My new book is now available. If you’re local, stop by the church to pick up a copy. If not, you can purchase a softcover, hard cover, or electronic edition at many online retailers such as Amazon, Crossbooks, and Barnes & Noble.
The content of this book was first presented in its present form at The Oxford Round Table, Religion and Science Shaping the Modern World, in 2010 at Harris Manchester College, Oxford University, Oxford England.
Science, or its handmaiden “separation of church and state”, is absolutely incapable of establishing or sustaining the liberties spelled out in the Declaration of Independence and protected by the Constitution. Therefore, I present a replacement model for governing Church and State. I call this model the Proportional Accommodation and Appreciation (PAA) model.
This model is constitutionally, morally, and intellectually preferable because it is consistent with most religions, historically demonstrable in the U.S., inherent in the First Amendment, and equally encourages the free expression and participation of religious and non-religious citizens in every facet of society without government mandate or coercion, which engenders a public square characterized by a robust scientific enterprise and unfettered religious expression.
This is in contradistinction to the present Separation model, which expands science beyond its legitimate domanial authority, thereby conflating science and naturalism, which creates a Scientific Liberal Culture (SLC). By restricting public debate, education, and policies to scientific arguments, the Separation model actually suppresses religious expression and participation, diminishes human dignity and rights, and inescapably and unjustifiably elevates science to supreme arbiter of the public domain.
The United States was founded upon the astonishing declaration, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” Then the Constitution was drafted in order to “secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”
It is these rights and liberties that are being systematically and surreptitiously dismantled by both the unwarranted expansion of science beyond its legitimate domain and the restricting of religious ideas from public education and policy debate. True science has blessed us, but when employed beyond its legitimate limits of authority, it becomes a dehumanizing tyrant.
Science has its place in public life, but to limit religious knowledge to merely opinion and private faith, while concurrently limiting all publicly imposable knowledge to what can be demonstrated scientifically, requires more than science can provide. These rights and liberties are based upon belief in the existence of God who created man with intrinsic worth and liberties. Without a public belief in the existence of God, all talk of unalienable rights is quixotic and assures the continuation of the heretofore unabated evanescing of those rights.
