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The report from Theos, the Christian think tank which commissioned the research, "draws on a three-year project in which the researchers conducted over a hundred in-depth interviews with leading academics and science communicators, and commissioned a YouGov public opinion poll of over 5,000 British adults".
There is good news for those hoping for a balanced conversation on the topic, but it's worthwhile studying first the fact of the residue of antagonism that has been deposited – or cultivated – in the public's mind by the campaigning of that tiny clique of atheists who loved to court controversy, with their efforts ebbing in more recent years.
The 'science-religion' research report's executive summary provides these negative findings:
The British public are more likely, by a proportion of 2:1, to think that science and religion are incompatible (57%) than compatible (30%).
There is an even more pronounced difference (3:1) between those who think they are strongly incompatible (22%) than those who think they are strongly compatible (7%).
This issue has a noticeable gendered and ethnic dimension. Men are more likely to voice an opinion on this matter and to be hostile than are women. Conversely, respondents from non-white ethnic groups are more likely to be positive than white respondents.
Of those who expressed an opinion, 68% of white respondents were on balance ‘incompatible’, compared with 48% of those from nonwhite ethnic groups respondents. In effect, white men are the group most likely to have a negative view of science and religion.
However, the good news on attitudes concerning the interaction of science and religion suggests that "the angry hostility towards religion engineered by the New Atheist movement is over".
The summary states:
About 15 years ago, [...] a ComRes poll found that 42% of UK adults agreed that “faith is one of the world’s great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate”. Today, that figure is 20%.
By comparison, 46% of people today agree that “all religions have some element of truth in them”, 49% that “humans are at heart spiritual beings”, and 64% of people agree that “there are some things that science will never be able to explain”.
One of the report's writers adds:
Moreover, younger people are notably less hostile about all this than any previous generation. Gen Zs, aged 16-24 in the survey, are more likely to agree that it is possible to believe in God and evolution, more likely to believe that you can be religious and be a good scientist, more likely to think religion has a place in the modern world than any other generation, more likely to disagree that science will be able to explain everything one day, and more likely to disagree that science is the only way of getting reliable getting knowledge about the world. For them at least, the conflict seems to be passing.
On closer inspection, there seems to be a conflict of image rather than substance:
Tension with specific sciences is much less than with ‘science’ in general. If you ask people about their view of religion and science, they are likely to lean towards incompatible. If you ask them about religion and a specific science, e.g. neuroscience, medical science, chemistry, psychology, geology or even cosmology, they are more likely to say that, on balance, it doesn’t make it hard to be religious.
A similar point can be made for specific religions. The perception of hostility between ‘science and religion’ is greater than it is between ‘science and Christianity’ or ‘science and Islam’.
Although much of the science and religion debate has been focused around evolution, it has rightly faded as a matter for contention. Only 6% of the religious group disagree (3% strongly) with the statement that there is “strong, reliable evidence to support the theory of evolution”.
Religious people and even regular worshippers are only marginally more antagonistic to the theory of evolution than non-religious. Even among strict biblical literalists, a small group (3%) who are traditionally the most hostile to Darwinism, only just over a third rejects evolution.
In fact, any antagonism that may exist between religion and science does not appear to arise from the religion side. When asked whether they agreed that “the dangers of science outweigh its benefits”, only 12% of the religious grouping strongly agreed or agreed compared with 9% of the general public. Conversely, 61% of the religious disagreed or disagreed strongly, just below the figure for the general public.
On this, the report's writers state that "[...] the religious are no more antagonistic towards science itself than are the non-religious, and:
In short, much of the science and religion ‘battle’ has been smoke – and there has been a lot of smoke – but without much real fire.
This comes out clearly in the more than 100 in-depth expert interviews with scientists, philosophers, and sociologists. One strong atheist in this expert category stated:
“I want it on record, don’t just list me as an atheist in the Richard Dawkins type. Because I am not an atheist like him at all.”
The report writer says separately:
Perhaps most tellingly, the sense of hostility seems to weaken with knowledge and education. The higher your level of education or knowledge is, the less likely you are to think that, for example, “you can’t be a good scientist and be religious”. Indeed, we spoke in depth to leading scientists and philosophers, from Brian Cox to Adam Rutherford – people who were recruited on the basis of their expertise and their non-belief – a surprising number (two-thirds) saw science and religion as compatible, far more than the general public.
In the words of one interviewee, the evidence seems to show that “there is much less of a conflict for anyone who has had to think a bit about it, whether they be a practicing scientist or a practicing member of a faith community. The idea of a problem comes more from those who aren’t either and who have just picked up the cultural zeitgeist.”
The report writers continue:
The contention of this report is that the science and religion debate has been distorted by being viewed primarily through a few narrow lenses – in particular, evolution (“vs creation(ism)”), the Big Bang (“vs God”), and neuroscience (“vs religious experiences”) – and because these are ‘conflictual’ lenses, the resulting picture is one of wholesale conflict, a conflict that the public feels but finds it hard to locate or explain.
The research findings seem to provide evidence for the view that:
“‘Science and Religion’ is a lot like a swimming pool. All the noise is up at the shallow end.”
The commissioning think-tank acknowledges that there are remaining areas of conflict but the hope is that by understanding it better deeper issues can be examined in a mutually respectful manner. Rather than a war of words, the goal is to have a meeting of minds on matters such as metaphysics, epistemology, anthropology, and ethics.
Two of the expert comments were these, first with regards anthropology and then ethics:
“Although there are tensions within modern thinking, I don’t think they’re specifically problems for religious belief, they’re problems for our ways of thinking about ourselves as human beings.”
“I think there is a real tension [here] but I think it’s an area, having said that, where having religious people and scientists together discussing it can be very interesting and possibly fruitful.”
The report itself states:
Properly speaking (as a number of philosophers and sociologists of science and practising scientists themselves pointed out in our interviews), science itself is an inherently conflictual process. Disagreement is not a problem.
There is no reason why the science and religion conversation should be any different. In the process of those disagreements, some will come to a place of broad compatibility between science and religion, some to one of broad incompatibility, and some will linger in ongoing contestability. That is fine.
The goal, then is not "premature or unwarranted harmony" nor "staged and exaggerated conflict".
What we hope is that, wherever people do find themselves on this issue, they do so on the basis of the best and most nuanced thinking possible, and that, in the process, they get a taste for quite how stimulating and intellectually provocative the field of ‘science and religion’ really is.
To close, we note this statement in the report, perhaps referring to the discrete disciplines of the History of Science, and the Philosophy of Science:
What is important is to recognise that the territory of science even today still has complex, contestable borders and numerous different elements within it.
That issue, and others relating to the nature of religion, are worthy of scrutiny in a further post. Look out for it in the coming week.
Ω Find the full Science and Religion report here
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