Written by Dr. Mehdi Nassaji
Our recent research paper entitled “Secondary School Students’ Reasoning About Science and Personhood” is now published online.
The study reported in this paper sought to discover whether students perceive tension between what they suppose science to say and their beliefs about personhood and in particular the soul.
The study revealed that belief in a form of soul is widespread among school students surveyed in our sample (530 secondary school students in England) and over half of respondents expressed the belief that humans have souls. However, over a third of those who believed that humans have souls also strongly agreed or agreed with the statement that ‘the scientific view is that soul is not real’ indicating they perceive science to take a position that conflicts with their own.
There are other interesting and important findings related to students’ reasoning about science and personhood in the paper. The paper is written by Berry Billingsley and Mehdi Nassaji (Members of the LASAR research team), and is published in the Science and Education Journal, a high impact research journal in this field. The paper is Open Access and the full text of the report is available here.