Two sides of the same battle

Even believers end up defending a theistic universe rather than the biblical cosmos. Eliminating mystery as a consequence of Protestant critiques of allegorization (p. 330),“ even believers end up reading the Bible as if it were a treatise on such a universe; in short, you get the emergence of young earth creationism (p. 330). Indeed, we only get the so-called war between science and religion once the modern cosmic imaginary has seeped into both believers and unbelievers; at that point, “these defenders of the faith share a temper with its most implacable enemies” (p. 331). In other words, no one is more modern than a fundamentalist. This is why the “face-off between ‘religion’ and ‘science’ ” has a “strangely intra-mural quality” (p. 331). But this supposed “pure face-off between ‘religion’ and ‘science’ is a chimaera, or rather, an ideological construct. In reality, there is a struggle between thinkers with complex, many-levelled agendas” (p. 332).—James K. A. Smith, How (Not) to Be Secular, 72