On the specific issue of science and religion, the problem is largely the gap between what scientists think science is and what good science content consists of, and what the general public thinks about these two things. As long as that gap persists, there is going to be tension. I am, of course, in favor of good science but I am also not too keen on giving too much power to scientists and technocrats. That can lead to a form of elitism and violates my basic sense of how democracies should function.
 
Interestingly enough, I am currently in the process of researching and writing about how the religion-evolution-legal skirmish has evolved in the US over the years. It will appear on my blog fairly soon and I may try and get it published in time for the big Darwin year of 2009, the 200th anniversary of his birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species.
 
MLU: I look forward to that. Like Darwin, you are both a scientist and an atheist -- aspects which arguably go hand-in-hand. And yet, some scientists are religious practitioners. In your experience working among your colleagues, how is it possible that some scientists are not atheists also?
 
MS: In some sense I have an inside track on this question because there was a time when I was both a scientist and a believer in god. What I did was try to either compartmentalize my views by not letting the two ideas interfere with another (by adopting a popular model that says something like science deals with the physical world while god deals with the spiritual world or something like that), or by creating glib explanations to explain away any contradictions. I was a scientist by day and a believer in god by night, so to speak. I think that most religious scientists do something similar.
 
This is not as hard to do as one might think. Most scientists work in a very, very narrow area of specialization. As long as you keep god out of that area, you can allow yourself to believe that god acts in other areas. For example, when I was religious and doing research in nuclear physics, it was easy for me to think of god as influencing people via their thoughts and consciousness and brains. There was no cost to me in allowing this since I was not working in those areas. Religious cognitive scientists probably also can find some area outside their field for god to act, and so on.
 
This model of separation does not really hold up under close scrutiny and for me personally it started falling apart when I tried to think more globally and tried to integrate the two worlds of science and religion into a single coherent philosophy, without glossing over the difficulties. I realized that the two worlds just did not fit together and something had to go. The one for which there was no evidence was the god part, and so it got abandoned. But one has to realize that within the world of science there is little discussion of these kinds of things so it is easy to hold onto this kind of makeshift philosophy. One has to be internally driven to examine it.
 
MLU: The Bush Administration has done little to promote science research and education, and in some cases has been openly hostile to science. To name but a few of many cases: the President has repeatedly vetoed legislation for stem cell research, and fails to lead the charge to find alternative forms of energy. His space initiative seems more concerned with filling pockets than launching rockets. Since you are an educator, I wonder what you hear "in the trenches" about our government's apathetic science policy. Will America lose its technological edge? If you were President, what would you do differently?