Karen Armstrong’s intriguing The Battle for God proposes that the success of
science in the modern world is, paradoxically, a cause of fundamentalism in
religion. Newton’s discovery of the clockwork progression of the planets “proved
the existence of God, the great Mechanick” because order in the Universe did not
arise by chance. As science extended its embrace to all human activities during
the next three hundred years, its success attracted religious leaders. In a
modern world, science alone had authority. She shows how fundamentalists of the
monotheist religions borrow from science while attacking it. And American
William Bryan Jennings even blamed Darwin for the slaughter of the First World
War: he claimed that German officers used evolutionary theory to justify their
actions. Published by HarperCollins, £19.99, ISBN 0002555239.
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