International Perspectives on Science, Culture, and Belief: From Complexity to Globality

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.