Cultural criticism

But I'd like to suggest, with all the diffidence I can muster, that there is something better to do here - or at any rate something that should be done in addition to this. And the essence of the matter is fairly simple, despite the daunting complexity that arises when we descend to the nitty-gritty level where the real work has to be done. The first thing to see, as I said before, is that Christianity is indeed engaged in a conflict, a battle. There is indeed a battle between the Christian community and the forces of unbelief. This contest rages in many areas of contemporary culture-the courts and in the so-called media-but perhaps most particularly in academia. And the second thing to see is that important cultural forces such as science are not neutral with respect to this conflict - though of course certain parts of contemporary science and many contemporary scientists might very well be. It is of the first importance that we discern in detail just how contemporary science-and contemporary history, literary criticism and so on-is involved in the struggle. This is a complicated many-sided matter; it varies from discipline to discipline, and from area to area within a given discipline. One of our chief tasks, therefore, must be that of cultural criticism. We must test the spirits, not automatically welcome them in because of their great academic prestige. Academic prestige, wide, even nearly unanimous acceptance in academia, declarations of certainty by important scientists-none of these is a guarantee that what is proposed is true, or a genuine deliverance of reason, or plausible from a theistic point of view. Indeed, none is a guarantee that what is proposed is not animated by a spirit wholly antithetical to Christianity. We must discern the religious and ideological connections; we can't automatically take the word of the experts, because their word might be dead wrong.

- Alvin Plantinga, "When Faith and Reason Clash:Evolution and the Bible"

As Dr Kelly Clark said at a seminar I attended on evolutionary psychology, scientists have become today's high priests. Anything they say - no matter how poorly they prove it or how incompetent they are on the subject - is accepted by the majority as "scientific" and trustworthy.

Richard Dawkins, for example, might be a good biologist, but he probably is a poor historian or philosopher. But people don't seem to get that. Because he attaches the label of "scientist" to his name, all his pronouncements tend to be taken as the absolute truth.