I've spent many years studying YEC and interacting with YEC's. I've even spent some time on the YouTube YEC debate circuit. I've come to one over-arching conclusion: the roots of YEC belief go down to the very foundations of one's philosophical outlook. Specifically, it is rooted in an acceptance of teleology [1]. It is a very long chain of reasoning from there, but this it the thing that most detractors of YEC miss: this reasoning is logically sound [2]. And because of that, you cannot successfully combat it with logic. You have to go to the very roots of the belief and address its foundations, which is to say, you have to deal with the fact that YEC's accept teleology as a philosophical foundation, and it is very hard to dislodge someone from that position without also sending them into a spiral of existential despair. That is the reason that these beliefs are so persistent despite being so violently at odds with [EDIT: the scientific view of] reality.
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[1] Teleology is the assumption that things have a purpose. The divergence between teleologists and whatever its opposite is (scientists?) is that the latter starts by asking what is the cause? and the former starts by asking what is the point? Everything can be traced back to that initial flapping of the butterfly's wings.
[2] An extremely abridged version goes something like this: a cursory inspection of the world around us seems to indicate that it was designed. So let us adopt that as a hypothesis. What would be expect to see? Well, one thing we would expect is that the designer might have provided a manual to go along with his/her/its designed creation. And lo and behold, there is such a manual. Actually, there are many such manuals. Collectively they are referred to as holy texts. The logical rabbit warren branches out from there.
This makes a tremendous amount of sense to me. Sorry to be political (what a crime), but I think it's a useful framework for thinking about the modern conservative movement. So much of the right now defines itself not with a cohesive ideology or specific set of policies, but rather in knee-jerk opposition to anything their supposed enemies believe. When your starting point is "these people are 100 percent wrong no matter what they say" you are now forced to explain why. And the result is a whole universe of shared lies and conspiracy theories (and people trying really hard to create some consistency or reasoning to back up those lies).
> It is a very long chain of reasoning from there, but this it the thing that most detractors of YEC miss: it is logically sound.
OF course it's not and most counter arguments knock it on it's face at that point. Any idiot can see that just because something looks designed doesn't mean it has a designer.
>[2] An extremely abridged version goes something like this: a cursory inspection of the world around us seems to indicate that it was designed. So let us adopt that as a hypothesis. What would be expect to see? Well, one thing we would expect is that the designer might have provided a manual to go along with his/her/its designed creation. And lo and behold, there is such a manual. Actually, there are many such manuals. Collectively they are referred to as holy texts. The logical rabbit warren branches out from there.
Except all the actually useful manuals were built by man and not provided by a Designer.
How can something be both logically sound and violently at odds with reality? What you’re saying is that those who hold YEC beliefs have an inconsistent belief system, but the belief in YEC is constructed with valid arguments within that belief system. That’s like the opposite of logically sound.
I should have qualified that with "violently at odds with the scientific view of reality" (I've gone back and edited my original comment). And it's not hard to see how this can happen. Quantum mechanics is pretty violently at odds with most people's intuitions.
> those who hold YEC beliefs have an inconsistent belief system
No, that is absolutely not what I am saying. Their belief system is, for the most part, logically sound, and so it is consistent. But it is violently at odds with science, and so they end up with conspiracy theories to explain why scientists believe in evolution so overwhelmingly. Conspiracy theories are improbable, but they are not inconsistent.
What is science in this context? Is it the scientific method? Is it the popular view among scientists as a whole (many of whom are not experts in areas they don't work in)? Is it the view of scientists in a niche? What happens when scientists in a niche disagree (they do all the time)?
I'm guessing you mean the popular view of scientists and most people see it conveyed through media, pop culture, etc.
If physicists believe/agree with/state evolution what's the science foundation to look at them as an expert to trust? Would I trust a mechanical engineers view on circuit design because they are an engineer just like electrical engineers?
Being curious I've read works from physicists who view an ancient universe and YEC (they really do exist). I've done this in good faith to try to understand how intelligent people with advanced degrees can come to different conclusions.
I bring this up to show the complexity, views, and assumptions to what we quickly call science.
