TEN members of the Russian Academy of Sciences have written an open letter to the President of the Russian Federation Vladimir V Putin stating their ‘deepening concern over the increasing clericalisation of Russian society’, and the Russian Orthodox Church’s infiltration of all areas of public life.The signatories include two Nobel Prize winners Zhores Alferov and Vitaly Ginzburg.

They say:

The Constitution of the Russian Federation declares our country to be secular and separates the Church from the public education system. We address this letter to you as the holder of the highest office in this country and guarantor of the Constitution’s basic principles.

In March of this year, the 9th World Russian National Council was held in Moscow. One of its resolutions caught our attention: ‘On the development of a national system of religious education and science.’ It is a peculiar title. If religious education is an internal affair of the Russian Orthodox Church, then why should the Church concern itself with science? And would science be well served by such concern? The text of the resolution is unequivocal. The resolution calls for an appeal to the Russian federal government to ‘include theology in the list of scholarly disciplines recognized by the State Commission for Academic Degrees and Titles and to preserve theology as an independent scholarly field.’

And they ask why theology - an assemblage of religious dogmas - should occupy a place among scientific disciplines. ‘Scientific disciplines’, they insist ‘deal with logic, facts and proofs, but not faith’.

The letter continues:

All the achievements of science worldwide are based on a materialist view of the world. Modern science is simply not concerned with any other views. Steven Weinberg, the American physicist and Nobel Prize winner, put it aptly: ‘The experience of being a scientist makes religion seem fairly irrelevant. Most scientists I know simply don’t think about it very much. They don’t think about religion enough to qualify as practicing atheists.’ (New York Times, August 23, 2005)

It ends:

To believe in God or not is a matter of each individual’s conscience and convictions. We respect the feelings of religious people and our goal is not to fight religion. But we can not stand by when attempts are made to cast doubt on scientific knowledge, to extirpate the ‘materialist worldview,’ to substitute the knowledge accumulated by science with faith. We shouldn’t forget that the government’s policy of innovative development can only be realized if schools and universities equip young people with the knowledge acquired by modern science. To this knowledge there is no alternative.