Science vs. Religion: Why the Stark Differences in the Gap between Opinions of General and Personal Conflict?

Pew has a new report out titled, "Religion and Science: Highly religious Americans are less likely than others to see conflict between faith and science." Here is the chart from the publication regarding opinions about general conflict between religion and science:

A few things surprise me. First, white Evangelicals are relatively unlikely to see conflict/more likely to see compatibility between science and religion compared to those of other religious traditions. Second, the unaffiliated are exceedingly likely to see conflict/unlikely to see compatibility between science and religion. Third, those who attend worship services weekly or more are less likely to see conflict/more likely to see compatibility than those who attend worship services less than weekly. All three of these relationships are the opposite of what I would had guessed.

Here is the chart from the publication regarding opinions about conflict between personal religion and science:

A similar pattern exists here for white Evangelicals, the unaffiliated, and regular attenders--except in the opposite direction! I created the following chart, which shows the percentage point difference between the opinions of conflict generally and conflict with one's personal religious beliefs:

White Evangelicals are surprisingly unlikely to see much difference between the religious/scientific conflict generally versus personally. Nearly as unlikely to see much difference are regular attenders. On the other extreme, the unaffiliated are likely to see stark differences.

What to make of all this? Here are my speculative explanations:

Since we know that they typically have conservative theo-political beliefs, it's likely that white Evangelicals and regular attenders hold a belief of "science" that is inconsistent with scientific consensus. Since this is the case, white Evangelicals and regular attenders simply don't observe any conflict socially or individually between "science" and religion.

The unaffiliated, on the other hand, are more likely to hold beliefs about science that are consistent with scientific consensus and to note that some large, vocal groups (e.g. Evangelicals) hold "scientific" views that are at odds with the consensus. Thus, the unaffiliated observe pointed conflict socially, but very little personally, between science and religion.

An alternative interpretation (though I find it highly unlikely) is that white Evangelicals simply find the societal claims of a science/religion divide overblown and that the unaffiliated exaggerate the conflict that others, like Evangelicals, actually experience and perpetuate.

The Unintended Consequences of Evolution Denial, Pt. 2

The classic folly in the Religion vs. Science conflict revolved around the notion of a heliocentric universe. You remember this old tale of Galileo being forced to recant his support for the scientific theory that placed the sun and not the earth at the center of the cosmos. It took them another 367 revolutions of the earth around the sun, but to its credit, the Catholic Church did formally apologize to poor old Galileo. The debate over Evolution is is just as dicey, and I see see two possible reactions to the evidence surrounding the theory:

1. We trust what we pull from the ground and what we analyze in the information stored in DNA.
2. We see all of this data as an elaborate ruse set up by God to test our trust in him despite our God-given capacities for sensing the world around us and synthesizing logical conclusions based on those observations.

Some may argue that there is a third possibility that I fail to note above, that there is an alternative interpretation of the existing data. This is not correct. The only, I repeat, only logical conclusion given the existing data is evolutionary theory more or less as it exists in its current state. Certainly, there are details over which to bicker, but the foundation is inevitable. The Flinstones did not ride dinosaurs to work. Inevitably and eventually, one must decide between science or a woefully deceitful deity.

Contrary to what we are often told or might assume, though, possibility 1 above does not preclude religious faith. It is the standard teaching of most mainline Christian denominations and of the Catholic Church. Science and religion can in fact coexist in harmony. A serious question comes directly from possibility 2 above, however. If that is the reality, that God has intentionally deceived us by planting misleading evidence on the earth and by programming us to come to inevitable conclusions based on that evidence, many are forced to ask whether such a god is worthy of our veneration, and many would answer that such a god is indeed not worthy. (But, since any definition of a beneficent god would require that God do only good, then God would be incapable of possibility 2, but I digress.) And, this is the risk: when religions take hardline stances in the face of overwhelming and contradictory evidence, they endanger not only people's ability to adhere to their particular brand of religion but to religion as a category; they erode the plausibility structure on which religious belief is built. It may seem like throwing the baby out with the bathwater, but this is the wages of such orthodoxy.

