Well, yes. You are talking as if both positions were equally reasonable, and as if there is a non-religious anti-evolution movement; they aren’t, and there isn’t. The only reason evolution is denied is in order to claim that god(s) developed life instead.
Well, I don’t think an ‘evil agent’ is required, but there is most likely a reason why there isn’t such widespread disbelief in, for instance, relativity or quantum mechanics. I’d also wager that the number of agnostic/atheist disbelievers in evolution is roughly equivalent to the agnostic/atheist disbelievers in quantum mechanics. I’d argue that’s “background” noise, but the increase among religious disbelievers is because evolution directly contradicts creation narratives.
I disagree here, for what it’s worth. I think that evolution is just about the most intuitive concept once the basic facts are understood (genetics, selection pressures, relative reproductive fitness.) The general disagreements in the scientific community are over the theories that aim to explain evolutionary mechanics and evolutionary history, but the facts of evolution are very nearly as intuitive as the facts of, say, ballistics. And only slightly less intuitive than the facts of gravity once the basics are understood.
Obviously not. Inerrancy means simply the Bible doesn’t have any errors and allows for non-literal passages.
A lot of what I’ve seen also suggests to me a strong misunderstanding at a very fundamental level about what science is and how science works.
I’m a Catholic, and my Church hasn’t had any issue with evolution for a very long time. I have a friend who is really only quasi-Christian. If you ask him about his belief in God, his faith, he has said that to be honest he can’t believe in it, and he doesn’t believe. Unlike a lot of atheists however, he goes to Church with his wife and kids and actually has professed to me privately on many occasions that he wants to believe in God, but just can’t get his mind around it.
On an educational level, the guy is a chemical engineer, so at least at one point in his life he had the ability to get through a chemical engineering program which isn’t academically one of the easier degrees. However, when it comes to evolution and religion he’s basically insane and irrational.
I’ve known him for a long time, but never really knew much about his religious views until recently. Basically it came out because he suggested I watch Ben Stein’s horrible documentary that purported to “debunk” evolution, coming from this individual I was very shocked. Here’s a guy who will openly admit he does not believe in god at all, a guy with a very technical back ground that surely must have included some natural science classes. We had a long argument about evolution and the list version of it is:
[ol]
[li]Evolution is not proven with any certainty, and is just a theory.[/li][li]Scientists present it as absolute fact, and most scientists are engaged in trying to actively spread this information to discredit Christianity.[/li][li]The scientists that do not accept the lies about evolution are suppressed by the rest of the scientific community, creating the false perception that evolution is more accepted by scientists than it really is.[/li][li]When you push him on any of these things, he will talk about how various parts of evolutionary theory have evolved and changed over time. To him this is evidence of the fact it is not proven theory.[/li][li]He denies the existence of any proof whatsoever that one species has ever “transformed” into another. He does not deny that there are mutations, but he denies that mutations can cause, over a huge span of time, development of new species.[/li][/ol]
I will also add that after becoming exapserated with his mind-numbing views on the topic I tried to reason with him from the religious end of it. I pointed out that my Church has long been fine with evolution. His response to that was that since Catholicism does not follow the literal word of the bible, it is essentially no different from a Unitarian Church and they really aren’t Christian at all. That opened up a whole new line of discussion, in which he revealed that he only believes the Eastern Orthodox Church is the true Church, because it is the only true original Church and their beliefs are 100% exactly the same as they were 2,000 years ago as created by Paul. He further believes that the bible is 100% straight forward, that every passage has only one, clear and obvious meaning, and that the Orthodox Church is the only Church that has held true to those meanings. FWIW he goes to a Methodist church with his family because he tried to get his wife to go to an Orthodox Church and she did not like it (and he had never been either, he had just developed a strong appreciation for them.)
All that being said, what really shocked me the most is how tightly he latched on to the fact that evolution is not proven. I was reminded of this conversation by this post in another thread (link:
In similar conversations throughout my life about evolution, something that comes up time and time again is that it “isn’t proven.” You can’t talk to people who start saying that about all the other scientific “theories” that aren’t “proven” and that they use in their day to day life every day with no problem or doubt. When you bring up such topics they just say “that’s all proven.”
For a lot of people I think they believe the scientific method works like this:
- Hypothesize –> 2. Test Hypothesis 3. If tests support your hypothesis, it is proven.
Some may have a view that is a little more nuanced than that, but what it boils down to is I think a large portion of the population absolutely believes that science as the end result of its process regularly and generally proves things to be absolutely true, for every and always.
For people who aren’t very religious or don’t get involved in the whole evolution/creationism debate, I imagine their ignorance about the scientific method doesn’t come into play very often (you do see it some with AGW, though.) When you combine what I feel is a general ignorance of how science works with a specific beef with creationism, it creates a ready made situation in which people are immune to being convinced. Their ignorance of science is deep seated enough that these individuals will laugh at any arguments you make in which you try to say “but science doesn’t try to prove anything absolutely, that’s not what it is about…”
People need to understand that science regularly revises itself, and that for well established topics those revisions affect minor details mostly of interest only to career scientists; those minor revisions typically aren’t changing the underlying conclusions as they relate to the laymen at large. So while we’re still learning new things about evolution all the time, none of those things is something that diminishes or refutes the underlying conclusions which have been well supported since before anyone living today was born.
There were rudimentary theories of evolution even in ancient Greek philosophy. Anaximander. for instance, postulated that life began in the sea, emerged from the sea when land formed and that animals eventually evolved into man. He got a lot of things wrong with his hypothesis 9some of them wildly wrong), but the basic intution was right.
