Print edition: 
Texas Gov. Rick Perry has generated a lot of ink for trumpeting his religious faith and for his attacks on evolution and global warming. I have no magic insight into the mind of the candidate jockeying for the GOP nomination, and I'm not a member of the religious right.
But as a sociologist studying religion in the United States, I do know that while many conservative Protestants disagree with the scientific consensus about evolution, you cannot infer their perspectives on other scientific issues such as climate change from this one view alone. Fundamentalists' and evangelicals' relationship with science is much more complicated than the idea that they "oppose science."
On most issues, there is actually very little conflict between religion and science. Religion makes no claims about the speed of hummingbird wings, and there are no university departments of anti-Resurrection studies — scientists generally are unconcerned with the vast majority of religious claims and vice versa.
There are, of course, a few fact claims in which conservative Protestant theology and science differ, such as the origins of humans and the universe. Here we find that typical conservative Protestants are likely to believe the teaching of their religion on the issue and not the scientific claim.
Conservative Protestants tend to accept scientists' claims that are based on direct observation and common sense and to reject those based on what might be called unobservable abstractions.
Since nobody was around for the big bang and for human evolution from lower primates, these unobservable claims are treated with more skepticism than measurements of the effect of airborne carbon on planetary temperature. (Despite biblical passages suggesting the contrary, conservative Protestants believe the Earth orbits the sun, which is observable by scientists in the present.)
The greatest conflict between fundamentalists, evangelicals and science is not over facts but over values. While scientists like to say that their work is value-free, that is not how the public views it, and conservative Protestants especially have homed in on the moral message of science. Contemporary "intelligent design" advocates, for example, are deeply worried that the teaching of evolution has a negative effect on children's values.
Is it still futile then? Can the two "sides" never agree?
No, it isn't futile. Understanding what concerns the "other side" would help. Those wishing to affect public policy on issues such as climate change, for example, need to make it clear to conservative Protestants that the science of global warming is based more on direct observations than on analytic abstractions, that it is more like determining the average body temperature of a human than where humans came from.
Conservative Protestants, in turn, should make distinctions between scientific areas in which they are in moral conflict with science, such as embryonic stem-cell research, and those areas where they are not.
To move forward, we as a country need to lower the political conflict. Yes, the views found in fundamentalist churches are not exactly the same as those at the National Science Foundation.
But we would see less of the polarizing rhetoric from the religious right if its members were not ridiculed as know-nothings. Conservative Protestants are not fundamentally opposed to all science.
