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A Jealous God: Science's Crusade Against Religion

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What this book demonstrates to its readers is that Pamela Winnick has several strawmen she has erected about science and evolution, and she enjoys beating them regularly. One wonders if she was not subject to abuse with a science textbook at some point in her life, so obvious is her vitriol toward anything scientific.

She has made no effort to check her sources or to even document them; I've Googled several of her unattributed quotes and have found no record of who might have said the things she quotes. For all I can figure out, Ms. Winnick might have made up those quotes herself to support her cause. The editing and proofreading of the book are atrocious enough that I've had to read several sentences more than once to try to ascertain her meaning. As another reader has noted, she never attempts to address to whom she might actually be speaking. Is she upset at science as a method, at scientists in general, or only at those she considers "leftist"? The reader is left to wonder for himself what her motive might be.

It's obvious that she understands very little about evolution, a subject about which she seems very upset. She refers to neo-Darwinism as "the only acceptable scientific explanation for the origin and evolution of life" and neglects to note that evolution says absolutely nothing about the origin of life. She implies that such ongoing social problems as racism are the fault of science. I wondered while I read this book if Ms. Winnick had ever cracked open a science book or if she was capable of using a non-pejorative word to describe a scientist. She makes rather unprofessional and silly remarks about people with whom she disagrees, commenting on their appearances and on their personal lives with the obvious glee of a Kitty Kelley tell-all.

if you'd enjoy reading a book that is an honest discussion of either politics or science, _A Jealous God_ is not for you. If, however, you enjoy being preached to in unprofessional and underhanded ways about the distaste all religious people should have for scientists, then by all means, pick up this book. If you enjoy poorly edited and non-annotated books written by laymen about the problems with science, then this book's for you. It's certainly not an honest portrayal of anything within the real world or outside of Ms. Winnick's worldview in which scientists are a terrible evil.

Once upon a time, we learned that the scientific method was dispassionate; that scientific observations were independent of the observer. By its very nature science affected belief about the world and the cosmos by persuasion without preconception. Science required no revelation. It was not doctrinal. It did not promise miracle cures, instantly. This book makes it clear that none of this is any longer the case, at least for celebrity-science hyped by today's fatuous mainstream media outlets.

Undoubtedly, much unbiased and unpretentious scientific research is still conducted beneath the media radar. As most of it is not supportive of progressive politics, however, it is deemed mostly unworthy of dissemination by media elites. Another "science," however, provides a target-rich environment, and "A Jealous God" strips away its stealthy patina, exposing it for what it is: a power grab by a self-appointed elite with a "progressive" social agenda. Shockingly, this book exposes the eugenics roots of the stem cell research movement, and those roots are steeped in racism, as the author makes painfully clear. These benevolent folks would reengineer our very substance, and, as the author shows, are arrogant enough to believe that they are actually entitled to force all of us to fund their efforts! The tale of California's Prop 71- where taxpayers own only the risk, with no chance of return - alone makes this book worthwhile.

Like the author, I am not a religious person. I am skeptical of revealed truth. I remain no less skeptical of some supposed "truths" reported widely and enthusiastically (dare I say zealously) under the rubric of "science," particularly when, most improbably, these truths all seem to converge at a locus inhabited by elites which would exercise political power over every aspect of every human life, right down to our genes - for our own good, of course.

This book calmly and dispassionately shows with meticulous facts that it is not enough that science long ago routed religion as the source of knowledge of the cosmos. The author cites Professor Peter Singer of Princeton, who says that the Ten Commandments must be replaced with ten new ones. For instance, "Thou shalt not kill," will be redacted to say that humans should be killed under certain circumstances. "A Jealous God" makes it clear that, should the political/celebrity/progressive "science" prevail, when all the new commandments are written, there is likely to be one holdover: "Thou shalt have no other gods before me." The author makes that conclusion inescapable, based upon much evidence.

