Summary: Contemporary public perceptions of science-and-religion are largely dependent on historical myths with global and local origins. While the still prevalent tropes of the conflict thesis were in the past argued from a universalist point of view (both across disciplines and geographies), recent scholarly work in the History of Science, the Sociology of Science and Religious Studies have challenged such universalism.
And yet, much work needs to be done at the local and national levels. The particularities of the history of science and of religion in Spain, and the little study of science-and-religion in this particular country, make it an almost barren field for historical and sociological studies as compared to Britain, the US and Canada, for instance. Specifically, this project wants to explore the historiographical background of the conflict thesis in Spain and the way these historical origins project in contemporary Spanish public opinion.
To achieve this goal, the project will proceed in two steps: (1) Analyzing scientific, popular and, above all technological journals in the period 1874-1931 so as to compare the narratives on science and religion beyond the usual, and largely imported cases such as Evolution, Cosmology or the Galileo affair. We take as a starting hypothesis the assumption that the world of engineers has been largely neglected in the historiography of science-and-religion and that engineering professional associations in Spain were more crucial than pure scientists in the shaping of modernity. The choice of the period 1874-1931 has a particular significance in the history of Spain due to its relative political stability between the two republics. (2) Comparing those narratives with the historical tropes used in the last decade in the major newspapers.
Our hypothesis is that, again, the narratives in Spanish science news (including disputes on about budget cuts during the financial crises) may have often used historical common places shaped one hundred years earlier and which include the conflict thesis, thus fossilizing such simplistic narrative in the public opinion. Our goal is, thus, to explore the extent to which the conflict thesis is still present in disputes about contemporary science and the extent to which such arguments are a continuation or not of the once shaped one hundred years earlier.
