Religion and science: value reversal

Anybody who ever believed that the religion will fade away with time and economic growth needs to seriously reconsider. Religion is very much alive, if anything it appears to be gaining ground globally. And I do not mean just the Islamic crescent countries. In the United States, the impact of religion in American on political and social life is stronger than ever. Even in Europe, the stronghold of agnosticism and atheism, the religion continues to play a major role in countries as various as UK, Denmark or Poland.

Yet, behind the apparent resilience of religion, there is a dramatic shift, which goes as far as a u-turn or a reversal in the arguments that justify the religious faith. In the modern western thought, religion was largely justified on moral grounds. The world had to have a purpose, a sense of direction. The search for the good and the virtuous provided such a purpose. The God made us simultaneously aware of the good and weak, therefore subject to temptation of evil. The life on earth was a struggle between good and evil, a struggle orchestrated by God. For in the absence of the evil, there would be no need for the ultimate guide.
On the other hand, science was seen as the implacable nemesis of religion. Its progress, by relentlessly reducing the scope of the unknown to sheer ignorance, made the faith less and less necessary. Moreover, the science appeared capable of supplying not just a sense of direction of the universe but an overriding and determining principle of world organisation. When Charles Darwin published his treatise On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection in 1859, this was widely seen as a definitive challenge to the religion. Between physics of Newton and biology of Darwin, the science made the distinction between good and evil irrelevant.
Yet, in the early 21st century, the conceptual underpinning of religion is fundamentally changing. The incessant and widespread outpouring of evil acts all along the 20th century has fundamentally weakened the moral arguments in favour of religion. Occasional temptation of evil is one thing, wholesale slaughter of innocents is another. God not only allowed the Holocaust and Stalin crimes and ethnic cleansing and Rwandan genocide but his shepherds, who could not pretend  they did not know, were by and large passive in face of constant violation of God’s commandments.  
On the other hand, the science has evolved in a surprising way. First, quantum physics reintroduced notions of uncertainty and indeterminacy into the core of science. It was this aspect of quantum theory that bothered Einstein, who famously wrote to Max Born that God does not play dice.
However, it is the modern biology, in particular genetics, that raised essential even more fundamental questions about the nature and dynamics of life. As we begin to understand the critical role of genetic structures, such as DNA’s double helix, we are struck by their formal beauty and the intricacy of their interactions.  These interactions are largely random, yet in many critical aspects they are amazingly purposeful. Jacques Monod, Nobel Prize laureate, noted in his celebrated 1970 book that the evolution balances between chance and necessity. Moreover, the occurrence of some of the more critical interactions, procreation for instance, cannot be simply explained by the laws of normal distribution, as their probability is actually very low. Organised life is a statistically negligible phenomenon. Yet somehow, genetic interactions happen with sufficient frequency and sense of purpose to allow life in its various forms to occur and to evolve towards more intricate and more sophisticated structures and expressions.  Many attempts have been made to formally model these interactions, often with remarkable results and some scientists assert that the mystery of life is close to be uncovered. Yet, many others believe that more progress we make in exploring the origin of life, more we are confronted with the intangible notions of intelligent design which ultimately govern the critical interactions. And such intelligent is a sign of a superior being. It is not surprising that many leading biologists and geneticists are deeply religious.
After all, God may be playing dice but it is a multidimensional and complex one rather than a simple cube.