Been e-biking quite a bit lately. Its just too gorgeous out not to. So I bloody do. I mount up, put my helmet on (YES, MELISSA!!!! I ALWAYS PUT MY HELMET ON) and take off into the sunshine for thirty-five minutes of pure joy and freedom. And everyone asks if I feel vulnerable, fearful, concerned about the ‘dangers’. And, of course I’m concerned. Just not enough to outweigh the pleasure. And after getting bashed off my bike by a blind man in a white van, I’m always ‘wary’. But its not really buses and lorries that concern me. They’re big enough to avoid. The main problem is bikes. They’re dangerous, Stupid. Stop for nothing. Ignore other vehicles, particularly other bikes. Won’t stop at red lights. Drive through pedestrians. Go on pavements. Ride through shops.

Yes, I am the problem. It’s like they used to say when you drove too fast; “one day you’ll meet yourself head on, coming in the opposite direction”. Which, of course, is total bollocks and logically impossible. But we all get the message. And yet the only thing I really fear when I’m biking is the Police. Who, according to our friendly City postman, were yesterday stopping battalions of naughty bikers as they broke numerous, so-called ‘laws’ in Farringdon. Though I’m always pissed off with slow bikers, erratic bikers, Lime-bikers and, basically, every other biker on MY road, or cycle path. Maybe pavement, if I have to. I need to know that if I’m actually going through a green light, all legal and kosher, that I’m not gonna get broadsided by some tosser on a Lime bike wearing headphones, sending a text message, as he flies through a red.

There’s an outcry in the scientific world because a BBC presenter said that science has become the domain of ‘left-leaning atheists’. Which is probably true. And because the answer to every big question, from the mouths of the devoted, is ‘God dunnit’, it actually makes sense. Darwin, who studied for the clergy, spent half his life fighting the church over his evolutionary theory which they deemed ‘ridiculous’, verging on ‘blasphemous’. Because it removed God from the equation.

Scientific study is always a reflection of the views of society. Were you to initiate a study today to ‘show’ that white races are ‘superior’ to all the ‘darker’ races, that they are ‘more evolved’ and generally ‘better’, I reckon you’d struggle for funding. Unless the KKK have any spare cash. But in Europe in the 19th century that’s what all the ‘scientists’ (rich white men) ‘proved’ in many ways. (Why I have no faith in statistics whatsoever, without knowing who paid for it).

Science and religion should always be separate. One is strictly ‘material’ and one is, or should be, strictly ‘spiritual’. Otherwise religion gets offended when anything ‘hand of God’ is explained (I don’t mean Maradona’s goal) scientifically, and science gets all shitty, like Stephen Hawking, and actually ridicules people for any religious belief at all.

The late, great Stephen Jay Gould, master of many sciences at Harvard and scientific historian who, in his own way, believed in God, laid this out beautifully in his work on ‘NOMA’, non-overlapping magesteria. Keep religion and science separate. Where they belong.

So scientists should be atheists. And preferably ones who don’t ride Lime bikes round London.

Happy Thursday

A xxxx