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Revelatory Evolution and Cosmological Creation Tales: when science is presented like a religion

By Will Mason-Wilkes When you sit down to watch a science documentary you’re probably expecting to learn something about science. You might even be hoping to pick up a few facts to impress your colleagues at the office or your friends at the pub. However, along with these nuggets of knowledge, a science programme will also present an image of science. This image is a product of the way science is talked about in the show and suggests something more fundamental about how scientific knowledge is produced and the status or quality of this knowledge. My research has focused on these images or representations of science in non-fiction programmes, and I argue that in some programmes science is presented in a way which makes it look like a religion.

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Perpetuating the Myths

By Thony Christie   ***This post originally appeared on The Renaissance Mathematicus on May 17th, 2017 – for the original click here*** Since the re-emergence of science in Europe in the High Middle Ages down to the present the relationship between science and religion has been a very complex and multifaceted one that cannot be reduced to a simple formula or a handful of clichés. Many of the practitioners, who produced that science, were themselves active servants of their respective churches and many of their colleagues, whilst not clerics, were devoted believers and deeply religious. On the other hand there were those within the various church communities, who were deeply suspicious of or even openly hostile to the newly won scientific knowledge that they saw as a threat to their beliefs. Over the centuries positions changed constantly and oft radically and any historian, who wishes to investigate and understand that relationship

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Science and religion conflict for non-religious Britons and Canadians

By Rebecca Catto ***This original version of this post was published on the Nonreligion and Secularity Research Network website on 6th April 2017*** The “conflict thesis” is the label historians of science give to the purported essential and enduring incompatibility or clash between science and religion. However, today this thesis is considered historically inaccurate (Harrison, 2015, Lightman, 2015). So, why then does it persist? This gap between narratives, perceptions, and knowledge was part of the motivation for the current Science and Religion: Exploring the Spectrum project. Given that the US is already the most researched country and a distinctively polarized one in terms of science and religion debates (Baker, 2012, Ecklund and Park, 2009, Evans and Evans, 2008, Evans, 2016, Guhin, 2016, Hill, 2014, Long, 2011, Noy and O’Brien, 2016), we chose to focus upon two cognate and yet contrasting national contexts: Canada and the UK. [1]

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Australian neo-Pentecostal perspectives on anthropogenic climate change

By Mairead Shanahan As the seriousness of the human impact on a changing global climate becomes evident, many religious movements are developing theological responses to such ecological issues. As one of the fastest growing Christian denominations on the globe, Pentecostal and Charismatic churches are now formulating theological positions on anthropogenic climate change. Australian neo-Pentecostal churches such as Hillsong, C3 Church, Planetshakers and Influencers Church, are part of this global Pentecostal Charismatic movement. These Christian churches emphasise receipt of spiritual gifts as evidence of salvation; blessings can take the form of glossolalia (speaking in tongues), healing and prophesy interpretation.

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Fake news, media framing, and the case of Pope Francis’ ‘shocking’ comments on evolution

By James Riley If you can believe what you read, “FAKE NEWS” is everywhere these days. Shot onto the media scene like a lexical gag, the phrase was fired from the mouth of President Donald J. Trump as he confronted CNN reporter Jim Acosta during the then president-elect’s first press conference. Although the words are much older, Trump has certainly made the capitalisation his own. “FAKE NEWS!” The phrase itself comes stinking of Orwell’s ink, and when levelled it splits the media between those who goodthink and crimethink—between those who carry the party line, and those who don’t. However, this post isn’t concerned with presidential duckspeak, but rather the shape of the messages themselves—fake or not—which we receive via the media.

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Podcast: Religion, Science and Evolutionary Theory

***This podcast first appeared on The Religious Studies Project on 30 January 2017*** Science and evolution in Muslim societies is a complicated topic. Among members of the public, what does evolution mean? Is there one ‘Muslim view’ on evolution, or are there a great variety of views on evolution in Muslim majority contexts? In this podcast for The Religious Studies Project INSBS’s Dr Stephen H Jones interviews Dr Salman Hameed about recent research on Muslim perceptions of science and evolution.

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Spiritualism, religion and mathematics in the Victorian period

By Sylvia Nickerson In 1884 the English schoolteacher Edwin Abbott published Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions. This book, a social satire, also explores the mathematical concept of dimensionality. Abbott’s characters imagine what it might be like for creatures of one dimension to communicate with creatures of higher or lower dimensions. A major theme is how differently dimensional creatures could perceive and believe in creatures of alternately dimensional worlds. Abbott’s book can be read as a commentary on science and faith in the Victorian period, as his characters are conflicted between their desire to believe and their want of rigorous intellectual explanation, and material proof for their belief. Flatland describes a territory familiar to nineteenth-century British society, in which the project of reconciling their spirituality with the assimilation of contemporary scientific (and mathematical) theory into one holistic worldview was an ongoing and common concern. Late nineteenth-century British culture was somewhat

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‘How much faith does it take?’ Arguing for Creationism on Facebook

By Stephen Pihlaja   For the last 10 years, I have been studying interactions between Christians and atheists on YouTube and social media, focusing particularly on how they structure arguments and categories to fit very specific social contexts. One recurring issue in my work, and one that seems particularly prescient as we collectively practice saying the words ‘President Tump’, is how arguments about theology and science are often used to reinforce beliefs which a user’s audience might already hold. They need not be logical or fact-based, but they must appear to be delivered by an ally and broadly comport with a viewer’s own belief system. One social media user, Joshua Feuerstein, provides a particularly good case study of how this operates. He has over 2 million likes on Facebook and holds a set of intersectional beliefs that are not uncommon—the redemptive power of Jesus Christ, the right to bear arms,

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