As the discussion surges around that new French book, God, the Science, the Evidence (2025) — which just dropped in English translation — some reactions are predictable.
Evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne offers at Why Evolution Is True, “How do you keep your faith when all around you people are leaving it? You write a book decrying materialism, which of course, like all such books (as well as those recounting “visits to heaven”) become bestsellers due to the many believers desperate for ‘proof of God.’”
Coyne Knows Just Enough to Get it All Wrong
Religious interest and commitment is currently surging in the Western world, both among everyday folk and famous intellectuals. The big problem people face today is not snatching at straws but discerning the wheat from the chaff.
How that’ll affect the hardline atheism Coyne espouses is anyone’s guess. But here’s the thing: the question probably matters much less than it used to.
The rest of us look out on a world where science itself is being deplatformed by Woke relativism, platformed by the very people who used to listen to atheists like Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett (1942–2024) Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011), Sam Harris, — and Jerry Coyne.
Getting Our Bearings
John West, author of Stockholm Syndrome Christianity (2025), offered a telling comment in an e-mail the other day:
The atheists thought rationality would prove a godless, materialist conception of reality. When they find out it points the other way, they want to give up on rationality.
I doubt West had Coyne in particular in mind. But like many of us, he has noticed the gradual lurch — even in the treatment of science topics — toward a defense of irrationality. For convenience, I have called that the triumph of private truth. As I’ve often noted, Darwinian evolutionary biologists like Coyne are getting Canceled because they insist that humans are sex binary. That’s a fact which few have ever really doubted until the very recent — and now collapsing — transgender schoolkids craze.
Science? There was no science. There couldn’t be. The human mind is unique but the human body is a primate mammal model. In that design we are definitely either male or female. What clownfish do is obviously irrelevant.
But it didn’t matter that there wasn’t any science behind the transgender craze either. The legacy media, for example, were remarkably incurious, despite their tendency to swagger that they stand on the side of “science.”
But it’s Not Just About Hot Topics Like Sex
This summer, Richard Dawkins was concerned that ancestral beliefs are being given equal billing with science in New Zealand schools. And woe betide the scientists who complain about it:
I became involved because a number of distinguished scientists in New Zealand—fellows of the New Zealand Royal Society, which is the New Zealand equivalent of the National Academy of Sciences here—had written a letter protesting about this to a New Zealand journal called the Listener. As a consequence, they had their lectures canceled, they were threatened with expulsion, really quite unpleasant victimization of these distinguished scientists. And I had lunch with about half a dozen of them and heard all about it from them.
“Richard Dawkins on New Threats to Science—From Religion to Relativism,” September 7, 2025
It’s easier to understand if we keep this in mind: The belief that the human mind is an illusion (which materialist atheists espouse) filters down to the public as a right to believe and act on whatever makes us happy. On that view, if it makes someone happy to believe, as some people did long ago, that earthquakes happen when the Ground Fairy is angry with us, that person is entitled to have that view taught in school alongside plate tectonics, as an equally valid belief.
We can say the same for the war on math. A math education professor actually said this:
“On many levels, mathematics itself operates as Whiteness. Who gets credit for doing and developing mathematics, who is capable in mathematics, and who is seen as part of the mathematical community is generally viewed as White,” Gutierrez argued.
Gutierrez also worries that algebra and geometry perpetuate privilege, fretting that “curricula emphasizing terms like Pythagorean theorem and pi perpetuate a perception that mathematics was largely developed by Greeks and other Europeans.” Campus Reform, October 23, 2017
So mathematics, the foundation of the sciences — a way of elucidating the basic relationships of the natural world which gives us all more power to control them — is racist? It’s come to this?
No, this just means we are totally on the wrong track.
Here’s a thought. All of this decay happened during a period when atheists were considered to be the primary spokespeople for science. And they have yielded the floor to irrational forces. Maybe it’s well past time to let others have a turn at it.
You may also wish to read: Why materialism will probably drift into panpsychism. I predict that “Nothing is conscious” will be superseded, among fashionable thinkers, by “Everything is conscious.” Materialists will try to interpret the workings of the brain as one aspect of consciousness that is a natural part of the material universe.
Denyse O’Leary is a freelance journalist based in Victoria, Canada. Specializing in faith and science issues, she has published two books on the topic: Faith@Science and By Design or by Chance? She has written for publications such as The Toronto Star, The Globe & Mail, and Canadian Living. She is co-author, with neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Case for the Existence of the Soul. She received her degree in honors English language and literature.
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