The General Social Survey has twice asked national samples of adult Americans, “[Do] we trust too much in science and not enough in religious faith?” The graph shows the proportion of people who disagree, i.e., who support the amount of trust we place in science compared to religion. I show results for 1998 and 2008, for everyone and by party.

As might be expected, the party lines diverge, with Republicans becoming less favorable to science when the question is asked this way. To flip the question around, 36% of Republicans said in 2008 that we trusted in science too much, up from 33.5% in 1998. That does not mean that individuals changed their minds; more likely, the composition of the people who called themselves Republicans changed.

But what jumps out at me is actually the relatively high degree of consensus. The partisan difference (as of 2008) was not vast. The population had become more trustful of science, with the exception of Republicans–but the shift for them was small. A plurality of Republicans still shared the view that trust for science was appropriate.

By the way, I report these numbers without a strong implied value-judgment, since I have my own ambivalent feelings about trust in science, especially when it spills over to questions of ethics and justice.

(see also “Is all Truth Scientific Truth?” and “Building Alternative Intellectual Establishments.“)