Christian religious and scientific views and forms of human–nature relationship in biology teachers

Abstract In the context of the current global socioenvironmental crisis, it is fundamental to reflect on how we build relations with natural systems, the values intertwined with those relations, and the ethics we build based on the latter that may allow us to radically transform human–nature relationships. From this standpoint, academic sciences and religions are key frameworks we may use to ground those reflections. However, more knowledge is needed about how scientific and religious perspectives interact with each other within subjects’ views of nature in particular cultural, professional, and religious contexts. Moreover, the ontological and epistemological positions built by subjects showing different patterns of interaction between those perspectives may provide insight about their stances toward human–nature relationships and the values associated with them. The present study explores how scientific and Christian religious perspectives interact in four Colombian Biology teachers’ views of nature and its relationships with humans, using a qualitative approach and an interpretivist research design. The analysis shows that despite holding diverse religious and spiritual beliefs, all participating teachers showed a shared sense of care toward nature, blending their value systems and epistemological commitments in two distinct human–nature relational models, namely, the Stewardship and Wardship models, according to Muradian and Pascual’s typology of forms of human–nature relationships. We conclude that these teachers ascribe an aesthetic value to nature that is closely related to their ethics with respect to it, which is, in turn, related to their religious or scientific ideas to varying degrees.