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.