The Unintended Consequences of Evolution Denial, Pt. 1

Bare with me for these posts because it's not sociological per se, but it is rooted in my passion for teaching science--sociology being a science and all. It's well-trod ground, but nonetheless, here is my contribution.
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There's been a lot of talk about this video of Bill Nye "slamming" Creationism:



I talk to my classes regularly about this issue and make a point similar to what I think Nye was insinuating. It goes like this. Science--at its core--is empirical; it trusts our senses. When we look at a thermometer, we trust that it is telling us something real about what it is measuring. Religions--at their core--are super-emperical; they look beyond our physical senses. There is no such thing as a "theometer" because we cannot measure the metaphysical. In a perfect world, there should be no conflict between religion and science because the two simply look at different worlds; however, history gives us countless examples of religion inserting itself into the realm of the observable. (For the record, there have been some recent statements by activist atheist scientists [e.g. Richard Dawkins] in which they insert themselves equally inappropriately into the realm of the unobservable.) The fundamentalist assertions of what are mostly Evangelical Christians that deny the theory of evolution ironically place this specific religion (and religion as a category even) on some pretty precarious ground.

I will elaborate in the following post.

(Epi)Phenomenal Surfers

I'm watching Brian Greene's Fabric of the Cosmos on PBS. It's an amazing series. I initially got interested in science--and, yes, sociology is "science"--through physics. I read Einstein's Theory of Relativity when I was in middle school. (In all honesty, it was a statement of identity and status more than an actually attempt at understanding. The maths were utterly incomprehensible to me. I read the words, but more importantly, carried the book cover around.)

So far, I'm most interested by this idea of the "forward" movement of time. It seems to physicists that the tendency toward entropy, that is the ever increasing disorder of everything, dictates the direction of the arrow of time, without which time could theoretically tick in either direction. Knowing this, one physicist said that we are essentially "surfers riding the wave" of an epiphenomenon within a larger movement toward chaos.

As a scholar of religion, this leads me to an even larger conclusion about those who hold an anti-evolutionary perspective. Ironically, physics makes us more sympathetic to these fundamentalists. If we exist as cosmic quirk, residing in an isolated exception within the universe, programmed to understand only that which is in front of our faces, people's reactions against the theory of evolution are utterly understandable. What is exceptional is that some among us have figured out that we are the fluke. The irony is that science leads us to a greater appreciation for our exceptionalism.

The Mutual Exclusivity of Faith and Reason

I had hoped to comment more on this but haven't had time. Regardless check out this post from Rabbi Shais Taub:

To wit, accepting on faith that which can be understood is as unconscionable as using reason to reject something that cannot be understood. The former is laziness, the latter is arrogance. Both are predicated on the misconception rampant among fundamentalist believers and atheists alike that faith and intellect can somehow be used to perform the same function and that the one you choose to favor shows what kind of person you are.... Alas, faith is no more interchangeable with intellect than breathing is a substitute for eating. We need both, but we cannot replace one with the other.

Amen.

No One Can "Believe" Science

There was a cool piece in the WaPo today from Herb Silverman, a professor of mathematics at the College of Charleston. He writes:

Only 38 percent of Americans say they believe in evolution, and far too many politicians are either among the other 62 percent or pander to them....However, science is not and should not become democratic. If 100 million people believe a wrong thing, it is still a wrong thing.

The irony is that those who invoke arguments that would like science to be democratic are arguing for the very social change that they purport to despise, relativism. Science is a systematic search for truth (but not necessarily Truth). If truth can be revised with the shifting direction of public opinion, it has no absolute, universal basis, and that does not bode well for the very folks who are fighting the evidence.

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UPDATE: Here is another, related HuffPost.

But Who Picks Up the Check?

I caught this great quote in the NYT Books of the Times today:

Religion and science don’t have to be hostile to each other, but we can stop setting them up on blind dates.

In my sociology of religion course, I really try to bang my students over the head with this sentiment. Religion and Science do different things. They only conflict when you ask one to do something it was never intended to.