Still, Tom[ is essentually right that proper evolutionary theiry takes a lonmg time to explain, and that the details aren’t necessarily grasped very intuitively (especially if they have a completely distorted view of the claims, such as the belief that individual animals spontaneously turn into other 0ther animals).
Hey peeyaj, welcome to the SDMB. If you want to understand creationism , the wiki article on it is a good place to start. Notice there are a range of views, from young earth creationism to intelligent design, and that the motivations and assumptions of each are somewhat different. Young earth creationsts, for example, - which according to polls represent about 45% of the American public - are primarily exercised by the issue of inerrancy, i.e., a belief that the Bible is the literal divinely-inspired word of God. Add up the begats in Genesis and, lo, the world is about 6000 years old, so evolution has to be wrong. Other creationists are able to clear that hurdle, but have other issues.
As for how creationists deal with the evidence, you might find Answers in Genesis illuminating. It’s a YEC site, link given in the wiki article. Think of any issue you think should be compelling, e.g., dinosaurs, genetics or the geologic column. I assure you there’s an article on AiG. Not persuasive to you or me, but that’s not their purpose. These are apologetics, designed to reassure the faithful that brighter minds than theirs have considered the issues and found answers. And in almost every AiG article, inerrancy looms large.
Most people go through life accepting what authority figures tell them without putting any critical thinking into the process. If they happen to fall in with an authority figure that tells them that evolution isn’t true, they believe it. And, on the other hand, there are plenty of people who believe in evolution just because an authority they accept told them it was true rather than because they did any independent thinking of their own on the subject.
Watch any “science fiction” movie produced for the SyFi channel. That will show you how well (poorly) a certain not-so-small percentage of my fellow Americans understand science, that is to say, not very well at all… A large segment of the American population (perhaps a majority, though I truly hope not) has an understanding of science that is, essentially, fictional.
Some people view “unnecessary knowledge” (anything they can’t see an immediate use for) as a monumental waste of their time. They may suspect that you don’t know any more than they on the subject and are just trying to be a “big shot” by pretending to be smarter than them. :smack:
Why do so many people believe those people who claim they believe the Genesis creation account over evolution. There is no evidence to actually support the truthfulness of their beliefs.
I just can’t see too many people who rely on their church as their social support willing to admit that they just might question creation. They might as well publicly question their belief in God and get drummed out of the choir.
As you imply, if you look at other countries without a strong fundamentalist influence on education, you see this “natural belief” - which comes with a modicum of education. Not just America - the same seems to hold for fundamentalist Islamic countries also.
I’ve made it a practice to ask any creationist who wanders in here what he or she thinks evolution says. I almost never get a response. Descent with modification is a very simple concept - even if a person never gets into the actual complexity, they would know enough to understand antibiotic resistant bacteria. I suspect that the very last thing most of these people want to do is to try to understand it, for fear that their belief system might change - especially if they have been told from childhood that evolution is godless.
Then we have the liars who lead the movement, who certainly know better - but that is a tiny minority.
Well, talk about a circle-jerk…
Can you elaborate?
Simplest answer: They choose to ignore the evidence, because it contradicts the indoctrination they received from their church.
There’s a saying in the Talmud that says that lack of sight is not proof. (Or something to that effect.)
Short answer for Strict Creationists: Faith.
Also, Creationism and Evolution don’t have to be mutually exclusive.
Movin’ along…
That’s a rather presumptuous statement.
No, it isn’t. The evidence for evolution is overwhelming. And the denial of evolution has been exclusively a religious movement for a century or so. And choosing to ignore evidence to defend fantasy is a major part of what religion is all about.
I agree this is an important element of evolution denial. When you get down to it, the theory has very little substantive impact on people’s lives. Conan Doyle has Sherlock Holmes say something similar about whether the Earth revolves around the Sun or the other way around. Thus, disregarding or disbelieving evolution is cheap. If one believes inerrancy or giving respect to God is important and conflicts with evolution, it’s not much of a price to pay to reject the latter.
Somewhat yes… but mostly no.
While it may be ontologically possible that a God or Gods created life and then it evolved along its own trajectory or on set pathways, that’s not a testable, falsifiable hypothesis. So in terms of scientific analysis, evolution and creationism are mutually exclusive, as is any other God of the Gaps type argument. Just as it may be that God caused the Big Bang and then the laws of the universe came into being, “God did it” is incompatible with physics as a science.
The voice of experience. Before I unbent and discovered that G-d must really like us, much of my religious indoctrination came from my grandmother. She was a really nice person, but she had some really weird ideas about G-d and religion in general (Did you know the Bible, old and new testaments both, were written in King James English? :rolleyes:) Iit took me a few years to shake off my indoctrination and start reading the Bible for myself.
I wasn’t suggesting that all creationists think that way, but from a young age I was indoctrinated into that way of thinking. Fortunately my parents encouraged me to not just learn stuff, but to actually think. If your understanding of the world you live in never changes, you’ve stopped learning. If you believe that you know everything worth knowing, nobody can yell you different.
There are a lot of “reasons” some people believe that evolution isn’t real, but I suggest that most, if not all of these reasons are rooted in spurious logic and/or a woefully inadequate education.
I guess I never thought of evolution as a testable falsifiable hypothesis…?
If God is some kind of supernatural force that throws a baseball, well, didn’t the tree still fall in the forest? Er…
<–doesn’t believe in Creationsism