> I'm guessing you mean the popular view of scientists
Yes, though your use of the word "popular" puts an unfair spin on it. There is overwhelming consensus (like 99%) among working biologists (who are in the best position to evaluate the evidence) that evolution is true.
Yes, there can be complexity and nuance. But evolution is quite literally one of the least controversial issues in all of science.
There is one issue though - how many biologists are religious in any way? According to BioMed Central, biology has more atheists than any other field. So, either they are all convinced that religions are false - or they are hardly the most impartial deciders, and are great at making sure any newcomers don’t get different ideas.
Just that fact would make a religious person laugh their head off at taking their perspective. Even from an atheistic perspective, can we rule out the possibility of an echo chamber?
> According to BioMed Central, biology has more atheists than any other field.
According to Pew, the percentage of scientists in biology and medicine who profess no religious belief (41%) is lower than geology (47%) or physics (46%). So your claim is questionable at best.
But for the sake of argument let's suppose it's true. So what? If you took a survey of astronomers I'm pretty sure you'd find that the vast majority of them are convinced that flat-eartherism is false. But that's not because they are prejudiced, it's because the astronomical evidence is overwhelmingly against the flat-earth hypothesis, and so it's hardly surprising that there aren't very many flat-earthers among people who study astronomy.
Likewise, the biological evidence is overwhelmingly in favor of evolution. That is why virtually all biologists, including the religious ones, believe it.
BTW, notice that religious belief also declines with age. This supports the hypothesis that the more you learn the less likely you are to be religious. And that is evidence against your (implied) hypothesis that belief in evolution is the result of atheistic prejudice.
When I was a senior at my university I took a biology class. It was mostly freshmen. The class was lectured by a professor and graded by a teachers assistant who was a PhD student.
Being 22 as a senior, I would regularly head out to the bar at night and on the weekend. I got to know the TA for the class. One night he admitted that the professors would not let students going for a PhD get one if they had any religious belief of any kind. They only allowed atheists or strong agnostics through.
I've heard about this kind of thing happening. That was the first time I had someone in the system point blank tell me about it.
It's worth knowing there is merit to the accusations about the beliefs in this area being filtered or otherwise shaped.
Even if this anecdote were true, it’s just an anecdote. It’s important not to let anecdotes influence you emotionally. All types of individuals, religious or otherwise, do messed up things. Cherry picking examples that fit your world view is a great way to succumb to confirmation bias.
> So, either they are all convinced that religions are false - or they are hardly the most impartial deciders, and are great at making sure any newcomers don’t get different ideas.
If some news article suggested that biologists are not impartial because most are men of European descent, there will be pitchforks and bonfires in the ensuing HN thread.
This is not true and much of evolution has and is still debated today. Public universities make you believe otherwise but if you spend half an hour researching you will quickly find much of the foundations of evolutionary theory has been challenged by recent scientific discoveries
A reasoning is logically sound if it applies valid reasoning rules on well formed propositions.
Young earth can be both false and logically sound, in that case it would also be the case that some of its assumptions or models need to be wrong.
Another example of a logically sound yet wrong theory is the Ptolemaic model of the solar system, if nothing else because by Fourier analysis it follows that you can approximate well any periodic orbit using enough epicycles.
The axioms can contradict a particular view of reality. The "scientific" axioms assume that objective reality can be observed (they reject solipsism). Solipsistic axioms don't accept this, only the state of one's own mind can be directly observed so it's the only objective reality under these axioms. Religions accept the existence of one or more gods as axioms, usually with some extra axioms declaring the properties of such god(s).
> How can something be both logically sound and violently at odds with reality?
Firstly, logical soundness has little to do with reality; here's a logically sound argument:
All mammals nurse their Young
Ducks are mammals
Therefore ducks nurse their young
Obviously the statement "Ducks are mammals" is false, garbage-in, garbage-out, but the logic itself is sound.
Now there was an entire field of philosophy called "Rationalism" that had a chief tenet that innate ideas and deductive reasoning was superior to sensory information. Rene Descartes formulated "I think therefore I am" because any empirical evidence of the existence of an item is suspect, but the logical statement that "if a thought occurs, then some being must be doing the thinking" is irrefutable.
