Evolution is one of the most important scientific ideas ever. It helps helps make sense of the entirety of biology. Unfortunately, many still reject this crucial idea. Improving education has been the main strategy to combat this, but it turns out religious dogma can offer an alternate "route" into evolution.
This focus on education is understandable. It turns out there's a lot that can be done to improve it. Museum displays can cause misunderstandings, whilst ambiguous terminology in science literature can leave people confused.
And a survey of visitors to a museum found that education does help. It was linked with acceptance of Darwin's theory. However, there was a separate factor that influenced whether somebody accepted evolution: if they belonged to a church that also accepted it.
Religion and other evolutionary things
Pope Francis once caused something of a media storm by announcing to the world he believes in evolution. Quite why this counted as news I'm not sure, given that the Catholic Church has accepted evolution for decades. It's not even a particularly controversial opinion amongst religious people. Whilst young-earth creationism may be a loud and problematic group they nevertheless represent a minority view (although barely). Most religious people are perfectly fine with evolution as an explanation for our planet's biodiversity. But why do they agree with the scientific community when such a significant minority don't?
One popular explanation is that it's all to do with scientific knowledge. Acceptance of evolution is often correlated with education and scientific understanding. Thus it might be that some religious groups actively teach (or foster learning about) evolution; or at the very least don't tell people to shy away from it. This leads to increased scientific understanding, which in turn explains the increased acceptance of evolution.
So some researchers decided to test this hypothesis by taking trip to the Milwaukee Public Museum. There they conducted a survey, identifying visitors' knowledge of evolution, their acceptance of the theory and their religious denomination. The goal being to identify whether or not religious denomination was correlated with knowledge and acceptance of evolution; indicating that some groups were indeed fostering scientific understanding.
And as you might expect they found a link between knowledge and acceptance of evolution. People who knew more about the subject were more likely to believe it. They also found a correlation between religious denomination and acceptance of evolution. Catholics, for example, were about as likely as college graduates to accept the theory of evolution as true. Protestants had a similar rate of acceptance, whilst non-denominational Christians had a very low rate of belief in evolution.
Crucially though they failed to find a link between religious denomination and knowledge of evolution. A Catholic might have been as likely as a college graduate to accept evolution, but they typically knew less about the subject than a high school dropout. In other words, there were two paths people took to accepting evolution: they either knew something about the theory, or they belonged to a religion that said the theory was true.
Using dogma to teach science
The results of this review strongly suggests that the religious people who accept evolution tend to do so because of dogma. Because some authority figure - like the super pope - said its ok. They haven't understood or evaluated the evidence, they're just being obedient.
This raises some interesting questions. The most pertinent being: is this ok?
Other research has shown that this "trick" can be used to persuade people evolution is true. If someone doubts the theory, showing them an authority figure from their religion saying evolution is fine makes them reconsider their evolution-denial. One undergraduate class in a Mormon-heavy area was initially skeptical of evolution. However, once they had the Mormon churches' official, pro-evolution position explained they were much more accepting of the theory.
So there is a tool there that could convince a great many people of evolution. Should it be used? Should there be closer partnership between science education and religious groups, given these possible benefits? Is dogma a good thing?
The answer - like everything in this crazy world of ours - is complicated. But I suspect it's more often "no" than "yes".
After all, most of these religious organisations aren't "pro-evolution". It might be more accurate to describe them as "tolerating" the idea. Their own religious ideas always take precedence, with the existence of evolution being tolerated within this framework. And if evolution doesn't quite fit; it's hammered, squeezed and butchered to make it fall into line.
Returning to Pope Francis, for example. Whilst he does accept evolution he does not view it as sufficient to explain biology.
The Big Bang, which nowadays is posited as the origin of the world, does not contradict the divine act of creating, but rather requires it. The evolution of nature does not contrast with the notion of creation, as evolution presupposes the creation of beings that evolve
His predecessor was even more explicit about this; advocating in favour of a sort of "special creation" of humans.
[T]he theory of evolution seeks to understand and describe biological developments. But in so doing it cannot explain where the 'project' of human persons comes from, nor their inner origin, nor their particular nature.
Meanwhile the Mormon church - whose view is so "pro-religious" it made students accept evolution - has had its view on evolution described as
it is clear that the LDS religion maintains strict belief in God as the creator. However, the church does not specify how the creation was accomplished, nor does it confirm or deny the potential for evolutionary creation (i.e., theistic evolution)
Clearly, many "pro-evolution" religions aren't exactly what they say on the tin. Now, some are. And I'm all for those which don't try and butcher evolution contributing to education. But the fact remains that evolution is both a necessary and sufficient cause for humans. Chopping bits off to make it seem insufficient can cause problems.
After all, simply using ambiguous language can leave people with significant misunderstandings about evolution. I can only imagine what sort of misconceptions might develop if religion and its butchered version of evolution got more involved in the process.
tl;dr
Lots of religious people accept evolution, but they typically only do so because they're follow religious dogma, not because they understand the subject
Reference
Barone, L. M., Petto, A. J., & Campbell, B. C. (2014). Predictors of evolution acceptance in a museum population. Evolution: Education and Outreach, 7(1), 23.
Manwaring, K.F., Jensen, J.L., Gill, R.A. and Bybee, S.M., 2015. Influencing highly religious undergraduate perceptions of evolution: Mormons as a case study. Evolution: Education and Outreach, 8(1), pp.1-12.
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