Ways children reason about science and religion in primary school: findings from a small-scale study in Australian primary schools

Tensions between the domains of science and religion have been with us for centuries (e.g. Galileo 1615), with concord and conflict being the focus of numerous journal articles, books and websites (e.g. Davies 1983; Polkinghorne 2007a, b; Prideux and Pepper 2012; Reiss 2008; Straine 2014; Taber et al. 2011). Scholars from the extreme sides of the ‘debate’ critique the nature of their own discipline and how it compares with, relates to or is incompatible with the other. In more recent times, incompatible and in some circumstances immovable positions have been reiterated as promoting a public perception of religion-science duality: ’… there are the fanatical atheists whose intolerance is of the same kind as the intolerance of the religious fanatics and comes from the same source’ (Einstein 1941, cited in Jammer 1999, p. 97). There are many scholars, however, who argue for a way through the duality, proposing another way of thinking about the two domains and how they might be understood to relate to each other (Alexander 2007; Trigg 2007). While it may be rare for teachers to be exposed to the arguments posed by the advocates of the many positions that exist, it is possibly rarer still for them to have an in-depth understanding of how these positions relate to their teaching context or responsibilities towards their students.