Religion and science have never gotten along well in the past, but a survey conducted recently by the Pew Research Center revealed that more religious people in the US do not see anything in their faith that conflicts with science than those who are not religious.
According to the Pew findings, which gathered the views of over 2,000 respondents, those who see a tense relationship between faith and science are mostly those who seldom or never attend church service.
Past surveys of Pew showed that 60 percent of the people in general believe that religion and science conflict with one another.
However, there is a huge difference in the views of people of faith and those who are not religious.
About half of religious people, or those who attend religious services at least once a week, believe that faith and science don't go well together, as opposed to 76 percent of non-believers who expressed the same sentiment.
The results of the latest Pew survey pointed to the same conclusion: Those who are least religiously observant are more likely to believe in conflict between religion and science. Around 73 percent of the respondents who are not religious believe in conflict between the two things.
"The people who are farther away from religion themselves tend to see stronger conflict, because they're not as close to actual religious people," religion scholar Robert P. Jones and CEO of the non-profit organisation Public Religion Research Institute told Slate. "They aren't seeing all those people who don't have a conflict."
Non-religious people tend to perceive the religious community based on what they hear or see from the media, and this is why they think people of faith are always involved in controversies, fights over evolution, and other similar things.
At the same time, even though many respondents believe that faith and science are at odds with one another, fewer say that their own beliefs conflict with science.
Less than one-third of the Americans surveyed (30 percent) said their personal religious beliefs conflict with science, while fully two-thirds (68 percent) say there is no conflict between their own beliefs and science.
