But how should religion be eliminated? Our atheist educators have a short answer: through the power of science. “I personally feel that the teaching of modern science is corrosive of religious belief, and I’m all for that,” says physicist Steven Weinberg. If scientists can destroy the influence of religion on young people, “then I think it may be the most important contribution that we can make.”‘
One way in which science can undermine the plausibility of religion, according to biologist E. 0. Wilson, is by showing that the mind itself is the product of evolution and that free moral choice is an illusion. “If religion … can be systematically analyzed and explained as a product of the brain’s evolution, its power as an external source of morality will be gone forever.”
By abolishing all transcendent or supernatural truths, science can establish itself as the only source of truth, our only access to reality. The objective of science education, according to biologist Richard Lewontin, “is not to provide the public with knowledge of how far it is to the nearest star and what genes are made or Rather, “the problem is to get them to reject irrational and supernatural explanations of the world, the demons that exist only in their imaginations, and to accept a social and intellectual apparatus, science, as the only begetter of truth.”
What, then, happens to religion? Philosopher Daniel Dennett suggests that “our religious traditions should certainly be preserved, as should the languages, the art, the costumes, the rituals, the monuments. Zoos are now more or less seen as second-class havens for endangered species, but at least they are havens, and what they preserve is irreplaceable.”
How is all this to be achieved? The answer is simple: through indoctrination in the schools. Richard Dawkins has recently issued a set of DVDs called Growing Up in the Universe, based on his Royal Institution Christmas Lectures for children. The lectures promote Dawkins’s secular and naturalistic philosophy of life.
