Identity in a Secular Age: Science, Religion, and Public Perceptions

By Bernard Lightman

Although historians have suggested for some time that we move away from the assumption of a necessary clash between science and religion, the conflict narrative persists in contemporary discourse. But why? And how do we really know what people actually think about evolutionary science, let alone the many and varied ways in which it might relate to individual belief? In this multidisciplinary volume, experts in history and philosophy of science, oral history, sociology of religion, social psychology, and science communication and public engagement look beyond two warring systems of thought. They consider a far more complex, multifaceted, and distinctly more interesting picture of how differing groups along a spectrum of worldviews—including atheistic, agnostic, and faith groups—relate to and form the ongoing narrative of a necessary clash between evolution and faith. By ascribing agency to the public, from the nineteenth century to the present and across Canada and the United Kingdom, this volume offers a much more nuanced analysis of people’s perceptions about the relationship between evolutionary science, religion, and personal belief, one that better elucidates the complexities not only of that relationship but of actual lived experience.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Release date: Sep 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9780822987697

Book preview

IDENTITY in a SECULAR AGE

SCIENCE, RELIGION, and PUBLIC PERCEPTIONS

Edited by

FERN ELSDON-BAKER

and

BERNARD LIGHTMAN

University of Pittsburgh Press

Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pa., 15260

Copyright © 2020, University of Pittsburgh Press

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Printed on acid-free paper

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress

ISBN 13: 978-0-8229-4628-1

ISBN 10: 0-8229-4628-9

Cover art: Charles Darwin by John Collier, 1883, based on a work of 1881.

Oil on canvas, 49 1/2 in. x 38 in. National Portrait Gallery, London.

Cover design: Joel W. Coggins

ISBN-13: 978-0-8229-8769-7 (electronic)

CONTENTS

PREFACE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INTRODUCTION

Fern Elsdon-Baker and Bernard Lightman

PART I. THE PUBLIC SPHERE

1. FROM CONFLICT TO COMPLEXITY

Historians and Nineteenth-Century Public Perceptions of Science and Religion

Bernard Lightman, Sylvia Nickerson, and Parandis Tajbakhsh

2. CREATING HARD-LINE SECULAR EVOLUTIONISTS

The Influence of Question Design on Our Understanding of Public Perceptions of Clash Narratives

Fern Elsdon-Baker

3. SCIENCE AND RELIGION CONFLICT IN THE UNITED STATES

A Closer Look at the Polls

Jonathan P. Hill

4. EVOLUTION ON THE SMALL SCREEN

Reflections on Media, Science, and Religion in Twentieth-Century Britain

Alexander Hall

PART II. CONFLICT AND IDENTITY

5. LIFE STORY

Oral Histories in the Field of Science and Religion

Paul Merchant

6. SCIENCE AND RELIGION AS LIVED EXPERIENCE

Narratives of Evolution among British and Canadian Publics and Life Scientists

Stephen H. Jones and Tom Kaden

7. BEYOND BELIEF SYSTEMS

Promoting a Social Identity Approach to the Study of Science and Religion

Carissa A. Sharp and Carola Leicht

PART III. SECULARIZATION

8. THE CONFLICT NARRATIVE, GROUP IDENTITY, AND THE USES OF HISTORY

Peter Harrison

9. SECULARIZATION

What Has Science Got to Do with It?

Amy Unsworth

10. SCIENCE AS SECULAR

Dynamics of Reflection, Tolerance, and Contestation in British and Canadian Scientific Workplaces

Rebecca Catto

PART IV. FUTURE DIRECTIONS

METHODOLOGICAL AND THEORETICAL

11. THE METHODOLOGICAL CHALLENGES AND POSSIBILITIES OF SOCIAL SCIENTIFIC STUDY OF RELIGION AND SCIENCE ACROSS NATIONAL CONTEXTS

Elaine Howard Ecklund, David R. Johnson, and Robert A. Thomson Jr.

12. POSSIBILITIES FOR FUTURE ELITE CONFLICT BETWEEN SCIENCE AND RELIGION

John H. Evans

CODA

Fern Elsdon-Baker and Bernard Lightman

NOTES

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

INDEX

PREFACE

This edited volume was developed as a result of the Science and Religion: Exploring the Spectrum (SRES) project. The SRES project had its origins in the work Fern Elsdon-Baker undertook as part of the joint Darwin Anniversaries in 2009, 150 years since the publication of On the Origin of Species and 200 years since Charles Darwin’s birth. During that period, she worked on academic, educational, and public engagement activities for the British Council in a project that was eventually run in fifty countries worldwide. Having studied history of science, she was well aware of the work of John Hedley Brooke and others who argued for the complexity thesis in terms of the relationship between science and religion.¹ However, when operating in a nonacademic setting, where the focus was science communication, it fast became clear that those engaged in this work were most likely to uncritically accept the idea there was a necessary and intrinsic conflict between being religious and accepting scientific explanations for the origin of species. It was also at this point that it became abundantly clear that outside of the United States there was very little in-depth international data on public perceptions of evolution, let alone religious or spiritual public perceptions of evolution and religion. What little there was had at its core an assumption of a necessary clash between religious belief and accepting evolution. It was for this reason that, as part of the Darwin Now project, Elsdon-Baker commissioned an Ipsos Mori survey in ten countries on public views of evolutionary science and Darwinism. In 2008, when setting up the Darwin Now project, it became clear that there was a distinct danger of importing a conflict narrative from the US and UK contexts into cultural contexts where we did not know what publics currently thought. A primary concern at this stage was that suggesting that an individual could not be religious and accept evolutionary science was far more likely to foster a distrust in science than an increased interest, which is obviously a counterproductive exercise when trying to engage diverse publics with evolutionary science. This led to a more considered approach to designing and delivering project activities in such a way that the framing of these debates was not in terms of a necessary conflict but rather reflected the nuances therein.

At this point Elaine Ecklund and John H. Evans, both contributors to our volume, were laying down the foundations for a new social scientific approach to studying the relationship between science and religion.² Evans argued that we needed to move away from a purely epistemic account of the relationship between science and religion, and, as he suggests in this volume, that the real terrain for the conflict in the United States is cultural authority in relation to morality. At the same time, Elaine Ecklund was undertaking the first phase of her ground-breaking work on what scientists’ religious beliefs actually are, which ultimately led to the international research she reflects upon in this volume. Together they laid the foundations for much of the work that has been undertaken to date in this field of study, and unexplored pathways were beginning to open up for a new sociology of science and religion. Other sociological research was also beginning to challenge some of the conventions in thought surrounding science and religion in the public sphere. For example, among others, Joseph O. Baker’s work highlighted how only a minority of US populations agreed that science and religion were incompatible;³ Peter Hildering’s research showed how rejection of evolution among Dutch protestants does not translate directly into a blanket rejection of science, but more a perception of evolution as not being good science;⁴ and David Long’s ethnographic work examining US educational settings began to build on the work of earlier scholars, such as Chris Toumey, who suggested that rejection of evolutionary science may have more to do with cultural or personal identity issues rather than epistemic positions.⁵ Social science research was beginning to strongly suggest that the nature of an individual’s perspective on a point of conflict (e.g., acceptance of evolution in relation to personal faith) was not necessarily due to epistemological concerns, but was being driven by social or cultural factors and the relationship between public domain discussion of secularist attitudes and group identity and belonging. Challenging the conflict thesis and embracing complexity were no longer concerns just of historians. They became concerns of contemporary social scientists.

Thus, a number of researchers who have contributed to this volume, including the two editors, were beginning to converge on some similar themes and concerns from different disciplinary perspectives. For example, while Elsdon-Baker had been working on the Darwin Now project, leading her to notice a need for a sea change in the way researchers and science communicators alike were treating the topic of science and religion, Bernard Lightman had begun to realize how the changing landscape of historical research had transformed how historians pictured the relationship between Victorian science and religion. Lightman had just completed a study of the popularization of science in the Victorian period that had revealed, much to his surprise, that a significant number of previously neglected scientific authors writing for the British reading audience saw nature as full of meaning and charged with religious significance. Attempting to update the natural theology tradition, they produced some of the best-selling science books of the second half of the nineteenth century, surpassing even Darwin and other elite scientists in some cases.⁶ Working on the popularizers confirmed that the Victorian reading audience was still interested, even after the publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859, in worldviews in which science and religion were harmonized. According to previous historical work, it was this same period when the conflict thesis was supposed to have emerged in the writings of Draper and White and was supposed to have dominated the Victorian mind. But—and this confirmed the suggestion of historians John Brooke and Ronald Numbers that we move away from an emphasis on conflict—the existence of these popularizers showed that natural theology remained a powerful force in Victorian culture, at least until the end of the nineteenth century. Moreover, switching the focus to the public, rather than restricting it to members of the intellectual elite, brought home the idea that consumers of popular science actively engage with knowledge, transforming it or rejecting elements with which they disagree.⁷ Even if elite Victorian scientists bought into the conflict thesis (and this is up for debate), members of the public did not necessarily accept this conception of the relationship between science and religion. We must ascribe agency to members of the public, both in the past and in the present.

