Abstract
In his article Scientists at Play in a Field of the Lord, David Long (2010) rightly challenges our presumptions of what science is and brings forth some of the disjunctures between science and deeply held American religious beliefs. Reading his narrative of the conflicts that he experienced on the opening day of the Creation Museum, I cannot help but reconsider what the epistemology of science is and science learning ought to be. Rather than science being taught as a prescribed, deterministic system of beliefs and procedures as it is often done, I suggest instead that it would be more appropriate to teach science as a way of thinking and making sense of dialectical processes in nature. Not as set of ultimate “truths”, but as understandings of processes themselves in the process of simultaneously becoming and being transformed.
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Notes
I am not the first or only to argue this. See for example Engels’ (1972) Socialism, utopian and scientific.
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Alexakos, K. Religion, nature, science education and the epistemology of dialectics. Cult Stud of Sci Educ 5, 237–242 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11422-009-9252-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11422-009-9252-z