International Perspectives on Science, Culture, and Belief

Public understanding of the relationship between science and religion is dominated by US and UK perspectives and research that has been carried out in Western Protestant Anglophone contexts. This has enabled a culturally specific narrative of conflict to dominate public discussions of evolution, science, and religion, obscuring the varied cultural contexts and complexities within which engagement with science takes place and the growing influence of non-religious identities and diverse forms of spirituality.

Representing one of the most wide-ranging and original contributions to the emerging body of research on the relationship between religion, non-religion, and science in society, this innovative and timely collection revisits, challenges, and rethinks longstanding assumptions by decentring positions and perspectives that have until recently dominated discussions of science and belief. Drawing on almost a decade of multidisciplinary research, International Perspectives on Science, Culture, and Belief: From Complexity to Globality brings together incisive global perspectives exploring the social and cultural drivers of the relationships between evolutionary science and belief. Highlighting the natures and varieties of the interrelation between science and belief globally, this volume addresses the relationships between science, culture, and belief from multiple disciplines, methodologies, and geographical contexts including South Asia, Latin America, Africa, and Australia as well as Europe and North America.

This work has particular relevance in the increasingly polarised post-pandemic world, shining a light for the first time on the multifaceted interplay between social identities and cultural narratives in debates that are often about far more than the science.

The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Fern Elsdon-Baker is Professor of Science, Knowledge and Belief in Society at the University of Birmingham. She was PI of ‘Science and Religion: Exploring the Spectrum’ projects between 2014 and 2023 and previously Head of ‘Darwin Now’, the British Council’s international celebration of the life and work of Charles Darwin.

Stephen H. Jones is Senior Lecturer in Criminology and Sociology at Keele University. He was Co-PI of ‘Science and Religion: Exploring the Spectrum: A Global Perspective’ and is Co-PI and Co-Director of the International Research Network for the Study of Science and Belief in Society. His publications include Science, Belief and Society (eds. with Tom Kaden and Rebecca Catto, 2019).

James Riley is a mixed-methods researcher with interests in science communication, science and society, and science and belief. Between 2019 and 2023, he worked on the quantitative strand of the 'Science and Religion: Exploring the Spectrum of Global Perspectives' project, hosted at the University of Birmingham with partner institutions internationally.