After reading this book, I infer that this current brand of popular "science" overreaches. Citing only utility, its ethicists promise us bodily health, denying that any countervailing values are operant. Those values - as advanced by religion - according to the crusading new science, are merely the shadows of ignorance and superstition conjured by our distant ancestors, as they huddled together in caves and around fires, divining omens from the heavens. Hopefully, there will be no catastrophic unanticipated result stemming from manipulation of the biochemical foundations of humankind, lest our progeny revisit those caves and embers, only to rediscover in reconstituted penumbras, the ancient question: are we mere biological mechanisms, or part of some greater, even divine, plan? One need not be religious to pose that question, and even modern science, rightly understood, may never provide the answer.

Heard her on the radio here last week and had to buy the book, even though it's not the kind of thing I usually read. But I read it in one sitting. It' impossible to put down. I just loaned it to a friend who says the same thing.

Finally, a book filled with fact and measured analysis, not empty rhetoric. Winnick, an attorney and journalist, uses both skill-sets to adroitly slam the pretentious world of elite scientists and "ethicists" and expose their truly disturbing, sometimes racist agenda. Best of all, she does so using real people and situations, so complicated issues are presented in dramatic, readable form.

What's particularly great is how she's able to explain complicated science in very simple terms. For the first time, I understood embryonic stem-cell research and cloning and what all the fuss is about. While she clearly doesn't have a pro-life agendum against this work, she brilliantly demonstrates the puffery beneath it - and the economic interests. She's not a scientist but obviously she's done a huge amount of research, reading medical journals and so forth.

Her exposure of racism is amazing and based, again, on facts. She's taken the time to review hundreds of biology textbooks from the 1960s to the present, showing their subtle racist and anti-religious messages. Amazingly, these textbooks were written by those who pretended on the outside to be progresstive, but, as she shows, were scandalously racist.

She shows also how medical research has been so commercialized that it cares less and less about human safety. Her chapters on failed gene-transfer and fetal-tissue therapies are amazing. Medical researchers rush their products into human trial so they can make a killing in the marketplace, caring virtually nothing about people.

She also does a great job exposing California's Proposition 71, which raised billions for stem cell research. Unbelievable scientific fraud and Hollywood pretension.

Also great work describing "celebrity scientists" like Richard Dawkins and Carl Sagan, who clearly think they are so much better than the rest of us. These guys are actually quite pathetic. Also great work on Paul Ehrlich, the population guy, whose racism is absolutely amazing. I remember him from way back, when I thought he was a cool guy. She shows what a fraud he was and how he used "science" to push his racist agenda.

Winnick has a great sense of humor. There are little touches that made me laugh out loud, like the rat that had been treated with humam stem cells, and Goober, the baboon, whose heart was implanted in a newborn child - in furtherance of "science."

This is not the work of some religious fanatic, but a brilliant woman who has decided to challenge conventional thinking about religion and science. Winnick is a really great writer who combines understatement, wit and fact. We need more books like this.

One of the best books I've read in a long time.

As a researcher for a biotech in New Jersey, I'm aware of the ways in which "science" is distorted to serve certain purposes,including the eradication of religion.

From the other reviews here, it's clear the author has touched a nerve. I, for one, commend her on her courage in stepping out of long-held liberal political views to address the many ways in which the scientific community has set about destroying not only religion, but human rights. Perhaps others will begin to step up to the plate and slam it out of the ballpark as Winnick does. Truth, not political correctness, should be the goal of good writing.

She tackles a lot of areas in this book, from bioethics to evolution to medical research. She is right on the target when she analyzes the "miracle cures" -fetal tissue research, gene transfer therapy--that come around every decade or so, but never deliver. She is also right about state funding of embryonic stem cell research and who the real beneficiaries are. Like California, New Jersey funds this work, which mostly benefits companies like the one I work for.

Everything here is thoroughly documented. The writing is excellent, often ironic, always powerful. I highly recommend this book.

Is it too much to expect this Columbia Law School Graduate to clearly state her proposition at the outset and then back it up with evidence? Should she not have started out by clarifying what she meant by the book's title, which includes the words: "Science's Crusade Against Religion"? What does she mean by science? Individual scientists? The "scientific establishment" (whatever that might mean)? The scientific method? What or who, exactly, is launching this crusade? And then what about crusade? Let's forget where this word originates for a moment, and ask what the author might mean. A concerted effort? Again, by whom or by what? Finally, what does Ms. Winnick mean by religion? Religion as such? Particular religions? The so-called judeo-christian value system?

I'm sorry to be picky, but if you can neither agree nor disagree with Ms. Winnick's position if she doesn't set it out. And she doesn't. Instead, she presents a selection of anecdotes from the culture wars, most of which bear on science and religion, but in none of which she even tries to demonstrate a concerted attack by science/the scientific method/scientists against religion/religions/religious beliefs. To confuse matters, in one of her chapters (Monkey Business, on creationism), she even describes a religious attack against science.

If science really is launching a crusade against religion, then how does Ms. Winnick explain vaccines, drugs, and medical procedures that save lives and allow doctors to bring comfort to millions? How does she explain new food technologies that allow people to grow food under harsh conditions and thus to live? How does she explain communications technologies that increasingly allow institutions to get their message out to countless people? The list goes on, but all these advances, which science has provided, allow religions to flourish. Sure, science has had its dark days and its charlatans, but on balance, science has been overwhelmingly beneficial to religions. It's just ungenerous to suggest otherwise.

There are really many things wrong with this book. Errors abound. A gamete is not organic? Carl Sagan's third wife is Ann Dunyan? How about this: "The word "theory" when used in science is different from its ordinary use. A scientific theory is considered virtually the same as fact." Huh?

Many quotes go unattributed: "as one member later recalled"; "so-called "humanists" complained"; "observed two law professors at the University of California at Los Angeles." It matters who said things. The reader needs to be able to be able to verify the quote if necessary, and to place it in its context. Does attribution bring needless detail not central to the argument? How about a detail like this description of Richard Dawkins (here Winnick quotes John Horgan): "an icily handsome man, with predatory eyes, a knife-thin nose, and incongruously rosy cheeks." We're also told Dawkins is "meticulously dressed in tailored European suits" and is "married to an actress". If we can have this level of detail about Professor Dawkins (Stephen Jay Gould, by the way, is "affable, chubby...a regular guy"), can we at least know who made the statements in quotation marks? (By the way, would Ms. Winnick mind if I included information about her physical appearance in this review? Could she imagine why that might not be useful or relevant?)

I leave this book feeling disappointed and frustrated. Disappointed because I find it to be poorly written, badly edited, full or error and misconception about science, and lacking in any serious discussion of her opponents' positions. Frustrated because it fails to present any kind of case, let alone try to demonstrate one. There is plenty of anecdote but it fails to add up to a case that science is involved in a crusade against religion. Too bad that I spent the last few days reading it.

A judge would surely throw this one out. And you should too.

Is science a religion? Well, of course, that depends on what you mean by religion. I think that science is important. Science certainly has its problems, as any human activity does. Science is also all we have in the struggle against irrationality. If you think that makes science my religion, so be it. Winnick criticizes scientists such as Sagan, Dawkins, and Gould because they want to promote science. I don't see how it is a bad thing for them to be enthusiastic about science, given that they believe is vital to humanity's future.

Winnick says some things about science that are simply silly. Darwinism has its roots partly in the politics of its time--so what? The important thing is whether the evidence supports it. It does. Creationism has dozens of questions which it has never answered: Why do animals have rudimentary organs like the appendix, or the leg bones found in some whales? Why do some animals go extinct? Why are so many unique life forms found on islands? Why do different places around the world that have similar climates have different animals? Why are animals that live in caves more closely related to animals living on the ground above them than to animals living in caves far away? Evolution has good answers to all these questions. Creationism has "God wanted it that way," end of discussion. Winnick argues that favorable mutations are too rare for evolution to work, an improbability as great as a monkey typing out the works of Shakespeare. Please don't accept this without reading Dawkins' book "The Blind Watchmaker," which addresses precisely this question. While mutation is random, evolution is NOT random; evolution is based on the cumulative survival of favorable variations. If a monkey types for a long time and whenever he by chance types the correct letter it is retained, he will in fact type the works of Shakespeare.

