Science under Siege

"Science under Siege" is a comprehensive collection that addresses the current challenges to the authority of science. The authors identify scientism as the secular counterpart to religion and examine contemporary controversies that question the legitimacy of both religious and scientific truth claims. This collection offers a cultural-sociological perspective and draws on theories from the sociology of religion to illuminate the cultural mechanisms that explain the current resistance to science. The empirical contributions demonstrate how academic science has lost authority compared to competing social domains and how political and religious worldviews favor certain research findings while rejecting others. Additionally, it discusses that today's distrust of science is often directed against scientific institutions and academics, rather than against science itself.