Spanish Newspapers’ Treatment of Conflicts Between Science and Religion

ABSTRACT

The relationship between religious beliefs and scientific knowledge is complex. In contemporary culture, conflicts between the two are inevitable. This study analyzed the strategies employed by three newspapers, ABC, El Mundo, and El País, in treating these conflicts. A content analysis was performed to determine whether these newspapers employed a confrontation or conciliation strategy. Our results show how the newspapers held various editorial orientations regarding science and religion. In conclusion, their general strategy was to avoid explicit confrontation by steering the discussion on conflicting views between science and religion toward academic fields, such as historiography, and debates about their sociopolitical and cultural effects.

KEYWORDS:

• Catholicism
• religion
• science
• scientific communication
• scientific journalism
• Spain

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 It is important to highlight that the percentage of religious scientists in four of those regions (India, Hong Kong, Turkey, and Taiwan) is similar to that of the rest of the population and the percentage of people who associate themselves with a religion is estimated at around 80% of the global population, that is, 5.8 billion people.

2 We adopt Steensland’s classification following Obrien and Noy (215), which includes fundamentalist, Pentecostal, charismatic, and evangelical Christian traditions in a single category that we find useful for practical reasons in order to maintain the main focus on our argumentation, unless we recognize this as a controversial issue and a simplification of the question.

3 The search results of the journalistic texts in the Factiva database, as well as in similar databases, such as the popular Lexis-Nexis or MyNews, are only useful as a starting point, given that inaccuracies in the thematic categorization of the texts are common. Likewise, the order in which results are displayed, as per their relevance, is based only on the mere accumulation of search terms in relation to the length of the text. Factiva provides a contextual visualization tool for only the most significant fragments in which the search terms appear. However, after reading a sample of random texts, we concluded that it is not at all useful for an adequate analysis that is in line with the objectives of our research.

4 The obvious limitations resulting from the imprecision of the classification into knowledge areas carried out by databases like Factiva are discussed in the conclusions.