Meanwhile, back at the public engagement coal face at the heart of the Darwin Industry, two things became evident. First, the data that was collected in 2009 as part of the ten-country Darwin Now survey was suggesting that the conflict thesis was not the majority position endorsed by these publics. Second, it became evident that the conflict thesis had become so woven into the narrative surrounding Darwinian evolution that it was in effect being projected onto the public regardless of what they actually thought. Academics, media, and science communication professionals alike were all too ready to assume that religious people would either not accept evolutionary science or at best suffer from some form of cognitive dissonance if they were to do so. This mismatch between public perceptions of evolutionary science and religion and the perceptions of the public perception of evolutionary science and religion was even more pronounced when it came to the work being undertaken in Muslim majority contexts. Here, it was even harder to ignore the front-and-center (geo)political contexts, legacies, or—in some cases—prejudices within these debates.⁸

The SRES project, from which our volume originated, sought to build a better understanding of these apparently anomalous findings and observations. In order to do this, we needed to better answer two core questions. First, what do or did publics, both past and present, really think about the relationship between science and religious belief? And second, if, as the Darwin Now data was indicating, the conflict model was not a majority position in regard to evolutionary science, what was driving the public space narrative that there was a necessary clash or conflict between accepting evolutionary science and holding religious or spiritual beliefs?

Much of the available data on public discussions of the relationship between evolutionary science and faith, especially outside of the study of US publics, was based on survey measures of levels of acceptance or nonacceptance of evolution and on categorizing varying forms of anti-evolutionary stances. While this kind of research is valuable in serving to highlight the complexity of public attitudes, it does not shine a light on the processes by which these attitudes are formed or reaffirmed. Nor does it allow us to reflect on the role that public space discussion of a necessary clash or conflict between acceptance of evolution and personal faith might have in rejection of evolution. This isn’t a factor just in narratives promoted by those we might think of as holding traditional anti-evolutionary science positions, such as American Protestant creationist groups. For example, evolutionary theory was at this point increasingly being discussed as synonymous with atheism in the public domain, due in part to New Atheist–style rhetoric alongside anti-evolutionary science rhetoric. Was it then more likely that members of the public self-identify as creationist if they believe in any form of creator—even if they actually adopt what we might think of as a position that accommodates evolutionary science, such as a theistic evolutionist approach?⁹ The labels we ascribe to people when framing data collection or analysis don’t often make sense in terms of lived experience. Building on the sociological research of co-investigator Rebecca Catto, whose work with young atheists in the UK had begun to provide insight into how endorsement of science might act as a kind of social identity marker,¹⁰ the SRES project sought to unravel what role this kind of secular science narrative might play in the public’s lived experience of these debates, and how science and religion might act as a facet of social or cultural identity. It also sought to critically engage with the framing of previous social science research in this field to take into account what we hypothesized as a form of projected cognitive dissonance observed in the scholarly literature as well as in science communication practice. One facet of this was to build on the psychological research of co-investigator Carola Leicht in terms of thinking about how this kind of projected dissonance might relate not only to social identity theory but also to the perpetuation of stereotypes. When designing the project, we were particularly interested in not only how individuals’ religious positions can act as a social identity but also how an individual’s position on evolutionary science might act as social identity. A primary aim of the project, then, was to help build a more comprehensive picture of how differing groups along a spectrum of worldviews, including atheistic, agnostic, and faith groups, relate to, and form, the public domain narrative that there is a necessary clash between evolution and faith. The core research question of the SRES project was to determine what social and cultural factors have driven, and are currently driving, the narrative in the public domain that there is a necessary clash between religious belief and acceptance of evolutionary science. This is not something that can be undertaken through one disciplinary approach or lens. So, we designed a multidisciplinary approach that brought together a team of specialist researchers who would take on single disciplinary strands of research to tackle aspects of these overarching research questions within a larger project structure. Bringing together this expertise in history and philosophy of science, oral history, sociology of religion, social psychology, and science communication and public engagement gave us a more complete picture of what was going on in terms of public positions or perceptions and their formation. It has allowed not only triangulation of findings across different methods but also more comprehensive multilayered analysis. It has in itself been a fantastic learning journey for all of us as a team, and it is a journey we are still very much on, as we are about to take on wider international research in another six countries that further builds on our initial work in the United Kingdom and Canada. This multidisciplinary approach is reflected in the subsequent chapters.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The editors would like to thank Abby Collier and her team at the University of Pittsburgh Press for their help in bringing this volume to publication. We are also grateful to the gifted researchers in history, sociology, and social psychology who contributed their stimulating chapters and who were such a joy to work with. Finally, we give thanks to the Templeton Religion Trust for funding the Science and Religion: Exploring the Spectrum project, which provided the core ideas for this volume. We are especially indebted to Chris Stewart of the Templeton Religion Trust for his steadfast support and encouragement from the very start.

