Between Scientific Ideas and Christian Religious Beliefs

Despite the importance of evolution to understand living phenomena, evolution teaching confronts several tensions, especially with respect to teachers’ and students’ religious beliefs. These aspects have been widely investigated in the USA and Europe. However, little empirical research has been done on this issue in Latin America, despite their large religious diversity and the currently growing population of Evangelical Christians. This paper aims to fill this gap by exploring Colombian biology teachers’ ideas about the relationship between scientific views and religious ideas, and their evolution teaching practice. We carried out a qualitative multiple case study involving four biology teachers. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews, classroom recordings and discussion group. To analyse teachers’ discourses, we used a hermeneutic-phenomenological method. The results show that (a) there is a close relationship between the views about the science-religion relationships and evolution teaching practices; (b) the religious teachers did not fully assume the worldviews of their specific religions, but rather built a personal version of those worldviews; (c) the nature of each religious tradition was a key element for understanding how the teachers see the relationships between religious and scientific views.