Science Teachers’ Views of Science and Religion vs. the Islamic Perspective: Conflicting or Compatible?

publication-status: Publishedtypes: ArticleThis paper reports a study that explores Egyptian science teachers' views on religion and science within the context of Islam. It also highlights an ontological and epistemological consideration of these views, particularly the ways through which Egyptian Muslim teachers understand such a relationship with reference to the Qur'anic/Islamic attitude toward science and knowledge. The study built upon Barbour's categorization scheme to guide the data collection and analysis and to guide the interpretation of the teachers' responses in the interviews. Informed by a multigrounded theory of the teachers' views of science and religion, and using Roth and Alexander's analytical framework to interpret how teachers accommodate the relationship between science and religion within their belief system, the findings suggest that participants' views of the relationship between science and a specific religion (Islam) confirmed the centrality of teachers' personal religious beliefs to their own thoughts and views concerning issues of both science and Islam. This centralization, in some cases, appeared to lead teachers to hold a conflicting relationship, hence to a creation of a false contradiction between science and Islam. Therefore, it could be concluded that teachers' personal Islamic-religious beliefs inform their beliefs about the nature of science and its purpose

Continuous flow stable isotope methods for study of delta C-13 fractionation during halomethane production and degradation

Gas chromatography/mass spectrometry/isotope ratio mass spectrometry (GC/MS/IRMS) methods for delta C-13 measurement of the halomethanes CH3Cl,CH3Br, CH3I and methanethiol (CH3SH) during studies of their biological production, biological degradation, and abiotic reactions are presented. Optimisation of gas chromatographic parameters allowed the identification and quantification of CO2, O-2, CH3Cl, CH3Br, CH3I and CH3SH from a single sample, and also the concurrent measurement of delta C-13 for each of the halomethanes and methanethiol. Precision of delta C-13 measurements for halomethane standards decreased (+/-0.3, +/-0.5 and +/-1.3 parts per thousand) with increasing mass (CH3Cl, CH3Br, CH3I, respectively). Given that carbon isotope effects during biological production, biological degradation and some chemical (abiotic) reactions can be as much as 100 parts per thousand, stable isotope analysis offers a precise method to study the global sources and sinks of these halogenated compounds that are of considerable importance to our understanding of stratospheric ozone destruction. Copyright (C) 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd