But the corruption of religion is not the only outcome of today’s cynical attempt to invent a new green God. When so-called atheists, scientists and secular thinkers demand that their views should be treated as sacred, they degrade the status of scientific reasoning, too. Science emerged through an intellectual struggle to free humanity from the tyranny of sacred dogma. Belief in science is unlike pre-scientific belief. A belief in the power of science to discover how the world works should not be taken to mean that science itself is a belief. On the contrary, science depends on an open-minded and open-ended attitude towards experimentation and the testing out of ideas. Indeed, science is an inherently sceptical enterprise, since it respects no authority, other than evidence. As Thomas Henry Huxley once declared: ‘The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority as such.’ ‘Scepticism is the highest of duties’, said Huxley, ‘blind faith the unpardonable sin’. That is why Britain’s oldest and most respectable scientific institution, the Royal Society, was founded on the motto: ‘On the word of no one.’ And that includes the green God.
Getting God to do their dirty work
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