ABSTRACT
Nowadays most Japanese people have been trained at school to analyse technical and scientific data, but their scientific education has had a varying impact on their attitudes towards religion or spiritual phenomena. Some people consider that modern sciences adequately explain the way the universe works and believe that scientific perspectives have undermined certain traditional beliefs. For instance, they do not believe that millions of deities could agree enough among themselves to make a universe with inbuilt constants or 'laws'. Other individuals seem to compartmentalize their scientific perspective and isolate it from their attitudes towards religion – or else their motivations in performing religious acts are primarily social and they do not discuss the interrelations between scientific and religious worldviews. Moral attitudes continue to change, influenced not only by family, school, peers and perhaps religion but also by the media and popular opinion.
