Does believing in God make it harder to believe in science, or vice versa? There are lots of people who manage to do both, despite the assumptions our culture makes about the incompatibility of the two. But it's undeniable that the realms of faith and science could find better ways to communicate.

Elaine Howard Ecklund is Herbert A. Autrey Chair in Social Sciences, professor of sociology and director of the religion and public life program at Rice University. A few years ago, she wrote a book about what scientists really think about religion and religious people, which dispelled some persistent myths about the universal disdain scientists are expected to feel for religious belief.

Then she turned her focus around and interviewed hundreds of Muslims, Jews, Catholics, mainline Protestants and evangelicals to learn how religious people view scientists and their research. She again discovered more nuance and variation than many people acknowledge.

Did you always plan to follow your study of how scientists feel about religion with a study of how religious people feel about science, or did that first book reveal to you that there were lots of unanswered questions on the other side?

You are exactly right. The first book did reveal there were some unanswered questions. In my first survey of U.S. scientists, I found that there were more religious scientists than we might think and that scientists tend to be a bit more friendly towards religion than we might think. But I also found that some scientists have stereotypes of religious people, and I wanted to put on my hat as a sociologist of religion and try to go back out and do some survey work. And with co-author Christopher Scheitle we did a survey of over 10,000 people in the U.S. as well as in-depth interviews with hundreds about their views about these issues to really try to bring some light to what religious people think about science and scientists.

Did you allow people to self-identify as religious, or was there some bar they needed to meet in order to be religious enough for the studies that you did?

We did allow them to self-identify. Sociologists think about religion in terms of how we identify. So do I think of myself as a religious person? The kinds of practices that people engage in, like things like church attendance and the kinds of beliefs that people have. So we both measured across those three kinds of factors, and then in our in-depth conversations, we allowed people to self-identify about their strength of belief and their practices and the like.

Dinant, Belgium - Oct. 16, 2011: Creation of Adam and Eve, stained glass window in the church of Dinant, Belgium. (Jorisvo / Getty Images)

One of the things that you discover just in doing background research is that, contrary to popular perception, Americans are deeply interested in science. What is the evidence for that?

On our survey we found that Americans generally think that science is a good thing. You almost can't find people who aren't interested in new scientific studies. Now they're interested in other things, more like commercial kinds of things. But, in general, Americans are very science-friendly people.

I think just on the face of it, we know this. You know, for toothpaste commercials, where we have studies that show that people like certain kinds of toothpaste better than others, and obviously advertisers use that kind of information because they know that in the broader public, science sells. We did find that across religious groups there was occasionally some mistrust of scientists.

And the perception is that often when people like science but dislike scientists, they assume that scientists will be atheists and disrespectful of religious beliefs.

Yeah, and this depends on the religious group you're talking about, where evangelical Christians distrust scientists the most. But it's not that the assumption that scientists will be atheists, but maybe that scientists will have some sort of agenda or bias in their work that, interestingly, some religious groups criticize scientists on their own grounds. They think that they aren't objective enough.

There are actually a small number of scientific areas that are controversial to most religious people. For example, most religious people would be fine with a study about how long it takes a car to stop at a certain velocity. It's not like all science is bothersome to people.

That's exactly right. I would say that was something that surprised me. So I thought of religion as being a very diverse set of practices and beliefs and traditions, but the general public thinks of science as kind of one thing. And that's not actually the case.

No one is going and picketing against refrigeration or testing the velocity of cars. But we found that when it comes to scientific issues that seem to impinge on who God is and his or her intervention in the world, as well as those that impinge on humanity and the uniqueness of humans, those particular scientific issues cause persons of faith to give pause.

We're thinking of things like climate change -- is climate change really happening? That seems to have something to do with who God is in the world for some religious people. Couldn't God control the climate, that sort of thing. What about human reproductive genetic technologies? Some religious people are not sure if scientists should be mucking around with the human genome creating what they call designer babies, because that seems to impinge on what we think about humanity as well as what we think is God's intervention with humanity.

It's interesting, because some of those technologies -- particularly those that involve selecting particular embryos or giving them certain genetic characteristics -- both people who think this is a great idea and people who think that it's a really dangerous idea say it's like playing God.

That's right. ... It's not that all religious people want all technological exploration and advancement to stop. It's that they want scientists to give pause and maybe to engage in other kinds of knowledge and do some reflection on the implications of technology and what kinds of moral implications certain technology might have.

Like any other group of professionals, scientists don't always get this right. But it's my understanding that most scientists think a lot about ethics. Do religious people perceive that most scientists are not particularly ethical?

We don't really have a lot of evidence that there's a widespread lack of ethics amongst scientists. But it's the perception, and these perceptions can be very important in how communities view each other. Because new atheist writers, some of whom are scientists, have been so active, there is this perception amongst religious groups that scientists are all atheists, and not just atheists but anti-religious people. And that's not really accurate either. So we need to be careful when we let the loudest voices seem the most numerous.

This Q&A was conducted by Krys Boyd and condensed from a recent episode of Think. You can listen to the full episode at kera.org/think. Email: think@kera.org.

Elaine Howard Ecklund is a professor of sociology and director of the religion and public life program at Rice University. Her new book, written with co-author Christopher P. Scheitle, is called "Religion vs. Science: What Religious People Really Think." Email: ehe@rice.edu

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