The age-old debate continues: are science and religion compatible?

According to the census, there are more Christians in the UK than there are atheists and agnostics – yet the churches are empty. These Christians, it seems, don’t take their faith too seriously. Nor, I fear, does Nicholas Spencer, who has written a big book arguing that science and religion are fundamentally compatible. He’s wrong; but, surprisingly, he is more wrong about religion than he is about science.

Let me start by laying my cards on the table. I’m the son of a missionary. My father’s parents were atheists and scientists. He, in adolescent rebellion, became a Christian; I, ditto, became an atheist. Because I was raised abroad I barely knew my paternal grandparents, but I inherited from them one thing: a copy of Fred Hoyle’s The Nature of the Universe (1950), in which Hoyle attacked the ‘big bang’ theory that the universe had originated in a moment of creation and argued that it had always been exactly what it is now.