Faith leaders have a better shot than celebrities at changing the narrative about religion and science.
If you assume America’s laboratories and research facilities are filled with people who believe in the laws of science but not in God, you’re not alone. You’re also not correct.
About 36 percent of evangelicals think scientists are hostile to religion, compared to 22 percent of Americans overall, according to a 2014 study released by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Evangelicals who view science and religion in conflict are even more likely to see scientists as hostile to religion (42%) than those who view the two fields as collaborative (38%).
But there’s more to the story. It turns out perception weighs heavy in the science and religion debate, and many Christians are getting it wrong. Sociologists Elaine Howard Ecklund and Christopher Scheitle wanted to get to the bottom of this misunderstanding. After all, they’d found that scientists aren’t usually hostile to religion—even if they don’t believe.
They asked everyday people about how they viewed elite scientific thinkers, whether as the Richard Dawkins, God-is-a-delusion stereotype or as fellow believers who bring their faith into their fields.
Their new book out this month, Religion vs. Science: What Religious People Really Think, synthesizes the results of data analyzed from the Religious Understandings of Science study, a nationally representative survey of 10,000 Americans. It’s the most comprehensive research to date on how Americans view religion and science, including hundreds of interviews with people of faith from 23 different organizations.
Ecklund and Scheitle found Americans in general are five times as likely to have heard of Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist and vocal atheist, ...
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