Beyond Deficits and Conflicts: The Evolution of the Study of Attitudes Towards Evolution, Creation, and Human Origins

The ‘deficit model’ of science and society holds that the more you know about science the more you will love it, so rejection of science is based on ignorance. The conflict narrative presents the domains of science and religion in a necessary and enduring conflict due to their essential and epistemic differences. Both the deficit model and the conflict narrative are simplistic stories that simultaneously purport to explain yet actively obscure understanding of various publics’ orientations towards science. Both these discourses intersect in the topic of attitudes towards evolution, creation, and human origins. In this chapter, I argue that critiques of the deficit model and conflict narrative provide their most valuable contribution in opening space to reimagine and more accurately describe public orientations to science. Focusing on literature at the intersection of the public understanding of science (PUS) and what I term science and religion studies (SRS), and using public attitudes towards evolution and creation as a case study, I delineate four avenues that have opened once the dominant narratives of deficit and conflict have been surpassed: beyond acceptance, complexity mapping, moral conflicts, and second-order perspectives.