The Coexistence of Scientific and Religious Explanations Across Cultures and Development

Science and religion are often seen as competing frameworks for explaining the human experience. We argue that this psychologically inaccurate view has resulted in undue antagonism. We propose that the same individuals use both scientific and religious explanations to interpret the same events and that there are multiple ways in which both kinds of explanations coexist in individual minds. Our research program will address gaps in our current knowledge regarding how scientific and religious explanations develop, how they are used to reason about diverse phenomena across cultures and domains of fundamental importance to humans (i.e. death, illness, and human origins). We will organize a conference, open to the general public, to bring together experts on the science-religion dialogue that will result in an edited volume. It is our hope that this research will improve how the science-religion dialogue is conducted by demonstrating that religious explanations for phenomena are not primitive or incoherent modes of reasoning, but instead are integrated with scientific understandings of the world in an often coherent and sophisticated manner.