Scientism views science as the evolutionary successor to religion, and indeed religion's ongoing loss of habitat tempts us to believe that it is headed for extinction. Even the proponents of Biblical creation myths now cast their position in the form of a rival scientific theory and quote research journals instead of scripture. As the academic disciplines of archeology, comparative religion, and historical linguistics continue to advance and gain respect, we approach the day when the interpretation of the sacred texts themselves will belong to the domain of science, and debates among believers will be adjudicated by secular experts. Once it was thought that religion was essential to morality, but today even this proposition is dubious. Many atheists and agnostics live lives dedicated to moral values like justice or compassion, and pass these values on to their children with approximately the same degree of success as the religious.
Is there then any territory that is uniquely religion's own? Would a Scientistic, postreligious society lack for anything that religion might have given it? I believe that it would. Though such a society may not lack for moral values, it would lack the ability to create new moral values. Certainly science could not create them. Reason can make deductions, but it cannot tell us what to assume. Science can give us means, but it cannot give us ends. We might imagine, for example, that psychology and sociology someday will empower us to shape our psyches and societies as we wish--but they will not tell us what to wish for.
A Scientistic society could retain moral values from a prior religion, and might even implement those values more efficiently than the religious society did. But as technological and social change distanced it from the vision of its religious ancestors, such a society would face a grim choice: It could continue to enforce an increasingly irrelevant and pointless morality, or it could replace the outmoded moral values with the only kind of values science understands--physical values like pleasure, lack of pain, or convenience.
It is precisely this grim choice that we are now facing in our most divisive moral issues--abortion, homosexuality, promiscuity, divorce, and euthanasia. With our left hand we struggle not to be ruled by the prejudices of our dead ancestors, while our right hand recoils in horror from the prospect of a future devoid of heroism, in which all choices are simply matters of convenience. In the absence of a vital, fertile religion we lose the possibility of a third option: a new moral vision that recasts these paralyzing dilemmas and restores contact with the source of moral courage in our souls.