Faith and Facts: Student Conflicts

2013

Science education for diversity has long striven to take account of issues to do with gender, socio-economic class, ethnicity and disability. However, it has traditionally made rather less effort to consider issues to do with religious faith. Yet issues to do with religion are becoming increasingly important in school science lessons and certain other educational settings, such as science museums. I examine two possible circumstances where one might wish matters of religion to be included within the teaching of science: when teaching about the nature of science and when teaching about evolution. With regard to the nature of science, considering religion is useful simply for helping learners better understand why certain things come under the purview of science and others don’t. With regard to evolution, religious belief is a major reason why many people reject evolution. One can teach evolution in a way that is true to science yet respectful of student who, for religious reasons, feel unable to accept the validity of evolution.

Research examining the relationship between science and religion has often painted a narrative of conflict for students with various religious beliefs. The purpose of this paper is to present a counter-narrative based on a study carried out in Singapore, which provides a unique multi-ethnic and multi-religious environment and geopolitical context to study the phenomenon. Informed by the theories of collateral learning, situated cognition, and agency, the study examined how a group of high school biology students viewed and negotiated the relationship between biological evolution and their beliefs in Christianity. Case study methodology and semi-structured interviews were used to generate thick descriptions of their views. Findings from the study illustrate how the students exhibited agency in deliberately creating multiple resolution mechanisms as they recognised and negotiated the conceptual and social tensions between the worldviews of evolution and creationism. The findings suggest that the students exhibited more agency in resolving the perceived conflict between science and religion than we tend to ascribe based on previous interpretative accounts that emphasised confrontation, alienation and marginalisation. The implication is that students’ agency in negotiating the differing worldviews between science and religion should be seen as a resource for the learning of evolution, rather than a hindrance.

Journal of Geoscience …, 2009

A religious perspective on life shapes how and what those with such a perspective learn in science; for some students a religious perspective can hinder learning in science. For such reasons Staver’s article is to be welcomed as it proposes a new way of resolving the widely perceived discord between science and religion. Staver notes that Western thinking has traditionally postulated the existence and comprehensibility of a world that is external to and independent of human consciousness. This has led to a conception of truth, truth as correspondence, in which our knowledge corresponds to the facts in this external world. Staver rejects such a conception, preferring the conception of truth as coherence in which the links are between and among independent knowledge claims themselves rather than between a knowledge claim and reality. Staver then proposes constructivism as a vehicle potentially capable of resolving the tension between religion and science. My contention is that the resolution between science and religion that Staver proposes comes at too great a cost – both to science and to religion. Instead I defend a different version of constructivism where humans are seen as capable of generating models of reality that do provide richer and more meaningful understandings of reality, over time and with respect both to science and to religion. I argue that scientific knowledge is a subset of religious knowledge and explore the implications of this for science education in general and when teaching about evolution in particular.

Science Education, 2002

Zygon(r), 2009

Thirteen theology/religious studies students were interviewed while studying science-and-religion courses at four different institutions of higher education in the United Kingdom. They held a range of views about science and religion, their respective ontological status, and their science-and-religion studies. The interviews reveal that it may be possible to assign individuals to one of four different religioscientific conceptual frameworks and, furthermore, to relate differences in their approach when studying science-and-religion to their conceptual framework. The implications for course designers are discussed, including how the frameworks may enable teachers to be more aware of the range of possible reactions students may have while being introduced to science-and-religion topics.

There already exists a large knowledge base about teaching and learning related to the origins, diversity and history of life on Earth. We know less about teaching and learning related to wider issues pertinent to both religion and science. In our research with 40 students in six secondary schools in England, we looked at wider issues of student perceptions of religion and science. Our study involved an intervention of six lessons in Science and six in Religious Education (RE). Issues of philosophy, including ethics, were raised in Science lessons. The RE lessons dealt with a variety of contexts that highlighted the question of the relationship(s) between religion and science. In both pre-and post-intervention interviews, we found many instances where students used language that conveyed a misconception of the epistemic distinctions between religion and science. Students referred to 'truth', 'theory' and 'facts' interchangeably when discussing religious and scientific knowledge. We argue that RE needs to attend to epistemic literacy if we are to both avoid epistemological misconceptions and enable students to develop insights into the specific knowledge forms manifested in religion(s). 1 Pearce, P., Stones, A., Reiss, M. J. & Mujtaba, T. (2020) 'Science is purely about the truth so I don't think you could compare it to non-truth versus the truth.' Students' perceptions of religion and science, and the relationship(s) between them: Religious education and the need for epistemic literacy.

Zygon®, 2004

The high degree of specialization in society and compartmentalization in education have resulted in increasing difficulty in communicating across different fields of study. I propose that these gaps in communication across disciplines must be addressed to ensure a fruitful ongoing science-and-religion dialogue.

Science, Worldviews and Education, 2009

Science Education, 2016

How students view the boundaries between their science and religious education concerning the origins of life and the universe. Science Education International, 100 (3). pp. 459 482.