Speaking of religion in Britain, here is some news that’s been widely reported on secular sites, so I won’t dwell on it long. But it does show how ridiculous the British school system is when it comes to religion. Not only are there faith-based schools—an offense to an enlightened democracy—but there are also state-run “council” schools like North Primary School, in Southall, that do ridiculous things to coddle believers. In this case, the school banned its kids from watching yesterday’s solar eclipse—on religious grounds! The Torygraph reports:

Pupils at North Primary School in Southall were stopped from watching the solareclipse directly and had to observe it on screens instead.

Sometimes known as Little India, Southall is a diverse community in west London with a large Hindi population.

Although headteacher Ivor Johnstone would not comment on what the ‘religious and cultural’ reasons were, some Hindu scriptures say that an eclipse makes believers impure.

There’s a new accommodationist piece on the BBC’s website called “Can religion and science bury the hatchet?” It’s written by Caroline Wyatt, the Beeb’s Religious Affairs Correspondent, and of course the answer to her question is “YES!”

When reader Jim sent me the link to her piece, his email was headed, “There’s £700,000 down the drain then”, and that refers to the springboard for Wyatt’s piece: a substantial “Science and Faith Grant” given to the Church of England by—surprise!—the Templeton Foundation.  Here’s what it’s for:

Churches are being encouraged to talk about the relationship between science and faith through a project backed by the Church of England.

Well, Templeton is clearly still on the “unite faith and science” path, despite its lip service to pure science. And Ms. Wyatt is down with the project. Her article, which I find rather discursive and muddled, instantiates four misconceptions about the relationship between religion and science. Here they are:

1. There’s no conflict between religion and science. A lot of secular accommodationists, including the historian of science Ronald Numbers, as well as organizations like the National Center for Science Education, like to promulgate this idea. When there seems to be conflict, as in the case of Galileo v. Pope, or creationism vs. science, they fob that off on either “distorted religious beliefs” or, in the case of Galileo, as “a more nuanced conflict that really involves not religion, but politics and personalities.”

The fact is that, as I claim in The Albatross, both science and religion make claims about the cosmos (“God is a hypothesis,” as Shelley said two centuries ago), so they are competing to describe reality. But only science has a way to actually find out what’s real. That’s the true conflict between the two areas.

Wyatt argues against that:

But the real narrative of a conflict between science and religion was developed in the late 19th Century, and has proved remarkably persistent – not least because it makes for lively debates on TV, radio and the internet.

And, get this:

“The old distinction that science is about facts and religious belief is about faith is far too simplistic,” says Prof Wilkinson.

“Science involves evidence, but it also involves skills of judgement, and skills of assessing evidence.

“After all, you only have a limited amount of evidence to base your theory, and you have to trust your evidence – which isn’t far from being Christian.

“It doesn’t involve blind faith – and indeed religion is not good religion if it is simply based on blind faith.

“Christianity has to be open to interpretation about its claims about the world and experience.”

For Prof Wilkinson, the two are absolutely not mutually exclusive.

That’s outrageous! Seriously: trusting evidence is close to what Christians do? Well, maybe—so long as the evidence is either nonexistent or confected! If you look at how science and religion regard evidence, you’ll see the huge gulf between those disciplines. For one things, religion is ridden with confirmation bias, while science has procedures to eliminate it. The fact is that Christianity is indeed based on blind faith, for there’s simply no credible evidence that any of its claims—souls, heaven, God, afterlife, Jesus’s divinity and resurrection—are true. You must have blind faith to believe that stuff.

2. Religion can contribute to science—and to our understanding of reality. This is more than just Gould’s idea that science and religion are complementary, with science helping us understand the universe and religion dealing with morals, meaning and values. No, Wyatt’s interviewees tell us that religion can help science:

Prof Wilkinson became a Methodist minister after training and working in theoretical astrophysics on the origin of the universe.

“Many of the questions that faith and science posed to each other were fruitful,” he says.

Galileo’s ideas were condemned by the Church

“For many different folk both inside and outside the church, science and religion don’t have a simplistic relationship – and the model that says science has to be pitted against religion doesn’t explain the history of a very interesting interaction.

“Today, many cosmologists are finding that some questions go beyond science – for example, where does the sense of awe in the universe come from?”

Actually, the question of where our sense of awe comes from—not just awe about the cosmos, but about music, art, paintings, a loved one, and so on—is a scientific question. If it is ever answered, it will be by not by religion, but by neurobiology and evolutionary biology. Invoking “God” or “religion” as an answer is bogus; it’s equivalent to asserting that “God gave us the sense of awe” and leaving it there. That’s like saying “Fairies gave us a sense of awe.”

Ditto for “where did religion come from?”  That’s a question of history, psychology and sociology, whose answer is probably irrecoverably buried in the strata of history. It’s not an answer to say, “God gave us religion.”

Here’s another way religion is supposed to help science:

3. Religious scientists help advance science, ergo God. First, Wyatt gives us a list of religious scientists, to wit:

Living scientists with religious beliefs

Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the world wide web, Unitarian Universalism

Sir Colin John Humphreys, physicist, president of Christians in Science

Ahmed Zewail, 1999 Nobel Prize for chemistry, Muslim

Simon Conway Morris, palaeontologist, Christian

Martin Rees, Baron Rees of Ludlow, astrophysicist and former chairman of the Royal Society, churchgoer who doesn’t believe in God

But for every one of these I could provide two or three atheist scientists, for there are more atheists scientists (especially among accomplished scientists) than religious scientists. Would it be helpful for the BBC to provide a list of “Living scientists who don’t believe in gods” to show us that science is furthered by nonbelief?

And here’s the old canard that justifies religion because some scientists who advanced the field believed in God:

That sense of wonder is echoed by Catholic priest and particle physicist Father Andrew Pinsent, who worked at the Cern laboratory.

. . . Moreover, two of the most important theories of modern science, genetics and the big bang, were both invented by priests.”

[Pinsent] says that as a particle physicist, he was always impressed by the discovery of “beautiful patterns and symmetries in nature, mathematics at a deep level, and the extraordinary properties of light”.

“These discoveries cannot, in themselves, be used to construct a formal proof of the existence of God, but they do evoke a sense of wonder to which a religious response is natural,” he says.

Yes, Mendel made the first formal investigation of genetics, and Lemaître posited the Big Bang, but most of the geneticists and cosmologists who subsequently advanced the field were nonbelievers. And besides, there’s no rule that religious scientists, of whom there are many, can’t have good ideas. But I deny that the vast majority of those good ideas have anything to do with religion. Did Mendel cross his peas as a way of worshiping God? Nope—he was an educated man and was simply curious. As far as I know, and I may be wrong, Lemaître posited the Big Bang as the starting point of an expanding universe, and decried attempts to use it as evidence for God’s creation. In fact, I just found confirmation of that on Wikipedia:

By 1951, Pope Pius XII declared that Lemaître’s theory provided a scientific validation for Catholicism. However, Lemaître resented the Pope’s proclamation, stating that the theory was neutral and there was neither a connection nor a contradiction between his religion and his theory.^[19][20] 

4. Finally, NOMA.  After arguing and quoting people about how science and religion can help each other, Wyatt ends by quoting someone who undercuts all that, but in a problematic way:

James D Williams, lecturer in science education at the University of Sussex, says: “Where we have issues, they generally revolve around people trying to reconcile science and religion or using religion to refute science.