Scientists' views on the relationship between science and religion [View All]

[rug]

Posted on: September 22, 2011 2:04 AM, by Josh Rosenau

Elaine Howard Ecklund has a new paper out, building on her survey of scientists' views on religion, research she reported in a book last year, and in a series of papers over the last few years. In this paper (press release for those of you who haven't got access to the journal), she looks specifically at how scientists perceive the relationship between science and religion.

As she reported in the book, 15% of scientists she and her colleagues interviewed reported seeing an inherent conflict between science and religion. Another 15% saw no conflict at all, while the remaining 70% saw some conflict sometimes, but not an inherent conflict.

You may have noticed that many of the loudest scientific voices on the topic of science and religion tend to fall into that first 15%, who see conflict everywhere. Ecklund's account (co-authored with Jerry Park and Katherine Sorrell) squares with my own sense of these folks' attitudes:

the group of natural and social scientists who saw religion and science as irreconcilably in conflict saw religion in direct opposition to their work as scientists. On an institutional level, science and religion were utterly incompatible epistemologically, and on a personal level, these scientists could not embrace religion because it ran counter to their ways of understanding truth. In most cases, these scientists had a restricted, fundamentalist notion of religion. Scientists who adopted a conflict perspective tended to see science in an ideal-typical Mertonian form (Merton 1973), rather than having a particular version of science related to their specific discipline. Indeed, as with religion, we found no broad differences between the natural and social scientists in terms of views on science. Those who adhered to an unwavering conflict position held religion under the light of science, and religion failed. In addition, beyond just seeing science as attached to empiricism, these respondents saw empirical knowledge as the only true kind of knowledge.

http://scienceblogs.com/tfk/2011/09/scientists_views_on_the_relati.php