Science, Faith and the Culture War with Os Guinness

In this brief video conversation, Os Guinness suggests that the religious right might have largely created the current culture war that has science and faith as its core antagonists.

Video Transcription

To some extent this is a world issue, but it’s particularly an American issue. My interest is the way it’s come into the cultural wars in the last 40 years. You can see that religion and public life is part of the holy war front of the culture wars, and science and faith are a part of that. As a result of that, you have an enormous amount of fear, you have a huge amount of misrepresentation, and you have an incredible amount of demonizing of opponents, so it’s become very much a culture wars issue.

In many ways the new atheists are partly created by the religious right. You can see that in America there is no vehement repudiation of religion until recently. In Europe, the atheism is a reaction to corrupt state churches. Here you’ve never had that until the rise of the religious right. At first the concern was religion and public life, books like Kevin Phillips’ “America Theocracy”, and now it is religion itself. Of course, part of their powerful argument is that religious people have such a poor view of science. In many ways we have played into their hands, and this is totally unnecessary.