This spring, the novel coronavirus pandemic has raised the issue of the relationship between the blindest kind of religious faith and rational skepticism — this time in two countries that think of themselves as polar opposites and enemies: Supreme Leader Ali Khameini’s Iran and Donald Trump’s America. On the U.S. side of things, New Orleans pastor Tony Spell , for instance, has twice been arrested for holding church services without a hint of social distancing, despite a ban on such gatherings. His second arrest was for preaching while wearing an ankle monitor and despite the Covid-19 death of at least one of his church members. The publication in 1859 of Charles Darwin’s famed Origin of the Species , arguing as it did for natural selection (which many American evangelicals still reject ), might be considered the origin point for the modern conflict between religious beliefs and science, a struggle that has shaped our culture in powerful ways. Unexpectedly, given Iran’s reputation for religious obscurantism, the science-minded in the nineteenth and twentieth century often took heart from a collection of Persian poems, the Rubáiyát , or “quatrains,” attributed to the medieval Iranian astronomer Omar Khayyam, who died in 1131. Edward […]