Be aware that there are many epistemologies besides empiricism.
> Firstly, logical soundness has little to do with reality; hmm.here's a logically sound argument:
> All mammals nurse their Young
> Ducks are mammals
> Therefore ducks nurse their young
> Obviously the statement "Ducks are mammals" is false, garbage-in, garbage-out, but the logic itself is sound
This is not sound, merely valid. A logical argument is sound if it is both valid and its premises are true. This is valid, but the premise “Ducks are mammals” is false.
It's still logically consistent if I claim that ducks have mammary glands, and any duck to the contrary has had them surgically removed by the government.
You hand me an egg to put in my own incubator and raise myself? Well someone swapped the duck while I wasn't looking before the mammary glands developed.
"mammals have mammary glands" was not a listed axiom. There are two axioms, of the forms: "all X perform action Y", and "All D are members of X". There conclusion of the form "All D perform action Y" is sound. The second axiom contradicts observation, but axioms don't have to correspond to reality for the logic to be sound.
> "mammals have mammary glands" was not a listed axiom. There are two axioms, of the forms: "all X perform action Y", and "All D are members of X". There conclusion of the form "All D perform action Y" is sound.
No,valid, not sound. Soundness is validity plus true premises, and any sound conclusion is true of logical necessity. A valid conclusion is true contingent on the truth of the supporting premises.
> but axioms don't have to correspond to reality for the logic to be sound.
False, premises being true is part of the definition of soundness.
Most of the views people have that they call reality are conclusions drawn from interpreting observations based on assumptions. They aren't repeatedly observable or a case where the observation is shows "reality" without interpretation based on assumptions.
This is how people come to different conclusions.
Learning to understand the different assumptions people make for all views was enlightening for me, personally.
I've only done it twice, but both times were with very logical people, engineers.
My conclusion was that we had different base assumptions. They assumed that an omnipotent God existed. With that assumption, it's quite straight forward to build a logical case for evolution.
I actually doubt that they assumed that. Much more likely their belief in an omnipotent God was based on some more fundamental assumption, like that the Bible is true.
Yes they believed in more than the omnipotent God. However, the omnipotent God was the base assumption in their argument. It didn't require belief in the Bible as a base assumption for their argument to hold together, only a belief in an omnipotent God.
The robustness in their argument was probably so it would hold up for both literal Bible adherents and figurative Bible adherents.
IIRC it was some sort of adaptation of an argument for a literal Bible. IIRC it was something like this:
If you believe in a figurative Bible you believe in an omnipotent God. If you believe in an omnipotent God, then (steps elided because I can't remember them, but they were logical), thus proving a literal Bible thesis and a figurative Bible thesis were equivalent.
> It didn't require belief in the Bible as a base assumption for their argument to hold together, only a belief in an omnipotent God.
Young Earth Creationism is, as I understand it, entirely based on a literal interpretation of Genesis - the "young earth" part specifically referring to using the Old Testament from Genesis as a basis for counting geologic time.
If your argument requires a belief in the literal interpretation of Genesis, it's not a very robust argument since most people don't believe in a literal interpretation of Genesis.
If your argument requires a belief in an omnipotent omniscient God, it's a lot more robust because a small majority of people believe in an omnipotent omniscient God.
Young Earth Creationism is a Christian fundamentalist framework masquerading as science. They may not mention the Bible in order to keep up the facade of simply presenting an alternate scientific viewpoint, but requiring a belief in the Bible is still non-negotiable, since their entire thesis, as such, draws from it.
Certainly my exposure to them is limited and I'd like to keep it that way, but in my experience you've got it backwards.
The literal Bible is the goal, not the base assumption. They want to prove that the Bible is literal truth. Evolution disproves the literal Bible, therefore they must disprove evolution and/or prove creationism.
OK, I've never met a religious person who admitted to this as their base assumption, and I've talked to a lot of religious people (I run a weekly Bible study). It seems like a really weird thing to assume. But my experience is obviously not exhaustive.
That's not their base belief. It's their argument's base assumption.
Nobody ever states their true base assumptions when arguing anything. Most people don't know the base assumptions of the argument they are making. It takes a lot of analysis to tease it out.
