Only a block away from the Berkeley campus of the University of California, one of the world's proudest scientific centers, is the Pacific School of Religion. In last week's Christian Century, the school's dean, the Rev. Dr. Robert Elliot Fitch, gives his scientific friends and neighbors a gentle warning about the temptations that threaten the "new priesthood of science."
THE fact is that the scientists in our civilization constitute a new sort of religious order [that] sets itself apart from the world by a discipline, a language and an attitude. The attitude is that of contemptus mundi, a scorn for the ordinary...