This article was temporarily taken down on legal advice after New Scientist’s editor, Roger Highfield, received a letter from a law firm on behalf of James Le Fanu, the GP and author of the book Why Us? Following discussions, New Scientist has now reinstated the article accompanied by a comment from Dr Le Fanu.

AS A book reviews editor at New Scientist, I often come across so-called science books which after a few pages reveal themselves to be harbouring ulterior motives. I have learned to recognise clues that the author is pushing a religious agenda. As creationists in the US continue to lose court battles over attempts to have intelligent design taught as science in federally funded schools, their strategy has been forced to… well, evolve. That means ensuring that references to pseudoscientific concepts like ID are more heavily veiled. So I thought I’d share a few tips for spotting what may be religion in science’s clothing.

Red flag number one: the term “scientific materialism”. “Materialism” is most often used in contrast to something else – something non-material, or supernatural. Proponents of ID frequently lament the scientific claim that humans are the product of purely material forces. At the same time, they never define how non-material forces might work. I have yet to find a definition that characterises non-materialism by what it is, rather than by what it is not.

The invocation of Cartesian dualism – where the brain and mind are viewed as two distinct entities, one material and the other immaterial – is also a red flag. And if an author describes the mind, or any biological system for that matter, as “irreducibly complex”, let the alarm bells ring.


Misguided interpretations of quantum physics are a classic hallmark of pseudoscience, usually of the New Age variety, but some religious groups are now appealing to aspects of quantum weirdness to account for free will. Beware: this is nonsense.

When you come across the terms “Darwinism” or “Darwinists”, take heed. True scientists rarely use these terms, and instead opt for “evolution” and “biologists”, respectively. When evolution is described as a “blind, random, undirected process”, be warned. While genetic mutations may be random, natural selection is not. When cells are described as “astonishingly complex molecular machines”, it is generally by breathless supporters of ID who take the metaphor literally and assume that such a “machine” requires an “engineer”. If an author wishes for “academic freedom”, it is usually ID code for “the acceptance of creationism”.

If an author wishes for ‘academic freedom’, it is usually code for ‘the acceptance of creationism’

Some general sentiments are also red flags. Authors with religious motives make shameless appeals to common sense, from the staid – “There is nothing we can be more certain of than the reality of our sense of self” (James Le Fanu in Why Us?) – to the silly – “Yer granny was an ape!” (creationist blogger Denyse O’Leary). If common sense were a reliable guide, we wouldn’t need science in the first place.

Religiously motivated authors also have a bad habit of linking the cultural implications of a theory to the truth-value of that theory. The ID crowd, for instance, loves to draw a line from Darwin to the Holocaust, as they did in the “documentary” film Expelled: No intelligence allowed. Even if such an absurd link were justified, it would have zero relevance to the question of whether or not the theory of evolution is correct. Similarly, when Le Fanu writes that Darwin’s On the Origin of Species “articulated the desire of many scientists for an exclusively materialist explanation of natural history that would liberate it from the sticky fingers of the theological inference that the beauty and wonder of the natural world was direct evidence for ‘A Designer'”, his statement has no bearing on the scientific merits of evolution.

It is crucial to the public’s intellectual health to know when science really is science. Those with a religious agenda will continue to disguise their true views in their effort to win supporters, so please read between the lines.

James Le Fanu writes: The critical website Reponses to Ms Gefter’s article (‘epistemological hubris’, ‘straw-man argument’, ‘dualism a valid field of study’, [the necessity to distinguish between] ‘assertions that contradict the best scientific thinking from those that cannot be resolved by the techniques of science’ etc etc) speak for themselves. But her specific allegation against myself of covertly promoting ‘pseudoscientific concepts’ in pursuit of a hidden religion agenda is unfairly prejudicial to my reputation.

My interpretation of the recent dramatic findings in genetics and neuroscience, as set out in my book, ‘’Why Us?’ is that they are so extraordinary and unexpected as to challenge the prevailing view that the phenomenon of life – and in particular the twin enigmas of ‘form’ and ‘mind’ – can be accounted for by the materialist properties of the chemical genes and the electrochemistry of the brain alone.

This interpretation requires, by necessity, an examination of philosophical notions such as scientific materialism and Cartesian dualism that Ms Gefter alleges is typical of arguments deployed by closet creationists who “disguise their true views in their effort to win supporters”. But to whom can she be referring? Scarcely the protagonists of Intelligent Design, whose theistic inferences could not be more explicit. Perhaps she has in mind the many respected biologists, philosophers and science writers who, in different ways, are sceptical of the explanatory power of science’s radical reductionist programme to account for ‘form’ or ‘mind’ – but are we to assume they too are motivated by a covert religious agenda? And if not them, whom?

Ms Gefter’s supposition that there is a genre of science books written by creationists ‘disguising their true views’ is, I would suggest, a mirage invoked to condemn by association those like myself who draw attention to the limits of science and its exclusively materialist explanations and theories. I believe that the New Scientist should do more to examine such ideas to promote the spirit of open and intellectual enquiry.