Professor Elaine Howard Ecklund, the Herbert S. Autrey Chair in Social Sciences and Professor of Sociology at Rice University, delivers the Gifford Lecture entitled "Science and Religion in Global Public Life".
Theologians have produced an impressive body of scholarship about scientific ways of knowing and particular religious traditions. Yet, for a fuller understanding of the relationship between religion and science, we need to consider how a range of contemporary people in different societies view the interface of science and religion. In this lecture, Elaine Howard Ecklund offers a social scientific approach to science and religion in global public life. She shares insights from twelve years of empirical research, including surveys of 18,000 scientists and members of different general populations, as well as 900 interviews, gleaned from four national and international studies. She maintains that ideas about religion and science as non-overlapping are inadequate, that even atheist scientists have a spiritual impulse, and that the independence and conflict models are primarily western models.
