Many people believe that science and religion are two completely opposite phenomenons, but is that really the truth? In fact, science has been discovering some facts about the Universe thousands of years after the Bible first began to write them down in a rudimentary way. Topics like the expansion of the Universe, the creation of our physical reality from a perspective beyond space and time, and many other facts are mentioned in the Holy Book of Christians.
New findings of the assistant professor of psychology Jonathan McPhetres and his team were published in Social Psychological and Personality Science. Their purpose was to dive deeper into the subject ‘Science vs. Religion’ while conducting the majority of research in the US.
Not everyone trusts science
Atheism is reaching staggering heights in recent years, as the number of those who don’t believe in any deity being from 500 to 750 million people worldwide. But whether we like it or not, not everybody trusts science, either. Or at least they don’t trust anything that science throws at them, which is fairly reasonable. Nobody denies the tremendous help of science for our modern society, but we don’t have to pretend that scientists can never possibly say anything wrong.
McPhetres declared for PsyPost the following:
One of my main areas of research is trying to improve trust in science and finding ways to better communicate science. In order to do so, we must begin to understand who is more likely to be skeptical towards science (and why),
Nine initial studies that involved 2,160 Americans found that subjects who are more religious showed negative implicit and explicit attitudes regarding science. These people also showed less interest in reading or learning about science. However, professor McPhetres declares:
It’s important to understand that these results don’t show that religious people hate or dislike science. Instead, they are simply less interested when compared to a person who is less religious
Data from 66,438 subjects coming from 60 different countries were analyzed by the same researchers, and the outcome was that correlations were less obvious regarding the relationship between religious belief and interest in science. Another set of data from 1,048 subjects from five countries was collected (Brazil, the Philippines, South Africa, Sweden, and the Czech Republic), and the outcome was even more surprising: greater religiosity was related to greater interest in science.
The final conclusion is obvious: the findings undermine the idea that science and religion are necessarily in conflict.
