Religion and science can sometimes feel at odds, to the chagrin of Grace Wolf-Chase, a Planetary Science Institute senior scientist and senior education and communication specialist who is also a Lutheran Christian.
To begin to find common ground and make each space more welcoming, she led a team that created pathways for religious communities to participate in online citizen science projects through the Zooniverse with the aim of building trust across religious communities and scientists. The team included Katharine Hinman of the AAAS and Laura Trouille of Adler Planetarium. Trouille is also the principal investigator for the Zooniverse platform. They published their strategies in a Zygon paper.
Participants were encouraged to choose their own science project based on personal interest from fields such as cosmology, anthropology, climate science and ecology, then discuss them in religious context. For example, Wolf-Chase led participants through one such project tutorial on classifying galaxies in Galaxy Zoo, during which she highlighted “the potential for students to discover new objects or new types of galaxies, while the youth leader encouraged students to reflect on how the vastness of the universe in time and space might expand and deepen the way they thought about God,” according to the paper.
Wolf-Chase said one seminary professor asked students to write essays relating what they learned from their science projects to seminary course material. Her favorite essay came from a group that was learning about the behaviors of African elephants. They argued that the behaviors of elephants were similar to some of the structures in the Black church.
“This is so rich intellectually, and it’s creative,” she said. “It shows that there are so many different ways of relating scientific learning and thinking about things in terms of your religious framework.”
The 18-month-long initiative was evaluated through surveys and focus groups. The team learned that while some participants “viewed science and religion as complementary, others felt that science can inform, challenge, deepen, or modify religious understandings. Still others felt that science and religion could inform each other. Most of the conflict responses were not about science per se but reflected ethical concerns about some applications of science,” said the authors. They also found that people who have engaged directly with scientists had more favorable views toward science in general.
When reflecting on the importance of this work, she said, “There’s so much going on that’s divisive. The projects that I’ve taken on have been about building bridges across communities that think differently or that are coming from different places, and ultimately, as a pluralistic, multi-ethnic society we need that.”
