ABSTRACT
48Argentina is a federal republic in Latin America where 45 million people live, 65% of whom are Catholics. Although the process of secularisation involved some episodes where science and religion were presented as polar opposites by some political and social actors, in recent years there have been no relevant public debates in which the relationship between science and religion has played a prominent role.
In this article we present the main results from a qualitative study about how Argentinians perceive the relationship between science and religion that included 78 interviews with scientists and the general public and six focus groups.
Although most of the participants in our sample did not believe that there were relevant conflicts between science and religion, we detected that there is a latent conflict between some Christian groups and public institutions linked to education and science. While a majority of the Catholics perceive a peaceful coexistence between science and religion and accept the Big Bang and evolutionary theories; most of the Evangelicals and a minority of Catholics oppose these theories based on their religious beliefs. Moreover, many non-religious scientists hold negative stereotypes about religious individuals, contributing to perceptions of incompatibility between scientific thought and religious belief.
Argentina shows that present perceptions about science and religion are influenced both by the secularization process and the Catholic legacy. But the recent growth of the evangelical population may provide a new dynamic that activates the latent contradictions between groups and institutions.
