Clash narratives relating to evolutionary science and personal belief are a recurrent theme in media or public space discourse. However, a 2009 British Council poll undertaken in 10 countries worldwide shows that the perception of a necessary clash between evolutionary worldviews and belief in a God is a minority viewpoint. How then does the popular conception that there is an ongoing conflict between evolution and belief in God arise? One contributing factor is the framing and categorization of creationism and evolutionism within large-scale surveys for use within media campaigns. This article examines the issue framing within four polls conducted in the United Kingdom and internationally between 2008 and 2013. It argues that by ignoring the complexity and range of perspectives individuals hold, or by framing evolutionary science as atheistic, we are potentially creating 'creationists' - including 'Islamic creationists' - both figuratively and literally.

Islam's positioning in relation to Western ideals of individuality, freedom, women's rights and democracy has been an abiding theme of sociological analysis and cultural criticism, especially since September 11 th 2001. Less attention has been paid, however, to another concept that has been central to the image of Western modernity: science. This article analyzes comments about Islam gathered over the course of 117 interviews and 13 focus groups with non-Muslim members of the public and scientists in the UK and Canada on the theme of the relationship between science and religion. The article shows how participants' accounts of Islam and science contrasted starkly with their accounts of other religious traditions, with a notable minority of predominantly non-religious interviewees describing Islam as uniquely, and uniformly, hostile to science and rational thought. It highlights how such descriptions of Islam were used to justify the cultural othering of Muslims in the West and anxieties about educational segregation, demographic 'colonization' and Islamist extremism. Using these data, the article argues for: 1) wider recognition of how popular understandings of science remain bound up with conceptions of Western cultural superiority; and 2) greater attentiveness to how prejudices concerning Islamic beliefs help make the idea that Muslims pose a threat to the West respectable.

Classical sociology addressed the relationship between science and religion, but interest in the topic waned during the 20th century. A second wave of research has emerged in the 21st century, focusing on scientists' (ir)religiosity, evolution, and the relationship between knowledge and acceptance of scientific concepts. Most of this research has

The topic of Muslims’ attitudes towards the theory of biological evolution has received increasing attention at the margins of the fields of public understanding of society, science communication or education and science in society. The methodology and methods employed in this work are primarily informed by research on attitudes towards evolution in the ‘West’, particularly in the US where the issue is highly politicized. Small, interview based qualitative and larger, survey based quantitative studies have explored degrees of acceptance or rejection of non-human and human evolution in a number of Muslim majority and Muslim minority contexts. The underlying rationale for these studies is often underpinned by a ‘deficit model’ in which Islam, or being Muslim, is usually posited as a particular obstacle to public understanding and acceptance of theory of evolution. This chapter summarizes these studies, analyzes the particularities of how deficit model approaches might be implicitly informing their findings, and reflects on the lack of reflexivity in much public understanding of science research on Muslim contexts.

Issues pertaining to the relationship between science and religion, like creationism, Intelligent Design, and New Atheism, are increasingly the focus of social scientific research. This research often does not differentiate clearly between different kinds of social actors. At the most basic level, professional developers and distributors of systems of thought that deal with the relationship between science and religion, and laypeople who take up this knowledge, or parts of it, must be distinguished. Based upon interview material from the large, multinational study Science and Religion: Exploring the Spectrum, we identify five typical dimensions of lay knowledge vis-à-vis professional knowledge: reinterpretation of professional labels; neglect of important parts of knowledge systems; addition of knowledge; lower ascription of relevance; and an individual ethical framing.