Promoting positive attitudes towards science and religion among sixth-form pupils : dealing with scientism and creationism

A sample of 187 female students, attending a sixth-form study day on religious studies, completed a questionnaire containing four scales concerned with assessing: attitude toward theistic religion, attitude toward science, scientism and creationism. The data demonstrated a negative correlation between attitude toward religion and attitude toward science. However, this negative correlation was transformed into a positive correlation after taking into account individual differences in the students’ views about scientism and creationism. The implications of this finding are discussed in the context of the increasing support within society for the teaching of alternatives to evolution within the science curriculum. The authors argue both that it is important to challenge scientism by developing a better understanding of the role and limits of scientific methods, and that religious belief about creation should be recognized as essentially a claim about the ontological dependence of Nature rather than about the details of its origins and development