Promoting positive attitudes towards scienceandreligion among sixth‐form pupils: dealing with scientism and creationism

Abstract

Publisher: This is an electronic version of an article published in VAstley, J. and Francis, L. J. (2010). Promoting positive attitudes towards science and religion among sixth-form pupils: dealing with scientism and creationism. AbstractA sample of 187 female students, attending a sixth-form study day on religious studies, completed a questionnaire containing four scales concerned with assessing:attitude toward theistic religion, attitude toward science, scientism and creationism.The data demonstrated a negative correlation between attitude toward religion and attitude toward science. However, this negative correlation was transformed into a positive correlation after taking into account individual differences in the students' views about scientism and creationism. The implications of this finding are discussed in the context of the increasing support within society for the teaching of alternatives to evolution within the science curriculum. The authors argue both that it is important to challenge scientism by developing a better understanding of the role and limits of scientific methods, and that religious belief about creation should be recognized as essentially a claim about the ontological dependence of Nature rather than about the details of its origins and development.

Pre-service biology teachers’ acceptance of evolutionary theory and their preference for its teaching

“…The main difference is that creation is irrelevant for the acceptance of evolutionary theory, whereas creationism emphasizes the "idea of creation by a supernatural force" (Scott 2009). In contrast, scientism takes the view that absolute truth may be obtained by science, and only by science (Astley and Francis 2010), which is inconsistent with the nature of science (Lederman and Abd-El-Khalick 1998). While effects of both attitudes towards science and attitudes towards religion on the acceptance of evolution have been documented repeatedly, neither the effects of creationist nor scientistic beliefs have been discussed explicitly.…”

“…Attitude towards religion and science, scientism, and creationism Pre-service teachers' attitude towards religion (7 items), their attitude towards science (6 items), scientism (7 items), and creationism (6 items) were assessed by measures previously applied by Astley and Francis (2010). We employed the same rating scale used in the ACCEPTANCE and INTENTION measures.…”

“…Further affective constructs which might play a role in this context are creationist and scientistic attitudes or beliefs (abbreviated creationism and scientism). Following the definitions by Astley and Francis (2010), creationism reflects the "rejection of evolution and common descent as an account of the development of living things, in favour of a belief in God's special and independent creation of every form of life" (p. 5). Although the acceptance of evolutionary theory and creationism represent similar concepts which might at first sight appear to be two sides of the same coin, both constructs (creationism and acceptance) are theoretically different.…”

“…In order to analyze discriminant validity, a multidimensional Rasch analysis was applied to examine the empirical separability (i.e., empirical structure) of the measures which form the dependent variables of our study (ACCEPTANCE and INTENTION measure) as well as the measures which the predictors of the affective domain (Astley and Francis 2010). Concerning our dependent variables, we expected the acceptance of evolutionary theory and the intention to teach both evolutionary theory and unscientific alternatives to be two distinct attributes (or 'traits').…”

Collaboration between Science and Religious Education teachers in Scottish Secondary schools

“…The 'conflict' position has been criticized, for example, for distorting the complexity of both science and religion and for failing to recognize that many individuals engage with both science and religion (Cantor, 2010;Øyen, Vaage and Lund-Olsen, 2012). Astley and Francis (2010) use 'conflict' in their discussion on the contemporary relationship between science and religion, but they helpfully contextualize it within a tripartite framework. Thus, they identify a conflict model, a concordat model and a consonance model.…”