INTRODUCTION

FERN ELSDON-BAKER AND BERNARD LIGHTMAN

Surprisingly, relatively little social science or humanities research has been undertaken that explores the relationship between science and religion in society, or as part of popular cultures past and present—especially in a global context. Remarkably, we have barely even begun to scratch the surface in this field of study. And yet the public’s views on and relationship to science and religion in society drive at the very heart of debates that relate to what it means to be human; how we should live our lives or structure our societies; the nature of morality and political decision making; women’s, LGBTQ, or transgender rights; current or future medical practice; how publics engage with science in pluralistic societies; how we relate to or impact on the natural world or climate change; and the role or impact of technological developments in society and what the future might ultimately hold for humanity.

The topic of science and religion is never far from the public consciousness, fraught as it is with the potential for controversy. In our experience, it doesn’t take much prompting for people to come up with examples of controversy. The idea of a ceaseless conflict between these abstract entities, science on the one hand and religion on other, seems to be an integral part of the public consciousness. The classic examples of Darwin, Galileo, Scopes, and more recent controversies over creationism are nearly always readily dropped into conversation. As this is an area that the two editors of this collection have both been working in for at least the past decade, we have had the opportunity to speak about evolution and religion in several countries worldwide. The genuine interest that people have in these debates never ceases to amaze, from taxi drivers in far-flung places to audiences at public events to people seated next to us or our research colleagues on planes and trains. Science and religion are topics of conversation that rarely fails to elicit some kind of response, be it a well-considered personal position or a tentative exploration of a position. After all, science and religion arguably shape many of the ways in which we interact with the world, think about ourselves or society, and wrestle with the kinds of existential questions that trouble most of us at some point in our lives. And herein lies the current issue with research in this field: this vast wealth of differing publics’ perceptions of science and religion and all the ensuing debates, issues, concerns, and questions relating to the interaction between these two ways of encountering the world have been, for the most part, ignored.

This in part is due to one of the key underpinning assumptions about the relationship between science and religion to date: namely, that it is a relationship that is principally epistemic in nature. In other words, there is a strong assumption that it is a relationship that can be boiled down mostly to two different systems of knowledge with competing claims or concerns about the world, society, and the nature of the universe.¹ There is significant potential for controversy when these two knowledge systems contradict each other, as John H. Evans argues in chapter 12. An explicit or implicit epistemological approach has led scholars to concentrate their research on the intersection between theological positions and contemporary scientific positions. This is an area that has been studied in great depth and has in some instances proved to be a fruitful endeavor. After all, science and religion do act as systems of knowledge in different ways for different actors, and it is philosophically and theologically interesting to map these out.² It is also understandable that this narrower epistemic framing of the interaction between the two leads to the tendency to presuppose the relationship between them as defined and exemplified by conflict. For any notion of compatibility between two systems of knowledge is necessarily framed as counteroppositional to conflict, or indeed counterintuitive to a conflictual norm, given that they are binary opposites. Thus, even when seeking to challenge the idea of an inherent conflict between the two, the adoption of a principally epistemic position in effect begins from a position that inadvertently endorses, or even perpetuates, the very conflict model to be unpicked. This volume seeks to move away from the underpinning assumption of a necessary conflict between two warring epistemic systems of thought. While we are not seeking to deny all notions of a potential for clashes between epistemic positions relating to science and religion, we are arguing that this is only one aspect of what is a far more complex, multifaceted, and distinctly more interesting picture. It is vital to acknowledge that both science and religion, separately and together, serve as far more than abstract knowledge systems that are distinct from the societal contexts in which their claims to knowledge about the nature of being and the universe are elucidated.

