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 numerousjournal articles, books and websites (e.g. Davies 1983; Polkinghorne 2007a, b;Prideux and Pepper 2012; Reiss 2008; Straine 2014; Taber et al. 2011). Scholarsfrom the extreme sides of the ‘debate’ critique the nature of their own discipline andhow it compares with, relates to or is incompatible with the other. In more recenttimes, incompatible and in some circumstances immovable positions have been reiterated as promoting a public perception of religion-science duality: ’… there are thefanatical atheists whose intolerance is of the same kind as the intolerance of thereligious fanatics and comes from the same source’ (Einstein 1941, cited in Jammer1999, p. 97). There are many scholars, however, who argue for a way through theduality, proposing another way of thinking about the two domains and how theymight be understood to relate to each other (Alexander 2007; Trigg 2007). While itmay be rare for teachers to be exposed to the arguments posed by the advocates ofthe many positions that exist, it is possibly rarer still for them to have an in-depthunderstanding of how these positions relate to their teaching context or responsibilities towards their students