Winnick also says that science cannot explain behaviors such as charity that have nothing to do with survival. Winnick clearly missed the very extensive scientific literature on the evolution of altruism. Charity certainly can and does evolve--if it benefits the individual involved or those related to him. Bees have evolved to sting a bear attacking the hive, even at the cost of their own lives, because all the bees of the hive are closely related to one another. The genes get passed on preferentially, even though a few individuals die. Humans are social animals who are highly dependent on their communities for survival; charity is a big part of the social glue holding those communities together. It is not mysterious.

Given that I am an atheist and a scientist, Winnick and I are clearly coming from very different points of the ideological spectrum. If you are inclined to take all of Winnick's book at face value, I would strongly urge you to read some contrary viewpoints. My own personal favorite is Sagan's "Science as a Candle in the Dark."

Winnick takes the survival of human life--any human life--as the ultimate good, no matter what the cost. I am a little puzzled as to why a Christian would take this view. If an elderly cancer patient's next stop is Heaven, why put a lot of money and effort into prolonging their final illness? When does keeping a dying person alive become sadism? When it comes to a one-pound preemie, I tend to think putting him in an ICU for months, doing complex surgery, and the like, is more like sadism than like compassion. If Christians feel it is important to keep people alive no matter what, I would suggest that Christians be the ones to pay the medical bills in such cases.

Another problem with the "life at any cost" approach is that it assumes that the earth can hold any number of people. This is not the case. This is abundantly shown by the accumulating environmental problems we face today, not to mention the declining standard of living in the U.S. We are exhausting the natural resources on which ALL human lives depend very rapidly.(For more on this, I would suggest Diamond's book "Collapse" and Kunstler's book "The Long Emergency.") A stable population is an absolute necessity to get this situation under control. Population control is no liberal fad; on the contrary, it is deeply conservative. Given that we only have one planet to live on, we should be cautious about doing new things with it, including putting lots of new people on it. Whatever else you may say about abortion, it is an effective and inexpensive method of controlling the number of people. If you feel abortion is unethical, you still need to come up with a way to keep the population of the earth at a sustainable level. I don't see Christian churches ponying up the necessary money to pay for billions of people to learn and practice the rhythm method. This is condemning people--not fetuses, grown people--to death by war, disease, and ecological disaster. That doesn't strike me as genuine respect for human life.

That said, I was surprised to find that Winnick and I do have some points of agreement. I am no fan of high-tech infertility procedures, for the obvious reason that I think we have more people already than we need. Such procedures also cost huge amounts of money that could be better spent elsewhere.

I also oppose heart transplants, though not for the same reasons Winnick does. In my opinion, compared to the huge costs, the number of people whose lives can be saved by heart transplants is so small that transplants can only be considered a waste of time and money. The same is true for most other organ transplants, and indeed for much of modern high-tech medicine. Other countries have health as good as, or in some cases better, than we do here in the U.S., for a fraction of the cost. Much of high-tech surgery and medicine has surprisingly little solid scientific support as to its effectiveness. This is not a criticism of science. It is a criticism of doctors, who have allowed greed to lead them into forgetting about science and using unproven, fantastically expensive treatments on patients.

Winnick spends a lot of time criticizing science education. I agree with her that science is taught very poorly at present in the U.S. This is not because it is godless, but because there is a long-standing tendency in education to implement "reforms" without any evidence that the reforms will improve education. To make matters worse, most of the educational research that is done is of truly awful quality: sample sizes too small, samples not randomized, controls poorly done, results followed for too short a time, costs of implementing proposed reforms not taken into account, etc. (Given the importance of education in society and the economy, you'd think good research and lots of it would be a priority. But at present that's not the case.) Winnick falls into a trap here: she criticizes science education as being too focused on rote learning. But the replacement of rote learning with more creative approaches has been a goal of educational reformers for centuries, with a remarkable lack of success in improving education. Rote learning is enormously easier on the teacher than more "creative" approaches are, making it far cheaper to teach kids and making teacher retention and burnout far less of a problem. In addition, there's little or no evidence that kids learn more or are more creative if they're taught by "creative" approaches than by rote learning.

