Billingsley Berry, Nassaji Mehdi
Faculty of Education, Canterbury Christ Church University, North Holmes Road, Canterbury, CT1 1QU Kent UK.
Sci Educ (Dordr). 2021;30(4):967-991. doi: 10.1007/s11191-021-00199-x. Epub 2021 Apr 13.
Scientific advances, particularly in evolutionary biology, genetics, neuroscience and artificial intelligence, present many challenges to religious and popular notions of personhood. This paper reports the first large-scale study on students' beliefs about the interactions between science and widely held beliefs about personhood. The paper presents findings from a questionnaire survey ( = 530) administered to English secondary school students (age 15-16) in which their beliefs and concepts regarding personhood and the position of science were investigated. The survey was motivated in part by an interview study and a previous, smaller survey which revealed that many students struggle to reconcile their beliefs with what they suppose science to say and also that some have reluctantly dismissed the soul as a 'nice story' which is incompatible with scientific facts. The results from this larger-scale survey indicate that a majority of the students believe in some form of soul. Even so, and regardless of whether or not they identified themselves as religious, most students expressed a belief that human persons cannot be fully explained scientifically, a position that some students perceived as a partial rejection of what it means to hold a scientific worldview.
科学进步，尤其是在进化生物学、遗传学、神经科学和人工智能领域的进步，给宗教和大众关于人格的观念带来了诸多挑战。本文报告了第一项关于学生对科学与广泛持有的人格观念之间相互作用的信念的大规模研究。本文呈现了对英国15至16岁中学生进行的问卷调查（n = 530）的结果，调查了他们关于人格以及科学地位的信念和概念。这项调查部分是受一项访谈研究和之前一项规模较小的调查的推动，之前的研究表明，许多学生难以使他们的信念与他们所认为的科学观点相协调，而且一些学生已不情愿地将灵魂视为一个与科学事实不符的“美好故事”而摒弃。这项大规模调查的结果表明，大多数学生相信某种形式的灵魂。即便如此，无论他们是否将自己视为宗教信徒，大多数学生都表达了一种信念，即人类不能完全用科学来解释，一些学生认为这一立场是对持有科学世界观的部分否定。
