The Supreme Court has now ruled in a lopsided seven to two decision that the State of Washington may deny scholarships to students studying divinity. This decision solidifies decades of judicial pogroms against certain types of faith. Although this decision will be presented as just another of the increasingly bizarre extra-legislative steps necessary to separate church and state, it is exactly the imposition of dogma upon American society.

Science is faith and theology is science. Knowledge of reality requires belief. Ancients properly understood that religion is simply a method of explaining nature. It is not just that religion was a variation of science, religion was science and science was religion.

The manufactured illusion of a schism between science and religion is based upon the mistaken, or perhaps dishonest, precept that science is a pure, unitary whole. The famous trial of Galileo, for example, was based not upon theological disagreements but upon scientific disagreements.

Ptolemy had presented the world with a scientific theory to describe the movements of stars and planets. His system was accepted because it was a very successful model, not because it supported any critical aspect of Judeo-Christian theology. Copernicus proposed another scientific model. Both these models were imperfect, but intellectually rigorous.

Galileo refined the Heliocentric Theory -- and the word "theory" is crucial -- but even his refinement was inaccurate. It was fundamentally flawed in the supposition that the sun was the center of the universe and it failed experimentally to provide answers to several serious problems. Galileo was wrong.

Today much of what we call "science" is simply theory. Quantum mechanics, for example, has several different explanations for reality at the subatomic level. Mathematical models are useful, but imperfect, predictors of reality at that level. Quantum mechanics actually "works" only at the scale of our perceptions, the ordinary world which we observe.

Relativity is also simply theory. Einstein proposed his special and his general theories of relativity to explain the paradox of the nonsensical barrier of the speed of light. His theory works very well, but it is hardly perfect. Einstein is simply Ptolemy -- someone who has the best working system for explaining the perceivable world.

This is precisely what religion does: it explains reality at our level. If it fails, then it is imperfect religion and imperfect science. The effective operation of religion in history is very persuasive empirical evidence of the scientific validity of religion. Most of the giants of science have been deeply religious.

Indeed, a good case can be made that religion is better science than science. Religion explains the creation of Creation, which science does not. Religion explains the absurdity of quantum mechanics, which science does not. Religion explains the future of the future, which science does not. Religion explains the birth of life, which science does not.

Indeed, many, perhaps most, areas of science lack any scientific consensus. Will the universe expand to an entropic death or implode into a massive black hole? Scientific opinion swings about every five years on that subject. Does the universe diverge into an almost infinite number of alternate universes every nanosecond? Scientists disagree.

One of the few real certainties in science is that religion profoundly improves scientific inquiry. Why? It allows a foundation for observation; it provides a system of integrity; and it provides a purpose for inquiry itself. Religion is the indispensable foundation of our very notion of truth.

When the judiciary demands that government can no longer support religious study as a form of education and intellectual activity, then government has declared Secular Dogmatism the official state faith.

If this seems far fetched, consider what government now gleefully supports: consciously profane "art," history courses which describe religion as hokum, the presentation of evolution by natural selection as Official Truth (despite so many gaping holes that if Darwinism did not savage religion, it would have long ago been discarded as infantile pseudo-science) and social studies courses which propound preposterous explanations for human thought and sentiment.

The noxious faith of Secular Dogmatism provides none of the safeguards of religious faith. There is no natural mechanism to prevent the descent of humanity into a lightless dystopia. Official persecution of religion means that all of the many different manifestations of Judeo-Christian faith are obligatory victims. Diversity ends. The ongoing dialog which is the stuff of all true science and all true religion stops.

This inevitably will lead to the same perverse intolerance within that small part of human existence which we normally mean by "science." The Soviet Union is an excellent example of that disintegration of real thought, including particularly “science.”

Stalin decreed that Lysenko, the dodo who proposed as Marxist "science" his notion that developed characteristics can be passed on genetically, was politically correct science. Any botanist or biologist who disagreed on scientific grounds was not only deemed wrong scientifically but an enemy of the state.

Study, research and inquiry -- no longer protected by the benevolent structure of Christianity -- imploded. The genius of the Russian people, which had produced great science as well as great art under the Tsars, died with Marx, Lenin, Stalin and Lysenko.

A nation which had the fastest growing economy among the major nations on earth and the fastest rising class of true intellectuals wilted into atheistic incompetence (the myth that the Bolshevik Revolution led to a better life for ordinary Russians is the most corrupt and most grimly comical myth of the last century.)

When Eric Blair wrote his masterpiece 1984, he was describing the Soviet Union. The common feature of this and other literary descriptions of hopeless futures is Godlessness. Without God, man stops growing (Brave New World notes that invention is deliberately suppressed and dreary constancy is carefully preserved.) Without God, man stops caring. Without God, man stops thinking.

Secular Dogmatism is a jealous, vicious and hateful faith. It no more tolerates speculation and differing opinion than Hitler tolerated different ideas of racial equality or Stalin tolerated contradiction of Lysenko. Secular Dogmatism sniffs, hunts and destroys heretics, whether they are theistic, agnostic or atheistic.

God created humanity, and He instilled within man the capacity to flourish in any environment in which transcendent morality was acknowledged. Egypt, India, China and Sumeria each had definite, though different, ideas of immutable right and wrong. Every human civilization has reached civilization with the structure of moral purpose.

It is not so much that the "right" religion is essential -- although a compelling case can be made that the Judeo-Christian faith clearly works better than any other -- but it is that a religion is always "right" when the alternative is no religion.

In this new judicially decreed era of Secular Dogmatism, no religion is permissible. Tragically, that means no science, no decency and no civilization will be possible either. Modern universities evolved directly out of cathedral schools of Christendom. Modern jurisprudence evolved directly out of Judeo-Christian principles of real law.

Universities and courts, culprits in the latest crime against religious belief, have not just slit the throat of civilization by their raging bigotry. These two children of Judeo-Christian faith have committed suicide.

Bruce Walker's articles can be found at the Conservative Truth.