Obviously religious organisations have often demonstrated this principle. But insofar as the suppression of science is concerned, the bloodiest incidents have been recent and have had nothing to do with religion. It was the Nazi party, not the German Evangelical Church, that tried to eradicate "Jewish" physics, and it was the Communist Party, not the Russian Orthodox Church, that destroyed "bourgeois" genetics and left many other fields of Soviet science in disarray. No one has been prompted by these examples to propose an inherent incompatibility between politics and science. By the same token, that there have been conflicts between churches and science does not justify belief in an incompatibility between religion and science. It is, rather, that autocrats do not tolerate disagreement.
For the Glory of God, p128
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