It is also important to note that the terms science and religion are themselves contested. Historically, the boundaries between the two have been less clear than we might perhaps consider them to be today, as Peter Harrison argues (see chapter 8). Historians of science have challenged what is often referred to as the conflict thesis for some time, instead arguing for an understanding of the relationship between science and religion that better represents the historical complexity (see chapter 1). We have to concede that the epistemic conflict model has a limitation; it assumes there has always been a clear demarcation between the aims and endeavors of both science and religion. This notion is very much a construct of the more recent ascent from the late nineteenth century to the present of science as a core foundation of modern society. And this gives us our first clue as to why we should not view science and religion principally through an epistemic lens. First, historically, their relationship has been much more nuanced and indeed more complex than it is often presented today. The boundaries between the two authorities are far less clear over the longue durée, epistemically or institutionally. Second, this blurring of boundaries arises in part because neither can be removed from its social, cultural, or indeed political context where a clear division between scientific systems of knowledge and religious ways of thinking cannot always be neatly drawn at an individual level or at a societal level. Furthermore, the recognition of the fallibility of humans’ ability to interpret the world around us in an absolutely objective manner is now a guiding maxim in many fields of research, and the indisputable word of human beings from a scientific, or religious, perspective is increasingly seen as a problematic concept. Today, we are far more used to challenging or critiquing the notion of either objective scientific or religious knowledge and their related hegemonic structures. Recognizing this does not need to take us down a precariously postmodern relativistic path in an era currently tagged as post-truth. From Descartes onward, we have become relatively comfortable with accepting the idea that we do not need our knowledge about the universe to be certain; we do, however, need it to be reliable. There is, therefore, an element of trust, or faith, inherent in accepting any kind of knowledge about the universe and our place in it. In this regard, then, science and religion are not so distinct, and neither is as dogmatic as the other sometimes perceives it to be. If we accept that both science and religion are part of the fabric of our society from which any claim to knowledge cannot be separated, we also need to recognize that they carry with them cultural, social, and political cache or consequences. Furthermore, as Western Europe and North America are increasingly becoming more secular, we need to understand these debates against the backdrop of public perceptions of a secularizing society and shifting demographics in terms of religious, spiritual, or indeed non-religious identities. As explained in our preface to the book, it was from this foundation that the Science and Religion: Exploring the Spectrum (SRES) project team started designing our research in 2013.

Even in the past few years, there has been a welcome upsurge in interest in this field of research. The increasing fascination with this field of study is perhaps unsurprising, given that over the past decade discussions in the public domain concerning the relationship between science, rationality, reason, and faith have become increasingly polemic and polarized—perhaps most well documented in Anglophone contexts, for example in the case of the debates involving the New Atheists. At the same time, the authority, levels of trust, and traditional structures of authority for both "science and religion are being challenged or questioned in public and (geo)political domains. Alongside public debates and questions about the role of truth in society, we are also witnessing increasingly polarized debates about related issues, such as the perception of a threat to modernity from changing faith demographics due to migration. These interrelated sociopolitical drivers will potentially contribute to further intensification of public domain discussion of conflict narratives, not only surrounding science and religion but also related to assertions of a conflict between rational thought and religiosity. Conversely, we are increasingly witnessing appropriation of religious values" for populist rhetoric globally, which may ultimately lead to further polarization and distrust between what are perceived to be secular and religious positions, especially in relation to social values. None of these broader societal or political trends can be ignored when it comes to researching scientific and religious worldviews and their role in society. There is, then, an ever-growing need to build a better understanding of the intersections between science and religion, and by extension rationalism, modernity, and belief in society. Thus, this volume is timely in seeking to broaden the scope of research beyond an epistemic framing, and by doing so it highlights some of the opportunities for more socially orientated research into the relationship between science and religion.