According to them, or according to you? Because if it's according to you then I'm pretty sure you're just wrong. (But of course unless we can consult with one of your subjects there is no way to resolve this so we should probably just drop it.)
Young Earth Creationist. It’s a kind of creationism that posits the world is somewhere around 6,000 to 10,000 years old. That number was arrived at through interpreting scripture as inerrant and correct.
This is in contrast to other forms of creationism which have different interpretations of just how long events that happened in the scripture took place. For instance the days of creation need not be modern 24 hour days.
This point will be nitpicked , and I'm tempted to do so myself, but it only goes to show how deep rooted the conflict is when this appears at its face value to be contradictory with very reality.
I like the point that "logic" is not going to win the argument. I see so often people arguing against those with vastly different views and basically talking to them like children, like linking to articles or studies that explain a belief that is obvious and well known. When the source of disagreement is as you say far deeper, often outside the realm of fact and down to philosophy, and just gets ignored in favor of assuming people that disagree must be stupid
What I find interesting in all of this is the number of assumptions that are made on all sides. The assumptions are often not documented or discussed. It's easy to look at religion or YEC to pull out the assumptions. Yet, I've found assumptions show up in all views on the topic.
The belief that everything has a purpose is not very distinctive among Christians, so within a church, what separates young earth believers from the rest of the church?
You typically find these people in Evangelical churches that adhere to a literalist interpretation of the Bible, which is the main distinction from other sects of Christianity. These groups also tend to have out-of-mainstream views on eschatology and their own role in bringing the "end times" in the near future (often they believe it will happen in their lifetime).
That is not much of a differentiator. Genesis is the most well known book in the entire bible. Accepting that this book is spiritually and formally canonical is a very low bar.
By spiritually canonical I mean that it's the word of God revealed to man. These are extremely popular beliefs among Christians and not at all differentiating. I personally have not found YEC believers to be morally, spiritually or philosophically distinctive from other Christians.
They just have different beliefs and other Christians generally don't care and thus do not challenge them. Of course these are not the same kinds of people who show up to YT debate circuits because that's a very distinctive kind of person.
> what separates young earth believers from the rest of the church?
and I answered:
> Taking seriously the idea that the Bible -- and the book of Genesis in particular -- is the revealed Word of God.
The operative phrase there was "taking seriously". Many Christians profess to believe that the Bible is the revealed Word of God, but they don't really take it seriously. They play fast and loose with semantics and hermeneutics. YEC's don't. They believe that if the Bible says that the world was created in six days, then it means what it says: it happened in six 24-hour days. You crunch the numbers on the rest of the Bible's timeline and the result you get is a universe that is ~6000 years old, and so that must be the truth because God wouldn't lie. If the science says otherwise, the science must be wrong.
I've updated my comment to answer that because I figured not everyone would know. But the TL;DR is that teleology is the assumption that existence has a purpose.
Thanks. I find it interesting that you are using root-cause analysis to explain the situation of philosophers who reason in the direction opposite to causality
No, I can't. I can't prove anything scientifically. That's not how science works. Science doesn't prove anything. Science seeks the best explanations to explain observations. I see no evidence that existence has a purpose, and so the best explanation for that lack of evidence is that there is no purpose. But I can't prove it.
This is not the best explanation. This is a scientific explanation. Due to the nature of that cultural phenomenon science is only allowed to use statements of a certain kind: suitable to build rather precisely defined logical models and then draw conclusions that stay entirely valid under the same assumptions. This is a very useful abstraction in a way. Yet it is limited.
Take good art, for example. Something like "A Christmas Carol". It it markedly unscientific. Yet it also explains certain things about reality. Things that are rather hard to arrive to in a scientific way. And maybe that explanation is actually better?
It's the best explanation I know of for the fact that there is no evidence that life has a purpose (at least not that I've come across). Can you suggest a better explanation?
No, but that's not how science works. The general assumption is that the person making a provable conclusion (ie. that there IS a purpose) has the burden of proof.
If I claim to have a magical invisible dragon in my garage it's on me to prove otherwise, not for you to prove it doesn't.
I had a friend who was very intelligent, but their family chose to send them to Catholic school for education.
One day, we somehow got on the topic of dinosaurs, and they turned to me with an incredulous look on their face and said, "Wait, dinosaurs are actually real? I thought they were fake, like the Earth isn't actually that old."
Turns out that's what their parents and teachers told them since childhood.
Is that some weird American thing? I went to a Catholic school in Poland, and we were told about evolution as a matter of fact. No one questioned it. I think our biology teacher was actually a priest in fact. And as far as I understand the Roman Catholic church completely supports evolution as the dominant theory, maybe with a bit of "god helped along the way" somewhere but no one questions it being true. And suggesting that dinosaurs weren't real would just get you laughed out.
Well the point of the paper is that regardless of what your religion teaches (and the Roman Catholic church, in particular, is not anti-evolution; but not pro-evolution either, and offers its members essentially a choice of which mechanism of creation to believe), your "sociocultural environment" influences your beliefs more than what religion you say you're a part of. So yes, in accordance with the paper, it's probably more likely that even Catholics in the U.S. will be exposed to more anti-evolution indoctrination and more of their parents and teachers will try to deny evolutionary science, even if they aren't members of a specifically anti-evolution sect.
What the paper doesn't really go into is to how religion influences that "sociocultural environment"--it's just measuring effects for individuals. It's clear to me that "teach the controversy" movements, attacks on evolutionary science like the Scopes trial, attempts to remove evolution from biology texts and the actual removal in some schools are in large part motivated by religion, and comprise a lot of that "sociocultural environment" the paper refers to. Catholics have a choice whether to believe in a literal six-day creation and the creation of all life in its current form, so in a place like the U.S., where it's simply more socially acceptable to be an anti-evolutionist, they'll do so in more frequent numbers than where it's not.
It's a Protestant thing, I believe. Catholics have a central authority that is in charge of telling people more or less what to believe, but Protestants are free to make their own interpretations so they sometimes choose to believe stuff that sounds crazy to outsiders.
The Catholic Church happens to believe in evolution, so most Catholics accept evolution as well.
Yes, but no. It's still quite common in other places as well (take a guess), but none you are as likely to hear of as the US. The US may also be the developed nation in which such belief is most common and - more importantly - openly discussed.
It definitely is an American evangelical/fundamentalist thing. (Might also be elsewhere, I can't say) The history is that in the 1800s many seminaries, beginning with German seminaries, began teaching theology that differed from traditional orthodoxy. In the early 1900s a counter-movement emerged in the US which insisted on five fundamentals (hence "fundamentalist"): the Bible is "infallible" and inspired by God, the virgin birth of Jesus, the bodily resurrection of Jesus, that Christ's death atoned for our sins, and the reality of Jesus' miracles. It seems that over time the first point seems to become a literal interpretation of much of the Bible, in particular, Genesis 1. I assume this is because the Modernist theology has to symbolize the Bible if it wants to harmonize the Bible with Modern ideas about there is no literal God, miracles can't happen, etc., since a God that exists and intervenes (e.g. miracles) is kind of the whole point of the text. I'm not totally what happened or why, but it seems like the fundamentalists simplified things from "these are our assumptions" to "this is what the Bible says". YEC is the poster-child, but an unnuanced, one-sided view is endemic. I think evangelicals were originally more nuanced, but over time seem to have merged with the fundamentalists.
However, I don't think the Church has historically had an official position on how long creation took. I know some early Church fathers figured Creation took 6000 years: "a day is to the Lord as 1000 years". I also assume that "1000 years" had a similar feeling as "a million years" to us: you can do math with it, but a million years is pretty much an unimaginably long time.
It is also well-known that it is a hermeneutical error to interpret poetry literally, but there is little recognition, at least among evangelicals/fundamentalists that Genesis 1 is actually poetry, and hence interpreting it literally is what I would call a hermeneutical gaffe.
I think there's a strong evangelical influence over Catholic culture in the US. Church doctrine does acknolwledge evolution, but with certain exceptions such as human consciousness.
Indeed, and in particular it's the coupling of the eternal soul to the temporal body, that is held to be inaccessible to naturalistic inquiry. There are similar problems surrounding reproduction.