When it comes to improving peoples' lives, in my opinion the road to Hell is indeed paved with good intentions. If Christianity really worked to make bad people good and good people better, I would be the first to sign up. If Christianity was an effective way to relieve poverty and bring peace, I would definitely consider it. If Christianity were just a silly hobby that made people feel good and harmed no one, it wouldn't bother me. Unfortunately, that isn't what I see. Even when in power, Christianity has made little or no progress in solving the social problems that it deals with, such as poverty and violence. Christianity systematically ignores the most serious problems of our times: overpopulation, exhaustion of resources, and pollution, among others. Why does Christianity ignore these problems? Because they receive little or no attention in the Bible, a book written thousands of years ago. We deserve better.

Despite it's strong title and the title of the last chapter ("The Road to Hell"), this book is actually very mild and straightforward. It does not portray "Science" as historically and actively seeking to overthrow religion. It merely illustrates a few of the modern areas in which the goals (especially monetary) of certain researchers run roughshod over practically any ethical or moral considerations, not just religious views. What may be most surprising to most readers is that the most recent and most vital cases involve demands for research to be publicly funded but totally free of regulation or even public scrutiny, through means (and perhaps even to ends) that are abhorrent to people from both left and right wings of politics and religion.

A fascinating account of how medical science has abused human rights and acted as a major political force in this country. There's loads of gems here I never knew before--how racist the population-control movement was, the terrible things scientists used to do to living fetuses, the way they still abuse blacks and the poor in the developing world--all under the pretense of being so "liberal."

I especially was shocked at California's Prop 71 to raise billions for stem-cell research. She shows what a fraud it was, how bad for the poor and exposes the clowns in Hollywood for their support.

She does a great job showing how medical science raises expectations for cures, then never delivers--but they still make lots of money,

It's really good. She's not sticking up for religion so much--at least not Christianity. It's more of a decency-ethics case.

I really loved it! (and it's a fast read)

No wonder she's pissing people off, including some who haven't bothered to read the book, but freely offer their "reviews." Sure it would be cool enough to write yet another book about how stupid the religious are, but it simply isn't so.

Political correctness requires that we hold certain truths to be self-evident; among them, that science is unbiased and free of political corruption. The author shows this isn't true, that science is every bit as religious as traditional religion, and every bit as political as any political party.

She does a brilliant job of showing how even high school biology
books are riddled with rascist and anti religious messages. And she exposes the so called "liberal" scientific community for its inherent racism and elitism.

This is well-written and engaging, with many human-interest stories to illustrate the great issues involved. The book is a brave and important one because it challenges the scientific establishment in three areas where challenge is much needed.

First, Winnick suggests that many scientists are arrogant and over-reaching in their battles with religion. Although not siding with creationists in the Darwin controversy, she criticizes scientists who use evolution theory to promote atheism. Following science writer John Horgan, she suggests that creationists should stop attacking evolution theory and, instead, stress the origin of life itself--something scientists cannot explain. She quotes a rabbi who said: "While science may enhance the comforts of living, it can never create human happiness, nor can it ever exhaust the mysteries of the universe."

Second, Winnick talks about the influence of eugenics (the effort to breed a better human race) on population control. Too many writers suggest
--or pretend--that eugenics died with the Nazis. In fact, many leading American scientists of the post-Nazi era have been committed eugenicists and have lent their prestige to the targeting of poor people and minorities for population control.

Third, Winnick does a masterful job in exposing the financial interests behind the hyping of embryonic stem-cell research and cloning. In addition to greedy corporations, we're now seeing well-paid scientists, often ones with heavy stock investments in their own work, who lobby for public funding to make that work more profitable. The conflicts of interest in the 2004 California referendum on stem-cell research should make people in other states sit up and take notice. Those Winnick calls the "Hollywood troops, who inevitably believe they are missionaries for science," come in for their share of criticism.

Winnick's background in reporting gives her special credibility when she criticizes fellow journalists for accepting scientists' statements without question. After describing a dangerous gene-therapy experiment that killed a young man, she suggests several rules for reporters: They "should be wary of any claimed 'miracle cure.' They should investigate the financial holdings of any researcher who hails an imminent cure. They should read the medical journals and challenge the data."

Many Americans, religious or not, may well say "Amen!" to that.