When we use the term religion we are not referring solely to Christianity. Though the focus of this volume is not a comparative religion frame, we are seeking to examine these issues from across a spectrum of religious, spiritual, and non-religious groups, individuals, or identities. A number of the chapters actually focus on more humanist or non-religious perspectives alongside spiritual and religious perspectives. Moreover, we are not looking only at Christian populations as in these chapters we are not specifying groups by religious tradition. This approach draws on the growing trend of research in unbelief or non-religion and also reflects that the countries we have predominantly been working on to date are not majority Christian contexts when compared to the growing non-religious populations in both countries. The majority position in the United Kingdom, for example, is now arguably non-religion. One of the broader implications of the social turn that is currently taking place in the study of science and religion is that the foregrounding of epistemic issues relating to specific religious tradition or doctrinal stances is lessening to allow for other social and cultural factors to be analyzed. Although Christianity is an important topic in the volume, our research includes all forms of religion, spirituality, and non-religion. The sociological and social psychological studies included non-Christians as well as those who would classify themselves as non-religious. The conclusions arising out of this research thus have consequences and implications for the future study of all forms of religion, spirituality, or non-religion.

While we seek to understand religion in all of its diversity, the chapters in this volume mainly deal with Canada, United States, and Britain (with two notable exceptions in the work of Unsworth and Ecklund, et al.). This in part reflects the primary locus of research to date (United States) and also the goals of the SRES project laid out in the preface, which forms the backbone of this collection of studies and was undertaken in the United Kingdom and Canada. This volume is critical and theoretical in its focus—it is not meant as a case study approach to comparative contexts or religious stances. Rather, it is a needed contribution to outlining the possibilities, theoretical context, and methodological implications and limitations in the development of an entire field of research.

The chapters are divided into four parts. Part 1 examines public perceptions of evolutionary science and religion in the past as well as the present. In the first chapter, Lightman, Nickerson, and Tajbakhsh suggest how historians can provide new insights into the study of science and religion by examining the role of those who were instrumental in shaping the public discussion of their relationship. This chapter focuses on British publishers such as John Murray and Alexander Macmillan, the reception of Draper’s History of the Conflict between Science and Religion (1874) in British journals, and the periodical reviews of Darwin’s evolutionary tracts in Canadian periodicals. Turning from the nineteenth century to current public perceptions, in chapter 2 Fern Elsdon-Baker explores the role that evolutionary science might play in both religious and non-religious publics’ social identity and how this relates to the broader perception that religious individuals or publics will experience a form of conflict between science and religion. This chapter highlights how the public’s perception of an intrinsic conflict between religious identity and accepting evolutionary science could play an important role in the way members of the public, across both religious and non-religious publics, approach this subject. Focusing specifically on the public in the United States, Jonathan Hill reviews various attempts to measure American belief in science and religion conflict. He concludes that responses to conflict survey questions are sensitive to wording decisions and available response categories. Hill calls for future research to further investigate how science functions as a social identity for some members of the public and the role this might play in reinforcing the conflict narrative between science and religion. Rounding out part 1, Alex Hall draws our attention from the United States to the twentieth-century British public. He discusses the influential role of the media in the dissemination and popularization of ideas, facts, and worldviews across British society. Focusing on the medium of television, this chapter explores how programs as diverse as blockbuster documentaries, educational broadcasts, and science fiction dramas have presented content about evolution in postwar Britain.

Part 2 tackles the issue of how public discourse about science and religion relates and contributes to the formation of cultural identities for individuals or groups. Paul Merchant’s chapter opens this section with detailed life story interviews with individuals who made significant contributions to public discourse on science and religion in the last three decades of the twentieth century: science journalist Bernard Dixon, BBC World Service program maker Martin Redfern, and moral philosopher Mary Midgley. The oral histories reveal ways in which all three, in their writing and broadcasting on science and religion, were driven by strong personal rejection of what they saw as prevalent scientific, reductionist accounts of the world. While Merchant draws life story oral histories of prominent intellectuals to understand how individuals deal with conflict and identity issues, Tom Kaden and Stephen Jones use public interviews and focus groups to examine the views of scientists and members of the public. Kaden and Jones are interested in the ways in which qualitative research can shift the focus in debates about how people view science and religion, and they argue for a subtler understanding of the subject that gives recognition to individuals’ lived experiences. In the final chapter of part 2, social psychologists Carissa Sharp and Carola Leicht argue that religion and science both function as belief systems, providing people with explanations about the world around them and with a social identity. Sharp and Leicht attempt to refine our understanding of people’s perceptions of the relationship between science and religion, focusing on how individuals perceive that relationship from