Exposing the oft overlooked historical connections between the natural and the supernatural

In this episode, Peter Harrison, Professor Emeritus of History and Philosophy at the University of Queensland, talks about his latest book, Some New World: myths of supernatural belief in a secular age, which explores the relationship between the natural and the supernatural across time, from Aristotle to the end of the 20th century.

Rachael Shillitoe is a sociologist and a senior social scientist in the British civil service. She was previously a Leverhulme Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham where she studied what primary school age children think about religion. Dr Elizabeth Barnes is an Assistant Professor of Biology Education at Middle Tennessee State University, who explores how to teach culturally controversial topics.

Dr Anna Halafoff, an Associate Professor of Sociology and coordinator of the Spirituality and Wellbeing (SWell) Research Network, SWELL, based at Deakin University in Melbourne, and Dr Tom Aechtner, Associate Professor at the University of Queensland where he researches Australian-specific sources of vaccine hesitancies around COVID-19 and other diseases and their relationship with religious beliefs, join Deborah Cohen to discuss their research.

Dr Amy Adamczyk, Professor of Sociology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, part of City University of New York, and Dr Reynaldo Rivera and Dr Maria Sol Barbera, from the School of Communications at the Universidad Australin Buenos Aries in Argentina, discuss their research on how different contexts and personal religious beliefs shape people’s health-related attitudes and behaviors, in particular medical interventions such as abortion and assisted conception, at the beginning of life. Amy Adamczyk’s book Fetal Positions, is published by OxfordUniversity Press.

In the third episode of our new series, Dr Rebecca Catto, Associate Professor of Sociology at Kent State University (USA) who was for a decade a Principal Investigator on the Science and Religion, Exploring the Spectrum projects, talks about her research into science and non-religion.

John Evans, Tata Chancellor’s Chair in Social Sciences, Professor of Sociology, and Co-Director of the Institute of Practical Ethics of the University of California San Diego, talks about how his research shows that the religion and science debate should increasingly focus on moral conflict between religion and science, rather than on facts.  

Fern Elsdon-Baker, Professor of Science, Knowledge and Belief in Society at the University of Birmingham, looks back at the successes of the network she founded in bringing together researchers from all over the world and from awide variety of disciplines, from psychology to politics and theology to sociology, to gain a deeper understanding of the relationships between science and belief in peoples’ lives.

In the final episode of the season, James and Will are joined by Dr Adam R. Shapiro, an historian of science, whose work focuses on public understandings and misunderstandings of science and the relationship between science and religion. Adam provides an overview of some of the emerging trends in the history of science and religion and situates his own work within this wider disciplinary movement. The discussion ranges from the development of and public controversies surrounding two space telescopes - the James Webb Space Telescope and the 30 Metre Telescope on Mauna Kea; the role of Natural Theology in the American Declaration of Independence; Adam's contribution to the second edition of Thomas Dixon's Science and Religion: A Very Short Introduction; and where and how Adam sees the field moving beyond 'complexity'.

In the penultimate episode of the season, Will and Rebecca are joined by Dr Carissa Sharp, Assistant Professor in Psychology of Religion in the School of Theology and Religion at the University of Birmingham, UK and Dr Carola Leicht, Reader in Organisational Behaviour at the University of Kent, UK. Carissa and Carola discuss their almost decade-long collaboration, using social psychological methods to explore questions of science-religion conflict and how religious and nonreligious social identities drive perceptions of conflict in unexpected ways. Carola presents the in-depth results of her work on atheist and "new atheist" perceptions of science and religion, before Carissa discusses how stereotypes impact both religious and non-religious perceptions. Carissa goes on to discuss a recent grant success supporting her work to develop psychological cross-training for theologians.

In this episode Will is joined by a new co-host Dr Rebecca Hughes, a social psychologist at the University of Birmingham. Will and Rebecca welcome Renate Ysseldyk, Associate Professor in the Department of Health Sciences at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada specializing in Social and Health Psychology, and Emily Tippins, a PhD student at the University of Ottawa, who recently completed her Masters of Science working with Renate at Carleton University. Renate and Emily discuss how religious and non-religious individuals in Canada coped with the stresses of the COVID-19 pandemic and the differential relations between religiosity, trust in science (or lack thereof) and vaccine intentions that exist between religious and non-religious individuals. They complicate this picture further by highlighting the role that political orientation plays in vaccine intentions and trust in science, showing that it can play a greater role than religious/non-religious identity. Renate and Emily discuss the wider societal implications of this, and vaccine hesitancy more generally.