The thought process is probably the same reason we're all telling ourselves LaMDA and GPT-3 can't be conscious:
Our subjective experience of reality constantly eludes our ability to explain in terms of any physical or informational processes, so every time a system becomes explicable, it leaves the domain of "things which might be self-aware".
Some people take this in the other direction and attribute a soul to everything, others go further and say that even our self awareness is an illusion.
I was raised Catholic in a very rural rustic area of midwest USA, and we Catholics laughed at those of other religions who "didn't believe in evolution".
Yeah same here; not catholic but, for the Netherlands, very strict Christian (I do not know the particular name in English); we were taught evolution, dinosaurs and carbon dating etc.
> And suggesting that dinosaurs weren't real would just get you laughed out.
There's a contrarian part of me that sees this as somewhat negative. It suggests that perhaps some students may actually have hidden beliefs that they're simply unwilling to expose due to the lack of space for unconventional ideas in the environment. Are students being educated or merely bullied into a particular point of view?
That's another question from this study. They say students "given instruction on the nature of science" accept evolution more readily. What is the "nature of science?" And, what does that instruction entail, exactly?
Unspoken political views are pretty common in the US, and they’re likely why identity (and dog-whistle) politics play such an important role in US politics.
Yes it is. To put it bluntly a large portion of the American population is scientifically illiterate. Some of them believe the earth is around 6000 years old. They even have museums dedicated to such things.
upvote this as an American but not for the reason that you might think; outside of college towns, you are going to be surprised at the actual education and literacy levels about anything. You can definitely find college undergrads and get them to say dumb things on camera, too (a reflection of their social surroundings)
It’s a slow process due to American fundamentalist culture.
“The church first brought evolution into the fold in 1950 with the work of Pope Pius XII.
At the same time, Catholics take no issue with the Big Bang theory, along with cosmological, geological, and biological axioms touted by science.
In fact, the Roman Catholic Church has recognized Darwinian evolution for the past 60 years. It openly rejects Intelligent Design and Young Earth Creationism saying that it "pretends to be science.”
“
Well Nicolaus Copernicus was maybe a priest (definitely received minor orders and served as a church canon), but that didn't seem to speed up the acceptance of heliocentrism by the church...
Catholic school here in Canada explicitly teaches evolution and has done so for a very very long time.
Since Catholicism is pretty "centralized" as far as religion goes and since the official ex cathedra position has been a-ok with evolution since 1950 and arguably earlier, I have no idea how this story could possibly be true.
Living in the south in America I've encountered this mindset over and over. One of the best people I ever hired, absolutely top tier intelligent and productive, completely believed in the young earth theory and that dinosaur bones were placed there by god. Not exclusive to catholics, southern baptists, etc. Just "religious people in the south".
It's depressing and my cousin's son who is being home schooled by the same sort of religious mother is just criminally under-educated for his age. We don't live in a small city, one of the larger ones in America. It's just sad to see that this is often the status quo around here.
> my cousin's son who is being home schooled by the same sort of religious mother is just criminally under-educated for his age
That's why home schooling is just a terrible thing to allow to happen to kids. They can't choose what bullshit they're fed at home, mandatory free public education to some level is the main thing that can help them have a decent start at life.
There is no panacea. Many children may be tragically under-served by their home educations, but a great many children are tragically under-educated in the public school system, too.
My partner and I, not at all religious, are home-schooling our eleven-year-old because the public school was completely failing him. Pandemic-era zoom classes were especially worthless. By contrast, a few hours of parental attention each day has him thriving. We have the freedom to work with his natural curiosity, and the normal variations in the pace of skill development, instead of boxing him into a fixed curriculum.
Is that genuinely true of Catholics in your area? I had thought the organized structure of the brand made them far less prone to young-earth theory than non-denominated Protestants.
They do a decent job, but members of Catholicism aren’t entirely immune to psychological biases.
If you grow up as a catholic in the south, you’re in the minority. Sunday mass is just a small part of someone’s week, and you’ll spend most of your time around Protestants.
Most people are heavily influenced by their peers, and it can be pretty jarring for someone to accept that an ideology they’ve surrounded themselves with is wrong.
