

Even though the paper was peer-reviewed by three other eminent biologists and the Proceedings is unconnected to his day job at the Smithsonian, Sternberg was immediately attacked by other scientists at the Smithsonian.

First they tried to throw him out legally and above board. But Sternberg had followed the publication and peer review process flawlessly. When that didn't work, they commenced to make Sternberg's life miserable, not only jerking him around at the Smithsonian, but investigating his private affairs. In rooting around, they found the damning evidence that Sternberg had, at one time, "extensive training as an orthodox priest."

Aha! Believes in God! Out with him!

The situation became so morbid for Sternberg that U.S. Office of Special Counsel was called in to investigate. OSC agreed whole-heartedly that Sternberg was being harassed and mistreated for no good reason. He hadn't done anything wrong...except violate the hidden canons of Secularist orthodoxy.

He could have published anythingbut.