sam-harris-the-atheists's new book is sub-titled "how science can determine human values." determine! it's unlikely that i'll read that book, but that's a very good statement of science as a religion, and it is complete hogwash. if you think you're deriving "human values" from evolution, or from climate studies, or from psychology, or from string theory, or genomics, i say you are utterly self-deluded. by an astonishing coincidence, science will end up confirming precisely the "values" (=politics) you started out with: your mother's new deal liberalism or whatever. reality itself demands that you support obama's tax policies. these claims for science, or this revival of extreme scientism, simply make it a new scholasticism, and it is a profoundly a structure of epistemic authority, a constant bowing and scraping before 'expertise' as articulated in these gigantic institutional contexts on matters about which you can have no understanding without being processed through the institution to the ph.d. and beyond, which you must simply accept. what's obvious about these new atheists etc is that they still need a religion. someone has to tell them what values to hold or they are lost. and they are angry because they got lost. but now they've found their faith, their priesthood.