That sounds strange, Catholic church and schools never had problems with evolution and enforcing literal creationism. It's a issue predominantly common among some of the Protestant denominations in the US.
While attending school in Poland, I met only two people my age who believed evolution was a hoax and could be considered to be young Earth creationists. One of them was a Jehovah Witness, and the other was a member of an American-style Pentecostal and evangelical church.
I had a weird experience in high school as well, with my now-partner. She was completely surprised by the age of the earth and everything else that comes with it (dinosaurs, evolution, etc.)
Her parents did not even feel this way, but the home school co-ops they sent her to had taught her this.
That has nothing to do with actual Catholic theology, which doctrinally has no problem with genetics, evolution, dinosaurs, etc. This is also true of most European Protestant religious groups.
They see the bible story as allegorical and so not expected to be taken literally. Evolution is seen as simply the mechanism through which god chose to act. Creationism is largely an American thing, in Europe most Christians consider such people fringe nut jobs.
I took comparative religion studies at University. The first weeks of class, the Christian teacher (the other was a formal Buddhist) said clearly, you can easily divide modern Christian denominations between those that take the Bible as literal Truth, and those that do not; the latter generally being the literate ones.
Is this for real? I have never heard of a catholic school teaching fundamentalism like this. Not saying it doesn't exist, but would have to be pretty fridge.
I went to Catholic schools and there I learned that evolution/big-bang were church doctrine, the Bible is not the literal word of God but divinely inspired, and that God probably wouldn’t hold it against a just non-believer when it came to determining their fate.
So I’m not sure when your friend went to this school or if they were in a weird sect (mine was Jesuit) but it does not match my experience
This was a conservative area at the height of Republicans' push to teach "intelligent design" in schools instead of evolution.
I wouldn't be surprised if this was the result of tribalism, or deliberately not teaching certain things to keep parents happy. At the time, parents were sending kids to private schools so they wouldn't be "indoctrinated" into an atheist/scientific agenda with evolution in the curriculum.
At my undergrad, there would be after hours "talks" by religious leaders about the foolishness of plate tectonics, the fallacy of radiocarbon dating, etc etc. At least for hardcore Bible literalists, believing that the world is older than X generations (with the lineage spelled out in the old testament) is to believe that the Bible is false, and therefore their whole religion is disproved. My family was raised this way too.
The very fact life is billions of years old and all these religous texts don't even mention about it even once or the fact that dinousaurs existed for hundreds of millions of years really makes a lot of organized religions look like fools. Anyone who reads about evolution will realize that we are not special, our species is not special and god's son being a human is just a narcisstic idea ignorant people came up with 2000 years ago.
> The very fact life is billions of years old and all these religous texts don't even mention about it even once or the fact that dinousaurs existed for hundreds of millions of years really makes a lot of organized religions look like fools.
That is only true if you accept the idea of Biblical (or, more generally, textual) literalism, which is largely a feature of a subset of Evangelical Protestant sects in America starting in the mid-to-late 19th century.
For thousands of years prior to that, pretty much everyone was perfectly content understanding that these were stories to inform our understanding, some of them pure myth, some allegory, some depicting historical events (often with embellishments of one sort or another).
Sure, but technically speaking, a god could have created the universe, as is, while you were reading this sentence. It would appear, and you would know, that the universe is billions of years old, yet it would not be.
There's no contradiction once you assume an all powerful creator. That's why logic won't win these discussions.
My favourite variation of this is that the universe only comes into existence a week after you read this message, as the Creator made you with memories of reading this and me with memories of writing it.
Yes, and the Christian denomination (or at least what they'd like to consider themselves as) I was raised in would point at Catholic Church and laugh at its spiritual weakness, seeing acceptance of evolution as a compromise in both senses of the word.
I wouldn't use "believe" in the context. Catholic church does not specifically endorse evolution, but it finds no conflict between scientific concept of evolution and its teachings. I would call it "acceptance".
Many small Pentecostal and evangelical churches gain a lot of media attention thanks to their conservatism, fundamentalism and obscure views. Fortunately, they do not constitute the majority of Christians worldwide (at least not yet).
It is optional though and not endorsed - more like has not been clearly denounced. Even then the publication used for permitting believing it advises caution.
