Cats and Dogs?

I spent yesterday evening, as many evenings, curled up with a good book, in this case The Complete Idiot's Guide to String Theory, a highly informative and eminently readable introduction to the current leading contender for a unified theory. I was struck however by one particular passage, as the author, George Musser, following on from an anecdote from his own life, digressed for a paragraph or two on the relationship between science and religion, describing them as cats and dogs that "in an obliging household...might even be found lounging around together". This seems more than a trifle generous on his part and I reproduce the paragraph that follows this statement in full as it raises a couple of interesting points:

'Does science oppose religion? It's true that science usurps what used to be a major goal of religion: providing explanations for natural phenomena. In so doing, it has made room in our culture for a secular worldview. But that is not the same as saying science proves a secular worldview. Science is agnostic. By its very nature, it is incapable of saying whether a transcendental reality exists or not. Nor can it provide a comprehensive moral code. Scientists who promote atheism are speaking not as scientists but as adherents of their own belief system'

There are a number of issues to be addressed in the above, though I would concede the statement that science is agnostic as essentially true. The first issue, indeed the elephant in the room that I cannot avoid is in the final sentence, something that, no matter how many times it is exposed as fallacious or a misconception, will not stop rearing its ugly head. Atheism is NOT a belief system, it does not have adherents - as a thousand motivational posters succinctly put it, atheism is to belief as bald is to hair colour. To attempt to drag atheism down to the level of religion with the tired canards of "You're just as fundamentalist about your beliefs!" and "Atheism/science/reason is your religion!" should be the preserve of desperate religious zealots lacking in cogent arguments, and Mr. Musser does himself a disservice doing the same, even accidentally. Secondly, while Mr. Musser notes that science has usurped religion's attempts to explain the natural world, he fails to point out the key difference between the old and new systems - that difference being the ascertainable truth of scientific explanations of the world, versus the religious or "made-up" version. But what I find most bizarre is his introduction of the idea of morality, in what I can only term a muddying of the waters or an attempt to appear to concede a point to religious readers. Yes, science does not provide a moral code, but nobody (I should sincerely hope) ever thought or suggested that it should. Science does not tell you how to live life, it tells you how life comes to be, reveals to you the mechanisms underlying the possibility of a morally-reasoning being to exist and function. Indeed, in evolutionary biology we clearly see the Darwinian advantages that lead, filtered through a myriad of external factors and extrapolated along a dizzyingly long timeline, to what we today might term 'morality', and, through the ever-growing disciplines of sociology and psychology, science explains these mechanisms with ever-greater clarity. What is most worrying about what Mr. Musser says though is that he seems to concede that, as science cannot provide a moral code, this honour must belong to religion. Could anything be further from the truth? Much time has been spent in recent years debunking the ludicrousness of claims that ANY religious dogma provides a decent moral compass, and in my own reading of the Holy Books of the three Abrahamic religions I find this point illustrated in abundance. Hell, aren't our everyday lives so often punctuated by instances of the bigotry, small-mindedness, hatred, wanton ignorance and oppression religion breeds as to make even the discussion of such a point moot?
Mr. Musser's book is a joy to read and I would recommend it to anybody, and the the author comes across as a warm, witty and knowledgeable individual. But everybody, even a man as intelligent as he, should be wary of this minefield of ideology where science meets faith, and when discussing it should choose their words very carefully indeed.