Talking about conflicts between science and religion can be tricky: You don't want to feed the stereotype that the two are inherently mortal enemies. Many scientists are believers, after all, even if some of their colleagues give them a hard time about it.

Still, these conflicts do happen a lot. Which brings us to a new study which shows, among other things, just how different scientists' religious attitudes are from the rest of the public.

One of the most valuable books I've ever read was biophysicist Cornelius G. Hunter's Darwin's God: Evolution and the Problem of Evil. (I reviewed the book a few years back.) Hunter argued that Darwin and his followers were never just disinterested scientific observers. On the contrary, they brought philosophical — even theological — assumptions to the table. They looked at the world, decided it should have been designed better, and concluded that God simply wouldn't have done it that way.

Darwin was concerned, for example, that tons of pollen go to waste every year, that some species are ill-adapted for their environments, that ants make slaves of other ants, and that parasites feed off their victims. He tried to make sense of what seemed to be the evil side of nature. "What a book a devil's chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful blundering, low and horribly cruel works of nature," he concluded a letter to a friend.

How could divine creation be reconciled with such evils? It was questions like these that, for Darwin, seemed to confirm that life is formed by blind natural forces. He was motivated toward evolution not by direct evidence in favor of his new theory but by problems with the common notion of divine creation. Creation, it seemed, does not always reflect the goodness of God, so Darwin advocated a naturalistic explanation to describe how creation came about.

Hunter points out that in Darwin's time and place (Victorian England), God was thought to be always understandable by human reason and always benevolent in His dealings with man. "God's goodness and wisdom were thought to be manifest in creation," he writes, "but not his providence, judgment or use of evil."

This was a far cry from the God of Scripture, Who works in mysterious ways and Who presides over a world — the world that Darwin found so inefficient and cruel — which has been corrupted. But Darwin didn't know that God, and he could only reject the one he did. After that, he could only see the world through naturalistic assumptions. Thus, common traits between different species must reflect a common ancestor; the long-held alternative — that they reflect a common Designer — was now out of bounds.

So it is with so many scientists today. Naturalism is their faith. "We have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism," said Harvard geneticist Richard Lewontin. "Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door."

I'm often struck by the closed-mindedness of such people, especially since you'd think they should be among the most open-minded. Suggest an explanation for the universe that's based in God's sovereign work, and they'll tell you you're cheating — dragging in an outside force Who doesn't have to play by the rules of science. They don't seem to consider that this testifies not to the falseness of God, but to the limitations of science.

Obviously, the problem with such people isn't a lack of intelligence. I think it's closer to the opposite — an excessive regard for their own intelligence. Simply put, some people think they're too smart to believe in God.

It's only human to rebel against God, but some of us face special temptations. Consider the budding future scientist. He's a very smart kid, and long before he's done with his schooling, he's had it hammered into his head daily that all the other smart people believe in naturalistic evolution — no God required. The only people who don't believe in it, he learns, are religious folk, most of whom (he can't help noticing) aren't nearly as bright as himself and his teachers.

It's no surprise which group he'll side with. Odds are he won't even think of himself as choosing sides; he's just adopting the only view he imagines is intellectually respectable.

All this would move our future scientist to reject God even if he's not especially conceited: It'd take an exceptionally strong personality for him to go against all his colleagues. But truth be told, there's a fair chance he is rather conceited — very smart kids often get that way — and that only makes things worse. He's liable to place a great value on his own intellectual status (most of his sense of self-worth is wrapped up in it) and he won't take kindly to anything that diminishes its importance (like the idea that God's ways are beyond mere intellectual comprehension). He may also take pleasure in looking down on others as intellectual inferiors. The very fact that most people he considers dumber than himself believe in God can be an extra incentive for him to sneer at both them and their God.

Our man's training, his sense of professional respectability, and (perhaps most important) his ego — all of these move him to embrace a universe without God. Take these ingredients and you've got a recipe that'll produce a lot of atheists and agnostics. Sprinkle in a dash of other ingredients of the sort that sour many people's taste for religion — things like bad experiences with church folk (family, friends or otherwise) and resentment of certain moral teachings. Mix it all together and what have you got? Atheist stew.

All things considered, the marvel may not be that so many scientists don't believe in God, but that so many of them still do.

Religion isn't the enemy of science, but it is the enemy to scientists who have no sense of their own limits. Christianity, especially, carries a message that wounds their pride: Science is a means to shed light on aspects of God's creation, not a god in and of itself. Science can explain many things, but it can't come close to explaining everything. And not just "not yet." Not ever.

You can imagine how some might recoil at those words. That's because, as always, we're replaying the events in the Garden, with the devil's tempting promise that man can gain the knowledge of God — and thus be "as God."

The smarter the men the devil's tempting — or the smarter they think they are — the more raw material he has to work with. It's humility that gives him problems.