Muslim Perceptions of Biological Evolution: A Critical Review of Quantitative and Qualitative Research

The topic of Muslims’ attitudes towards the theory of biological evolution has received increasing attention at the margins of the fields of public understanding of society, science communication or education and science in society. The methodology and methods employed in this work are primarily informed by research on attitudes towards evolution in the ‘West’, particularly in the US where the issue is highly politicized. Small, interview based qualitative and larger, survey based quantitative studies have explored degrees of acceptance or rejection of non-human and human evolution in a number of Muslim majority and Muslim minority contexts. The underlying rationale for these studies is often underpinned by a ‘deficit model’ in which Islam, or being Muslim, is usually posited as a particular obstacle to public understanding and acceptance of theory of evolution. This chapter summarizes these studies, analyzes the particularities of how deficit model approaches might be implicitly informing their findings, and reflects on the lack of reflexivity in much public understanding of science research on Muslim contexts.

The Sociological Study of Science and Religion in Context

In this chapter,Elsdon-Baker and Mason-Wilkes review recent debates on science and belief, problematising the philosophicaltenor of current academic and popular discourse and highlighting the limitations of current research. The chapter begins by highlighting the fundamental difficulty with multi- or cross- disciplinary research into science, belief and society – which in part relates to the lack of social science researchers who can adequately provide open minded insight into both ‘science’ and ‘religion’. The authors contend that the nuance and complexity of how these two knowledge systems interact in diverse social contexts can be lost due to implicit disciplinary biases. Too often in academic discourse, they argue, scholars lose sight of the multi-layered and relational ways in which members of a variety of ‘publics’ relate to ‘science’. Rather than assuming that ‘publics’ negative responses to scientific research simply transect various epistemological, ontological, ethical narratives, the authors maintain that we need to situate people’s positions within a complex system of geopolitical, cultural and social contexts that lead to individuals’ positions on scientific issues acting as an identity marker across a spectrum of religious, spiritual, non-religious and atheistic publics.

Atheism and the Social Sciences

In the past two decades, the anti-religious movement known as New Atheism has been working to define a scientific basis for opposing religion and its influence in public affairs. New Atheist thought on religion is rooted in scientism and a narrative of progress and Enlightenment that refers to ideas derived from evolutionary biology for its authority. A notable feature of this approach is the New Atheism’s critique of the social sciences, which it dismisses as relativistic and seeks to replace with evolutionary psychology and neuroscience. This chapter examines the New Atheism’s position in terms of an historical division within atheist thought between approaches to religion that are grounded in the natural sciences and the social sciences, and argues that contemporary atheism should be understood primarily as a political project to advance the authority of an ideological vision of ‘true’ science and its representative experts. While typically understood as a response to religious fundamentalism, the New Atheism is as much a reaction to a perceived weakening of universalistic standards of knowledge and morality in an increasingly pluralistic western cultural milieu. Through a reading of influential New Atheist texts in relation to the historical development of modern atheism, the chapter examines the relative decline in importance of the social sciences in popular atheist discourse. This decline is a result of the evolving politics of contemporary atheism, which, in some major forms, has drifted away from its roots in progressive social justice movements and ideologies toward a more libertarian position.

Rational Believers: Religion, Tradition and Spirituality among Indian Scientists

Thischapter attempts to discuss, through detailed ethnographic description, the manner in which scientists in a leading Indian scientific research institute defined and practiced religion and atheism(s). Instead of posing science and religion as dichotomous categories, the chapter demonstrates their easy coexistence within the everyday lives and practices of Indian scientists. The hyper-rationalism associated with modernity and Western science did not over determine their everyday life and practices. The ‘religious’ scientists did not perceive their religiosity in opposition to science, nor did they accept the conflictual view of science and religion. For them, science and religion are two different ‘modes of existence’, and they perceived the science-religion conflict as an artificial one. Likewise, the ‘atheistic’ scientists did not find any contradiction in following a ‘religious’ lifestyle and simultaneously identifying themselves as atheists or non-believers. The chapter argues that the acceptance of a Western canonical understanding of atheism or belief imposes a closure on the multiple cultural meanings assumed by these categories. Any attempt to universalize or homogenize the experiences of belief and unbelief against the scale of Western modernity runs the risk of neglecting the enmeshing of these categories within the complex life worlds of Indian scientists. The chapter questions the tacit acceptance of the distinctions between science and religion and seeks to evolve new vocabularies to talk about these categories.

