Dawkins has to be doing a tap dance over this latest architectural feat. I guess they had to one up the Creationist Museum in Kentucky by building a Temple of Science. Good grief...can it get any crazier?
Jonathon Keats, designer of the petri dish God, built The Atheon to get people thinking about what a scientific religion (or religious science?) would look and feel like.
Keats' conception of that idea took shape as a two-story building complete with stained-glass windows patterned after cosmic microwave background radiation and a liturgy based on the sounds of the Big Bang. The Atheon opened Sept. 27 at the Judah L. Magnes Museum in Berkeley, California.
But, could science replace religion?
Some scientists surely hope so. Remember the conversations at the Salk Institute in 2006? Keats, the builder of the temple, sure does...
Jonathon Keats: I heard about the Beyond Belief conference in 2006. Richard Dawkins was there, and Steven Weinberg, and Neil Degrasse Tyson. They were trying to figure out what science might do to provide an alternative to religion. There wasn't a consensus, but there was momentum towards the idea that science could do everything religion could, that it could be everything religion had been.
What would the form be, I wondered, of a church to science? What would happen within that church, in the most literal terms? And what would the fallout be if religion became scientific, and science a surrogate for religion?
For some folks, science is *obviously* a form of religion. They evangelize like members of any other church body, they join humanist organizations, they hallow natural selection, they write manifestos. What is repugnant to me is that they can push their religion (Scientific and Social Darwinism) in the public schools and deem it acceptable because they claim it doesn't pose a problem as far as separation of church and state. Well, I say...keep these temples coming!!!! Build them all over the nation, and elect Dawkins as the Pope of Scientific Atheism, with Darwin playing the role equivalent to Jesus. Then we'll slap them for not complying with the separation of church and state.
