A recent five-year long study released by Rice University has found that despite popular public perception, a majority of scientists believe that religion and science are not always in conflict.
The study included in-depth interviews with scientists at universities whose fields range from biology and chemistry to social sciences like political science and economics, reports the Huffington Post.
“When it comes to questions about the meaning of life, ways of understanding reality, origins of Earth and how life developed on it, many have seen religion and science as being at odds and even in irreconcilable conflict,” said Rice sociologist Elaine Ecklund.
Instead the majority of scientists Ecklund and her colleagues interviewed accepted both religion and science as “valid avenues of knowledge.”
In the 275 tenured and tenure-track faculty members from 21 different research universities in the United States who were interviewed, only 15% believed religion and science were always in conflict, while an equal percentage saw the two as never being in conflict. The majority, 70%, said religion and science are only sometimes in conflict.
The scientists interviewed were pulled from a broader survey of 2,198 scientists, with about half of those saying they identified with a particular religion, while the other half did not.
“Much of the public believes that as science becomes more prominent, secularization increases and religion decreases,” Ecklund said. “Findings like these among elite scientists, who many individuals believe are most likely to be secular in their beliefs, definitely call into question ideas about the relationship between secularization and science.”
Ecklund also discovered that the way scientists view the compatibility of religion and science is influenced by how they view religion itself. Those scientists who find no compatibility between the two disciplines are more likely to have a narrow view of religion, identifying it only with the more conservative strains of Christianity.
"For some scientists, maybe a particular strain of evangelicalism is conflict with science, but spirituality and other religions are not," Ecklund stated.
Those scientists who believed religion and science were compatible most often cited the example of Francis Collins, the physician and geneticist who is the director of the National Institutes of Health. Collins openly speaks about his Christian faith and has written a book entitled: “The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief.”
The 5,000 page report is entitled “Scientists Negotiate Boundaries Between Religion and Science,” and it was published in the September issue of the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion.