Evans gets one right, two wrong
Noted via Uncommon Descent, an interesting survey piece in LA Times.

Author John Evans, a sociologist, gets one important thing right and says it loud and clear, running strongly against the grain of the usual secular asshole:

I recently conducted survey research comparing the most conservative of Protestants ... with those who do not participate in any religion. The conservative Protestants are equally likely to understand scientific methods, to know scientific facts and to claim knowledge of science. They are as likely as the nonreligious to have majored in science or to have a scientific occupation.

Bravo Evans! This is crucially important, because the secular monsters like Dawkins and Grayling insist that you can't have science, can't even have civilization, unless everyone learns and chants the perfect orthodox doctrine of anti-theist lunacy.

Fact of life: your internal beliefs about evolution and cosmology have precisely zero correlation with your ability to perform any task at all, scientific or otherwise. You can repair cars or chop vegetables or sequence DNA or classify bacteria without "knowing" that all life is random.

The only people who need to agree with Dawkins and Grayling are Dawkins and Grayling (and their fellow genocidal anti-civilization propagandists) because their income depends on writing incitements to chaos. Everyone else in the world is engaged in constructive endeavors.

But Evans goes off-track after his wonderful start.

Besides, conservative Protestants don't think of their own views as inconsistent, and they have a long-standing way, going back to at least the mid-19th century, of dividing the scientific findings they believe and don't believe. They tend to accept scientists' claims that are based on direct observation and common sense and to reject those based on what might be called unobservable abstractions.

That's not a conservative Protestant attitude, that's the complete definition of a scientific attitude. Real scientists stick to direct observations, extended carefully by instruments and math. If you accept anything based on unobservable abstractions, you are no longer doing science. You're doing faith or speculation or something else, but surely not science.

== When you say God created the universe, you are asserting an untestable proposition.

== When you say the Big Bang created the universe, you are asserting an untestable proposition.

== Both are religious axioms, strictly outside of science. You're free to believe either one, but you are not free to claim that one of them is scientific.

And then Evans skids entirely out of reality:

[Reconciliation] isn't futile. Understanding what concerns the "other side" would help. Those wishing to affect public policy on issues such as climate change, for example, need to make it clear to conservative Protestants that the science of global warming is based more on direct observations than on analytic abstractions, that it is more like determining the average body temperature of a human than where humans came from.

Nope. The pseudoscience of global warming is based on falsifying facts and tweaking equations to fit a predetermined religious axiom. It is unscientific in exactly the same way that "Young-earth creationism" is unscientific.
  ¶ 5:15 PM