Feeling Rational: Affinity and Affinity Narratives in British Science–Non-religion Relations

Despite widespread, wide-ranging and often straightforward, easily graspable criticisms of its core premises, the idea that religion and science are opposed to one another has proved remarkably resilient. Given how easy the notion is to rebut, it is not therefore the theoretical question (How are religion and science opposed to one another, if at all?) but the empirical one (What is the basis of this problematic binary and its hold over popular and scholarly imaginations?) that is arguably the most compelling.The goal of this chapter is to consider this question from the perspective of non-religion and secularity studies (Bullivant and Lee 2012), focusing in particular on the relationship between science and non-religiosity. It builds on ideas arising from critical secular studies and critical religion studies, both of which challenge the idea that science mainly impacts on religion epistemically, and instead draw attention to the ideological and mythological roles that science plays in the subjectivities, identities and cultures of non-religious people.The chapter uses the UK as a case study for understanding the role of science within non-religious cultural formations found more widely, especially across Europe and other Western regions.The aim of this chapter is to contribute to – and further encourage – the more localised and detailed empirical explorations of perceived non-religion/science affinity that are just beginning to emerge.

Science and the Unearned Virtues of the ‘Really Religious People’: Exploring the Association between Perceived Religiosity and Science Rejection among Students in the Midwestern United States

Formal school education in the US is a prime site where epistemological legitimacy is forged between science and faith. The intersection of science and faith in American school classes is guarded by both students and teachers with variable ideological commitments, and equally variable visions of what an appropriate boundary politics should be. Long examines the discourse of students who credit evolution or climate change rejection to ‘the really religious people’, as his informants describe it. Students who profess an ecumenical – or what Wuthnow (2005) would describe as a ‘both–and’ approach to science/faith boundaries – see rejection of these scientific orthodoxies by their peers as both the product of extreme religious views, but also, curiously, use language which ascribes such views with an amplified form of virtuous practice. At the same time, these same religiously temperate students do not describe their own form of practice as being a potential site of moral excellence in service of science. In this chapter, Long asks why this is. How did this deference to extremism emerge as a discourse? What social work does this discourse do? Through the lens of MacIntyre’s (1981) After Virtue, he analyses this power differential for both its likely discursive function and offers ways to make this insight pedagogically useful to scholars of science and religion.

Researching Clergy Attitudes towards Science: A Reflective Account of Key Methodological Challenges

“If I had realised you were interviewing me about science, I probably wouldn’t have agreed to do it” – this quote from an interviewee raises one of the key methodological issues facing researchers in the field of religion and science. The perception that one ought to be an ‘expert’ in science before one can be interviewed on the topic makes the recruitment of participants in qualitative and quantitative research particularly problematic. However, it does tell us something important about the way people understand ‘science’ and the increasing pressure on church leaders to be held accountable for anything they say in the public domain. In this chapter, Raid reflect on her experiences as a sociologist carrying out research on clergy attitudes towards science using both quantitative and qualitative research methods. She discusses the implications of having self-selecting interviewees as well as the challenges in creating a survey that accurately reflects the respondents’ views. Moreover, she outlines some of the key findings from the research and how some of these are intertwined with the aforementioned methodological issues.

Language, Labels and Lived Identity in Debates about Science, Religion and Belief

In public discussion and polling on the subject of science and belief people’s views are often subsumed under identity labels such as ‘Creationism’, ‘Darwinism’, ‘New Atheism’, ‘Intelligent Design’ and ‘Theistic Evolutionism’. Often, these labels are held to accurately represent people’s views both by public figures and by social scientific researchers. In this chapter, Kaden, Jones and Catto make the case for a reassessment of the role of labels and the knowledge connected to them in popular and social scientific treatment of the relationship between science and belief. They argue that there are considerable problems in identifying people’s views using the majority of commonly used analytic labels. Drawing on 123 semi-structured interviews with scientists and members of the public in the UK and Canada from a range of religious and non-religious positions, the authors then show that such categories of belief are creatively interpreted. The authors highlight the limited salience of popular concepts in science and religion debates, showing that such terms are frequently unfamiliar to British and Canadian publics. Based on their analysis, they argue that naive application of labels contributes to misperceptions and prejudices, especially relating to religious people’s beliefs about human origins. Finally, they conclude that to limit such misperceptions attention needs to be paid by scholars to whether, how and why individuals relate their fundamental beliefs to aspects of science.

Survey-based Research on Science and Religion: A Review and Critique

This chapter evaluates survey measures, primarily from the USA, on science, religion and beliefs about human origins. The bulk of the chapter offers a compilation of measures used in high quality, representative surveys. This scope is limited to the two most central types of items: those measuring beliefs about the relationship between science and religion and those measuring beliefs about evolution and human origins. Measures are analysed for trends over time and disaggregated by key measures of religious identity, practice, and belief. The chapter concludes with several critiques and considerations for improving survey-based analysis of science and belief. These critiques include a call for measures to be more carefully calibrated to how the public reflects on these issues. They also encourage the development of new measures on morality, progress, teleology (for both religion and science). Likewise, they argue that measures of social context (friends, family, congregations), and group identity and dynamics are often missed by conventional measures. Finally, the conclusion calls for careful attention to domains of conflict outside of human origins along with the development of techniques to avoid unintentionally priming conflict between religion and science.

Conclusion: Future Directions in the Sociological Study of Science and Belief

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