Emerson looked forward to the day when America would be self-reliant and not second rate in its scholarship. In science, the U.S. has fulfilled Emerson's ambition, but at what cost to religion?

Physicist Steven Weinberg muses on religion's fate in the West as science has come to dominate our culture:

Let's grant that science and religion are not incompatible—there are after all some (though not many) excellent scientists, like Charles Townes and Francis Collins, who have strong religious beliefs. Still, I think that between science and religion there is, if not an incompatibility, at least what the philosopher Susan Haack has called a tension, that has been gradually weakening serious religious belief, especially in the West, where science has been most advanced. Here I would like to trace out some of the sources of this tension, and then offer a few remarks about the very difficult question raised by the consequent decline of belief, the question of how it will be possible to live without God.

He starts off with a surprising claim:

I do not think that the tension between science and religion is primarily a result of contradictions between scientific discoveries and specific religious doctrines.

That kind of conflict does get most of the press - Evolution vs. Creationism and the Book of Mormon vs. the population genetics of Native Americans grab more headlines (ok, the latter mainly grabs headlines in Utah..).

But I have to agree. For a long time, the vast majority of educated religious people in the West managed to accommodate the findings of science with their religious beliefs. Young earth creationism is probably more widely and passionately believed today than it was in the time of Thomas Jefferson. Still, tension between science and religion has been persistent.

One reason Weinberg offers is explanatory power. If religious beliefs are held to explain the mysterious, scientific explanations of mysteries inevitably weaken a reason for holding those beliefs.

There are however religious traditions today that aren't heavily based on the idea of using God to explain the unexplainable in the physical world. Weinberg offers a second source of tension:

These explanations have cast increasing doubt on the special role of man, as an actor created by God to play a starring part in a great cosmic drama of sin and salvation. We have had to accept that our home, the earth, is just another planet circling the sun; our sun is just one of a hundred billion stars in a galaxy that is just one of billions of visible galaxies; and it may be that the whole expanding cloud of galaxies is just a small part of a much larger multiverse, most of whose parts are utterly inhospitable to life. As Richard Feynman has said, "The theory that it's all arranged as a stage for God to watch man's struggle for good and evil seems inadequate."

And it's not just physics that has enlarged the stage (and minimized our role) - evolution has knocked humans out of the central role in the drama, at least in the sense that it has rendered unscientific any claim that humans were the goal of the last 4 billion years of evolution.

No wonder that modern science makes religious conservatives nervous. This is about more than just the 100% literal accuracy of the Bible. It's about the willingness of people to hold certain theological beliefs in a world where science has explained a lot of natural phenomena, offers the promise of explanations for many more, and has made us aware of just how small our role is in the universe.

In progressive religions, this should be a major focus of today's theologians. Emerson maybe would, as Weinberg suggests, be dismayed at the effect of science on religion. But he may also have been just as likely to work to free belief from its ties to untenable ideas, much as he did during Transcendentalism's heyday.

Emerson would not have been a fundamentalist. Fundamentalists, as much as they'd like to, will never put the genie back in the bottle.