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Jeremy Mohn at the excellent stand up for REAL science has a response to Jerry Coyne's latest post against "accomodationism" that I largely agree with. I see no reason that the NAS, NCSE and other science organizations shouldn't counter the propaganda, largely from the Religious Right but also from some atheists, that science and religious belief are necessarily incompatible. Such statements by scientific organizations seem to me to be nothing more than acknowledging an empiric fact of the world that is not obviated by the fact that Coyne does not understand how some people are capable of doing it or because the means they use to do so do not meet Coyne's personal standards of how theology "should" be done.

The extent that such organizations should go in acknowledging this fact is, of course, a matter of fair debate and I must say that some of the examples of biblical exegesis Coyne points to at the NCSE site seem to me to be of questionable appropriateness for a science organization.

One of the complaints made by Coyne and others is that the "accomodationist" program is not working, based on the polls that show that the acceptance of evolution has remained stable over the last 60 years or so. But is that contention, by the standards of science itself, well founded? Certainly, the acceptance of a complex and (perhaps evolutionarily) counterintuitive idea such as evolution is itself a complex phenomena. At least one other major variable has changed over that same time period that reasonably should have increased the public's rejection of evolutionary theory: the great increase in Evangelical/Pentacostal/Fundamentalist Protestantism, generally antithetical to evolution and naturalistic science, at the expense of the "mainline" Protestant sects that have been more science-friendly.

In my own (admittedly unscientific) view, I suspect that these numbers are stable because they represent some basic way people differ in how they look at the world and attempt to explain it. Be that as it may, focusing on one statistic is a highly suspect way to judge the effect of any program. Look, for example, at another statistic:

Why should we not attribute this highly encouraging result, at least in significant part, to the "accomodationist" campaign?

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Update: Russell Blackford takes a position endorsed by Coyne; Wes Elsberry takes an opposite view and John Wilkins is collecting opinions.
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