IT’S, FUNDAMENTALLY, ABOUT THE FUNDAMENTALS OF FUNDAMENTALISM.

The science/religion battle does not engage all religion equally, but focuses upon Evangelical Christianity and Islam and, specifically, fundamentalist elements within these faith communities. Perhaps this is partly because these are the most strident religious voices, but it’s more than that. The truth is, it was the Fundamentalists who started the battle, and it’s largely been they who have kept it going. Fundamentalists are all about confrontation. But who are they really?

Fundamentalism arose in the late 19^th century within Protestant Christianity, particularly in America. It was a theological response to “Modernism”, especially “Liberal Christianity” which some believed compromised the “fundamental” Christian doctrines in an attempt to embrace new ways of thinking. Though the battle extended to new methods of Bible study, specifically historical criticism, the theory of Evolution quickly became the key battleground in terms of public perception. This perception was intensified and immortalized in the Scopes “Monkey” Trial of 1925, which focused on the teaching of Evolution in the public schools of Tennessee. The trial was popularized by the movie Inherit the Wind (1960), staring Spencer Tracy, Frederick March and Gene Kelley. And this is where the trouble really starts.

The battle over science and religion has, for many years, been largely a debate over what should be taught in the public schools. Science teachers, as a group, do not concern themselves with what’s taught in churches, but when it impinges upon science education in the classroom the gloves come off. Teachers are properly jealous of their classroom territory, and parents are just as properly jealous of their parental territory. Thus, the fuss.

The issue, of course, is authority. How will decisions in our society be made? Who will decide what is taught to the children? What is true? On what authority can anyone reasonably claim that anything is true? Who will construct the framework, story, central myth? Who will determine the shape of the world that the rest of us must live in? Fundamentalists turn to simple answers. Religious fundamentalists turn to sacred texts and a few essential articles of faith; science fundamentalists to the scientific method: systematic observation, empirical measurement, experimentation.

Most teachers and parents accept that an ongoing parent/teacher negotiation will always be central to the project of public education. But some teachers, and some parents, have visions of a final victory. They want the public school classroom to be permanently off limits to faith-based thinking, or they want their alternative views to become a permanent part of the curriculum.

But, in recent years the battle has broadened immensely and become much more complex. Other non-Christian voices, particularly Muslim, have entered the debate, with their own views, and their own fundamentalist elements. In 2001 a tiny, radical element within the Muslim fundamentalist movement attacked the World Trade Centre and the battle morphed into something quite new. It became a clash, not between parents and educators, but between science and religion, knowledge and ignorance, civilization and barbarism.

This is, essentially, a war between fundamentalists; science fundamentalists on the one hand, and religious fundamentalists on the other. But most of us are neither. Most people drift among various ways of thinking: rational and emotional, literal and metaphorical, prosaic and poetic, while fundamentalists on all sides want to reduce it all to the precision of a few simple, scientific or theological, formulas. These are reductionist folk who want to live in a simpler world than the one on offer.

Wouldn’t it be nice if science could swallow up religion and end the debate? Wouldn’t it be nice if religion could co-opt science and assign it a permanently subservient role? Wouldn’t it be nice if we could just talk and listen respectfully to one another? Yes, wouldn’t it be nice?