Scientific Thinking versus Religious Thinking from a Viewpoint of a Secular Science Educator

In this chapter, I’ll characterize Science Education as a research discipline. I will characterize scientific thinking versus religious thinking. The main difference is that scientific truths are refutable whereas religious truths are irrefutable. Thus, relying on Popper, we can consider religious thinking as pseudo-scientific thinking. The chapter will compare the contribution that science and religion can offer to face the main problems of human beings: mortality and suffering. Science can hardly facilitate our dealing with these problems. On the other hand, the solutions which religion offers to us have their own problems. The reader may guess that I am quite old. And when people become old they become reflective, they become philosophical, and they become skeptical. They ask questions about their life projects. I consider myself a civil servant in the field of education. I taught mathematics; I taught mathematics education and I taught science education. The reason for this is that I consider mathematics as part of science. It is so because all sciences (including social sciences) use mathematics in order to develop their theory. And also, their structure is quite similar to the structure of mathematical theories, namely, the deductive structure. In recent years, I have asked myself what could be the contribution of my teaching to the well being of my students. My main concern was scientific thinking. On the other hand, there is a lot of religious thinking around us, and I wonder what this thinking could contribute to the believers. Thus, I have come to make the comparison between the two and hence the title of this chapter: “Scientific thinking versus religious thinking from a viewpoint of a secular science educator.”.