Science, Worldviews and Education ─ Reprinted from the Journal Science & Education, Vol. 18, Nos. 6-7

This anthology deals with the theme of ‘Science, Worldviews and Education’. The theme is of particular importance at the present time as many national and provincial education authorities are requiring that students learn about the Nature of Science (NOS) as well as learning science content knowledge and process skills. NOS topics are being written into national and provincial curricula. Such NOS matters give rise to questions about science and worldviews: What is a worldview? Does science have a worldview? Are there specific ontological, epistemological and ethical prerequisites for the conduct of science? Does science lack a worldview but nevertheless have implications for worldviews? How can scientific worldviews be reconciled with seemingly discordant religious and cultural worldviews? In addition to this major curricular impetus for refining understanding of science and worldviews, there are also pressing cultural and social forces that give prominence to questions about science, worldviews and education. There is something of an avalanche of popular literature on the subject that teachers and students are variously engaged by. Additionally the modernization, and science-based industrialization, of huge non-Western, Asian societies whose traditional religions and beliefs are different from those that have been associated with orthodox science, make very pressing the questions of whether, and how, science is committed to particular worldviews. Hugh Gauch Jr, an agricultural scientist at Cornell University, contributed the volume’s lead essay in which he says that questions about science’s relation to worldviews, either theistic or atheistic ones, are among the most significant of contemporary issues for scientists, science teachers and culture more generally. The other authors include philosophers (Gurol Irzik, Robert Nola, Stuart Glennan, Hugh Lacey, Alberto Cordero), physicists who are also philosophers (Costas Skordoulis and Enrico Giannetto), a physicist with familiarity with the Islamic tradition (Taner Edis), a neuroscientist (Yonatan Fishman), a theologian (John Lamont), a biologist and science educator with theological training (Michael Reiss), and a science educator with philosophical training (Michael Matthews).