Yes, absolutely. Science and religion are opposed, and you shouldn't expect a discussion of one to defer to the other.
Yes, I know the history. But the history of something is not the thing itself. Talking about the history of science is not the same thing as science.
To its credit, the church was central to spreading and promoting learning. It did this to promote its own goals. It did not expect independent learning to conflict with religious truth. When it did the church could also be pretty vigorous about opposing it.
The reality is, religion and science have an essential conflict by their very nature. It's not about whether they agree on any particular conclusions, or not. It's about the method of arriving at truth. They claim opposite values. Religion values faith. Believe without reason. Science values doubt. Question everything, see for yourself. With one faith is a virtue, with the other a vice. One should not expect science or religion to be unbiased towards something that is essentially at odds with itself.
Now, some scientists — emphasis on “some” — do not like religion and are militant atheists. But many scientists are believers. So, again, there is no inherent all-or-nothing opposition between the systems.
Science wants to study the material world. And who would oppose that?
People of faith want to contemplate the immaterial world — but they may also be very interested in the physical world (we live here, you know). The history of science is largely the history of the Christians studying God's creation.
Lastly, if the show “Cosmos” simply wanted to talk about the physical world, and the current thinking of scientists about material things, that could be done in a pretty neutral way. Just stay focused. But they don't do that — they go out of their way to bring in the topic of believers and criticize them. And why? It's really unnecessary. But they cannot help themselves, because they feel threatened by people who engage in independent thought. Yes! If someone does not accept current scientific dogma, and if someone believes that something exists beyond the physical world, some scientists are very threatened by that. So they mock the believers. Meanwhile, people of faith are far more broad-minded. We accept both the physical world and the spiritual world and we have no need to discount half of that and say “There's just nothing there”.
You really will not find Christians who say "Science does not exist" but you will find some scientists who will say "God does not exist". They think they have proven a negative and their closed minds will not accept the idea that there is more to life than atoms.
Yes, absolutely. Science and religion are opposed, and you shouldn't expect a discussion of one to defer to the other.
There is no justification for a science program to be intentionally biased against religion or to mischaracterize religion in order to fit a false narrative. Science should not have an agenda and should be free to follow evidence wherever it leads. This Cosmos series is a mixture of Hollywood and science – and Hollywood comes with its own agenda , beliefs, and ‘faith’.
Beyond this, the ‘conflict’ between science and theism is fairly new. Excerpt from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Daniel Walker Howe’s What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1844, p. 464:
As this chapter is written in the early twenty-first century, the hypothesis that the universe reflect intelligent design has provoked a bitter debate in the United States. How very different was the intellectual world of the early nineteenth century! Then, virtually everyone believed in intelligent design. Faith in the rational design of the universe underlay the world-view of the Enlightenment, shared by Isaac Newton, John Locke, and the American Founding Fathers. Even the outspoke critics of Christianity embraced not atheism but deism, that is, belief in an impersonal, remote deity who had created the universe and designed it so perfectly that it ran along of its own accord, following natural laws without need for further divine intervention. The common used expression “the book of nature” referred to the universal practice of viewing nature as a revelation of God’s power and wisdom. Christians were fond of saying that they accepted two divine revelations: the Bible and the book of nature. For desists like Thomas Paine, the book of nature alone sufficed, rendering what he called the “fables” of the Bible superfluous. The desire to demonstrate the glory of God, whether deist or – more commonly – Christian, constituted one of the principal motivations for scientific activity in the early republic, along with national pride, the hope for useful applications, and, of course, the joy of science itself.