Myth of reason crashes and burns
The notion that reason is capable of supplanting religion, or even God, is not a recent conceit. For more than 200 years, advocates of the Enlightenment have insisted that reason not only can serve as a genuine basis for society and morality, but provides a superior one. The New Atheism which has popped up so often in the media of late is merely the latest attempt to revive this hoary old idea, which has survived despite the centuries of copious evidence to the contrary.
And for centuries, advocates of reason have assumed that science is a fundamental ally of Enlightenment, based primarily on the belief that science and religion are inherently at odds. But this is manifestly untrue, as indicated by the fact that the chief example of this massive conflict is not only more than 400 years old, but does not demonstrate what it is commonly supposed to show. Whatever one might conclude about Pope Urban VIII's preference for a pagan astrologer's astronomical system instead of the one developed 80 years before by a Christian cleric, it is simply not reasonable to believe that this single incident is in any way indicative of an inevitable conflict.
For it is a very strange sort of inherent enmity that should allow two magisteria to flourish so symbiotically for centuries, and it verges on the impossible for even the most paranoid scientist to cite a single instance of religion interfering directly with science at any time throughout the entire history of the United States. After all, neither battles over school curriculums nor federal funding debates can be reasonably said to have any impact on scientody or the current state of scientage; that religious opposition may have inhibited the application of the 20th century scientific enthusiasm for eugenics tends to count towards the credit of religion, not its debt.
And it is definitely worth noting that it was devotees of reason, not God, who beheaded Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier, the scientist known today as "the father of modern chemistry."
But if there is no evidence of an inherent conflict between religion and science, one between reason and science appears to be approaching fast. In an article entitled "Moral Psychology and the Misunderstanding of Religion," Jonathan Haidt notes that contrary to the insistence of Marxists, Freudians, Darwinists and other post-Enlightenment intellectuals, religion appears to offer genuine insight into human flourishing and may teach ways in which even a secular "contractual" society could improve the well-being of its members.
This, of course, is obvious. Haidt is hardly the first to notice that Catholics are much less likely to kill themselves than rational materialists or to realize that if one stumbles across a group of American high school students building homes for impoverished natives in a South American jungle, they're going to be members of a church group, not an atheist club. It is neither news nor an accident that the world's largest and most famous charity organizations are named the Red Cross and the Salvation Army.
What is much more interesting is Haidt's explication of how what the Enlightenment worshipped as reason actually appears to be the post-facto rationalization of ur-religious beliefs reached by intuition and emotion. While a scientific consensus on the matter has not yet been reached, Haidt's theories could provide the answer to many cognitive mysteries, not least of which is the highly emotive aspects of the supposedly scientific cases for atheism, rational materialism, scientific socialism, evolutionism, progressivism and secular humanism.
The fact that the atheist academic Haidt cannot be reasonably accused of an interest in defending invisible sky deities only tends to highlight the contrast of his approach with the entirely unscientific approaches of New Atheists like Dawkins and Harris, their attempts to decorate their arguments with pseudo-scientific jargon notwithstanding. And it's more than interesting, it is downright amusing to see the way in which the responses of New Atheists like Sam Harris and Dr. P.Z. Myers tend to indicate the very sort of emotive, post-facto rationalization that Haidt was describing in the first place.
In summary, science is increasingly tending to show that rational materialism, a secular philosophy entirely based on reason, is nothing more than an intrinsic category error. If Haidt's ideas are even remotely close to the truth, then not only is reason not a genuine rival to religion, it can never be; to suggest as much would be like attempting to solve the algebra problem 4 + x = 6 by proposing an answer of "x = blue."