FORTUNATELY, OUR CONSTITUTION FORBIDS SUCH AN ESTABLISHMENT OF RELIGION:

Don’t we need trained minds to handle all this?: The governing class needs a scientific background, C. P. Snow argued half a century ago. His argument still holds today (Lisa Jardine, 10/15/09, Times of London)

In the new Britain, how were those who had risen to the top of the political hierarchy through their engagement with great art and literature to decide whether or not to authorise public expenditure on the hydrogen bomb, or the peacetime use of nuclear energy? How indeed were those at government level charged with rebuilding British industry to make choices about where to concentrate investment, or those in charge of the NHS to decide which medical research to fund?

This is the context for Snow’s Two Cultures lecture, a lecture that raises an urgent question: how are informed decisions to be made about matters as important as the development and use of nuclear weapons (or, in our own time, to decide on strategies designed to save the planet from man-made destruction) if the education required to enter the governing elite does not include a scientific training? [...]

Snow was not advocating government by teams of boffins, or a society defined by its mastery of military hardware and associated science and technology, like the Soviet Union. Snow maintains that it ought to be possible for those in positions of power and influence to assess proposals put to them that involve science and technology. To prevent such political decisions from being taken solely on the basis of advice from expertly qualified individual advisers — the politically detached boffins — the entire population needs to be given a basic scientific education.