Past research suggests that religion and science may conflict on which is a better tool for explaining the world. This conflict implies that religiosity might negatively impact both attitudes toward science and science knowledge. However, past research has focused mostly on religious affiliation and has not consistently identified such a relation using a general religiosity measure that assesses religious beliefs and religious practice. Using two large, nationally representative datasets as well as two original datasets, and controlling for relevant demographic variables, four studies (N = 9,205) showed that general measures of religiosity are negatively associated with science knowledge, a relation that was partially mediated by an association between religiosity and negative attitudes toward science. Study 2 also showed that parents’ reports about their religiosity and its role in their children’s upbringing predicted, some 20 years later, their children’s attitudes toward science. The studies are correlational but the longitudinal relations in Study 2 suggests that religiosity might undermine science literacy.

Introduction

With several key scientific topics (e.g., climate change, safety of GMOs) [1] dividing the American public, and recent reports placing the United States at 27th out of 64 countries in science performance [2], public support and trust in science are more important than ever. However, attitudes toward science and science literacy are usually viewed as an educational issue, a perspective that does not consider the role of religion as a potential detractor from the value of science. Although surveys show that the general public, and even scientists, may think that science and religion do not conflict [3, 4], some evidence to the contrary exists, both in research [5] and in reviews of the literature [6, 7]. Given the relative cultural importance of religion in the United States [8], and increasing skepticism towards science [7], this issue merits an empirical investigation. In the present studies, we used two large national datasets and two additional datasets collected by the authors to examine the relations between religiosity and both attitudes towards science and science literacy.

The potential conflicts between science and religion can be viewed as limited or general. The limited version is that the conflict exists only for a few topics where science contradicts religious assertions, such as the origin of the Earth and the origin of humans [5,9]. Additionally, some scientific research—such as stem cell research—may have moral and ethical implications to which religious people object [5, 10, 11]. Outside of these specific epistemological and moral contentions, according to the limited view, we would not expect religious teachings or believers to oppose science.

However, a number of research findings suggest that the conflict between science and religion is more general, at least within the US. For example, greater religiosity is related to less favorable views toward scientific innovations and nanotechnology [11, 12], and religious people are less likely to choose careers in science [13, 14]. Survey data also shows that religious beliefs are negatively correlated with scientific consensus on a number of issues (e.g., vaccinations [15], climate change [16],) even when such issues do not directly challenge religious claims. While some researchers posit that objections towards nanotechnology and vaccinations may be driven by concerns about morality and scientists “playing God” [17, 18], the fact remains that these topics do not conflict with religious teachings per se—that is, we are not aware of religious texts which speak directly about nanotechnology, vaccinations, or climate change. Thus, religious people justify their opposition to some scientific concepts in terms of moral and religious beliefs in the same way that holders of a particular political ideology will oppose an idea in terms of economic or social justification. In contrast, Christian religious texts do discuss the creation of the world (versus evolution) and the sanctity of life (versus stem cell research). Viewed in this light, the conflict appears to address a more general epistemological dispute about whether science or religion is a better tool for understanding and explaining the world [19]. Thus, the general conflict hypothesis implies that religious people have more negative attitudes and possibly less trust towards science as a source of information. In the present studies, we tested whether this general conflict results in more negative attitudes towards science and in lower levels of scientific literacy.

Three previous studies examined the relation between religion and scientific literacy, using data from the General Social Survey (GSS) in 2006 [5, 9] or in 2008 [10]. Two of the studies [5, 10] found no such relationship. The third study [9] found that religious fundamentalists and Catholics (but not mainline Protestants, Jews, and Muslims) possessed less science knowledge than those participants who stated they were not affiliated with any religious group.

Some of the differences among these studies may be due to how science knowledge and religiosity were defined. For example, two of the studies [5, 9] included apparently “contested” items (questions about the Big Bang and continental drift) where a wrong answer may reflect a religious conviction rather than a lack of knowledge. The studies also differed in how religiosity was measured, such that the comparison between religious and non-religious people focused on religious affiliation and fundamentalism but did not involve the same groups.

Religiosity is defined differently by many researchers. However, Allport’s [20] construct of intrinsic religiosity, which refers to belief and identity, has been described as “…the sine qua non theory about what it means to be truly and appropriately religious” ([21], pg. 1). Indeed, widely used measures focus on religious beliefs, practice, and identity (e.g., [22, 23]), as those concepts are applicable to many different religious groups [23, 24]. Yet, the three studies just discussed [5, 9, 10] focused on specific combinations of religious affiliation and fundamentalism when investigating science attitudes and knowledge, which lends to a rather limited interpretation of the relation between religion and science. True, some religious groups do endorse teaching which conflict more directly with science (for example, literalist teachings about the creation of humans and the earth), but that is not the subject matter that we address. Instead, we aimed to investigate whether elements of religiosity which are common to most religions uniquely contribute to science rejection, not whether specific religious groups know more or less about science than others. Further, members of the same religious group can differ in the extent to which they endorse certain teachings, so a focus on affiliation ignores valuable individual differences. Finally, including affiliation and belief in an equation simultaneously creates problems of multicollinearity and makes interpretation of each variable difficult. For example, we assume that most people who identify themselves as Christian will score higher on a belief measure than people who identify themselves as atheists. For a minority, however, this difference will be reversed, raising the question of understanding where they are in terms of religiosity. In addition, any analysis of this minority will be hampered by low statistical power. We, therefore, proceed to examine only aspects of religiosity—religious beliefs and religious practice—which are common to most, if not all, religious groups [21–24].

Finally, whereas past research has found that the relation between religiosity and science depends on how the religiosity variable is measured or categorized [5, 9, 10], in the present research we demonstrate that this relation is robust and generalizable to broad, yet conceptually similar, measures of religiosity. Our present operationalization of religiosity also departs from past research due to differences between disciplines. Previous research on the relation between religiosity and science knowledge has so far come from sociologists; social psychologists have paid little attention to this area of research. Whereas social psychologists are interested in the individual differences in religious beliefs, sociologists may be more interested in how the religious traditions themselves influences attitudes towards science which results in more of a focus on religious affiliation. In our investigation, we sought to take a different approach simply to provide a different perspective on the relation between religion and science.

It’s also important to note that the studies reviewed above consider the relation between religion and science from a US perspective. While the above patterns may be stronger in the US—or may even only be true for the US—it is currently unknown whether these relations are true for other countries around the world. In evaluating the past and current research, these limitations should be kept in mind.