Secularity and Science

This book reports on the largest intercultural survey of the attitudes of physicists and biologists to science and religion with 20,000 participants and 600 interviews across eight countries: the US, the UK, France, Italy, Turkey, India, Hong Kong and Taiwan. As readers might expect, there are significant and revealing differences across these cultures, which gives a much more nuanced view of the field as a whole. Some readers may recall our own 2016 survey of spiritual practices and beliefs among European scientists, engineers and medical professionals covering the UK, France and Germany. Looking at the survey instrument, some of the questions around science, religion and spirituality are very similar, but there are no questions about spiritual experiences, and only meditation and prayer are covered in terms of spiritual practices; and while there is a frequency analysis for prayer, there is none for meditation. The most interesting comparisons concern the relationship between science and religion where the current survey also reports a high prevalence of the option that they are independent areas of enquiry. Our results for the UK were 44%, compared with 46.8% for this study, and for France 52% as compared with 57%. However, the questions were slightly differently set up in that the Rice University questionnaire has three variants of conflict, one of which is that the respondent considers themselves to be on the side of science; this generally corresponds to our category of mutually exclusive. We also found that fewer people felt that spirituality was mutually exclusive with science than religion.

The overall goal of the survey was 'to understand how science is related to ideas of secularisation, or the decline of religion's vitality and influence, among scientists and societies' in terms of belief and identity, religion in the workplace and religion in lifestyles and private lives. The four overall conclusions were that: 'around the world, there are more religious scientists than we might think; scientists – even some atheist scientists – see spirituality in science; the conflict perspective on science and religion is an invention of the West; and religion is not kept out of the scientific workplace.' All this involves epistemologies, cultural traditions, history and politics, in other words social realms, hence the social science approach.

For me, the most fascinating aspect of the study was the profound influence of social contexts - hardly surprising, but nevertheless essential in terms of understanding differences. In the US, the principal problem is that US scientists see the US religious public as antiscience evangelical biblical literalists, hence the prevalence of the conflict view on science and religion, also reflected in the debate about evolution. Part of the context in the UK is the high profile of new atheism and the challenge of Islam – and it is also interesting to note that nearly half of scientists in the UK originate from other nations. With its tradition of secularism, France emerges as the most atheistic country - we also found that France had the highest proportion of atheists at 29%. A further similarity across the two surveys is that men were more likely to be atheistic and non-religious than women; this trend also applied in our survey to younger respondents, but the current survey does not measure this. One respondent in France was somewhat astonished at the notion of a religious scientist.

Interestingly, the situation is very different in Italy, also a Catholic country where many more scientists are willing to align themselves with Catholicism. The figure here is 58%, as compared with 23% in France, while atheism combined with agnosticism runs at 43% in Italy, and 76% in France. Interestingly, the figures for independence between science and religion are almost identical at 57.1% and 57.8%. For many scientists, religion is a private affair, as Whitehead suggested in the 1920s. In some cases, this is taken further where scientists compartmentalise their beliefs. As a Muslim country, Turkey presents a very different picture with 85% of scientists identifying themselves as Islamic and 61% correspondingly believing in God; this is also reflected in frequency of prayer and attendance at religious services. Correspondingly, the figures for the independence thesis of science and religion are lower at 34%, while collaboration is higher at 32% - the figure in Italy is 15% and France only 7%. The situation is changing, though, with the politicisation of Islam as a threat to the future of science.

In India, religion and spirituality are part of an ethos of accommodation and tolerance. The survey found that science and religion are intertwined and hard to disentangle in spite of the secularisation of the state following independence. Many more scientists in India believe in a higher (immanent) power rather than a personal God, and the figures for atheism and agnosticism combine at only 22%. There is a high level of social participation in rituals at festivals as an aspect of family life. It was here that a Hindu professor of physics stated that the conflict view is born out of a wrong definition of religion: 'you have called religion as belief, and belief is anathema to science. Therefore, there is a contradiction between the two. But when you look upon it as a quest for truth, then they become two complementary quests for truth.' (p. 157) In Hong Kong and Taiwan we find a science-friendly Christianity and religion with no religious affiliation 25% higher in Hong Kong; they also exhibit lowest figures for the conflict thesis while the independence view is much higher in Taiwan than Hong Kong.

The final chapter provides a country summary and some more general conclusions reflected from the introduction. Countries differ with respect to religious pluralism and homogeneity. It would have been interesting to gain more insight into the relative perceptions of religion and spirituality, and the survey does report that many scientists identify as spiritual but not religious 'in order to construct meaning in ways they perceive as consistent with scientific practice' and with respect to larger issues of purpose and meaning. Greater influence of women is likely to modify the landscape, and one should note that the historical structures of science are largely masculine. As a whole, the survey gives a rich picture of the field in a variety of cultural contexts, and is well worth close study.