I guess it depends how you define religion. From the abstract:
> We carried out two nationwide data collections that allowed us to compare differences in the acceptance of evolution in Italy and Brazil by high school students who declare to belong to the same religion in the two countries. Roman Catholic students showed significant differences between the two countries, and the gap between them was wider than between Catholics and non-Catholic Christians within Brazil. Our conclusions support those who argue that religious affiliation is not the main factor in predicting the level of evolution acceptance.
My hunch is that being Catholic doesn't really mean the same thing in different countries, so the conclusion doesn't make much sense to me. Of course it's not the "religious affiliation" that matters but how the religion is practiced. I don't like the mismatch between the title and the abstract and actual study (the title mentioning religion rather than religious affiliation).
> Some factors may act as obstacles to the acceptance of evolution, such as religion, a lack of openness to experience, and not understanding the nature of science
Maybe this is just by bias but so often I see "listen to us, not them" as some kind of argument for why to believe in something, and I think the tone of this study feels similar. What about the idea that we should question stuff and not go down the "science tells us" faith based path.
What if the same underlying factors that might cause someone to believe unquestioningly in biblical creation are the same that could lead to someone believing unquestioningly in evolution. And likewise, what if being more of a skeptic causes people to reject, or at least moderate their opinion, on both.
I don't go in for "teaching the controversy" per se, but I do support a less faith based approach to education, which includes encouraging people not to blindly accept "science". My read is there has been a massive religious shift in that direction
I agree, scientific literacy is the problem. Too many people see Science as a replacement for religion and just say things like "trust the science" or act as if "science" is a noun that means things it doesn't. "We used science to prove our point" doesn't man a damn thing to me unless I've read the study.
The thing about the scientific method, is that it replaces faith, and people don't know what to do with that. Most people, even on the science side (myself included) just trust that "the science checks out" in the same way people just trust that "the Bible was written using divine influence outside the corruption of mortal man".
TL;dr- Teach critical thinking, which is the backbone of the scientific method, so above all else and hope for the best. Critical thinking is very hard, especially when you're not an expert on a matter, and that's the problem we can't ever solve: Nobody can be interested in everything enough to actually investigate it, even tough many of the things they're not investigating are extremely important to their lives.
It looks like the title of the paper is misleading, because they chose two Catholic countries to study and Catholicism is broadly accepting of evolution. As such, this was a study specifically on Catholicism, and not religion in general.
This study would be far more informative in countries where common religious doctrine is more oppositional to evolution.
> Roman Catholic students showed significant differences between the two countries, and the gap between them was wider than between Catholics and non-Catholic Christians within Brazil.
If we're talking about Christianity in particular, there's a divide between believing in the literal or figurative interpretations of the Bible.
The literal interpretation of the Bible is that the Earth is ~7000 years old and everything stated in the Bible is fact as written. The figurative interpretation isn't necessary inconsistent with things like evolution. The belief system simply switches to God triggering that process.
In other countries, at least in my experience, the figurative interpretation is more dominant, particularly in developed nations. Religion isn't a militant political force and there are no serious attempts to equate creationism (aka "intelligent design") as science or otherwise equivalent to evolution.
The US has a particularly problematic mix of factors that have become a problem for everyone:
1. The US has a problem with anti-intellectualism. I mean this came up in Kanye's recent meltdown. There was a clip from his interview tour that went something like "I don't see why I should have to understand or know anything". And that about sums it up. This isn't about being dumb or even ignorant. It's about being wilfully ignorant. This is a key driver for attacking public education;
2. The evangelicals are a particular militant and politically active sect that wish to dominate secular society. In many ways, they would like to hold the political power and position that the clerics of Iran hold in government. The history of this movement is interesting by itself. It evolved in the 19th century as the US expanded westward with homegrown preachers who really had no teaching or understanding of accepted Christian teachings, understanding and philosophy. Instead this was actively rejected. This led to other sects being formed, most notably the LDS Church (ie Mormons). These sects also have significant influence from American exceptionalism and white supremacy.
3. These sects teach a kind of theocracy where all authority is to be mistrusted and ignored except for the Church leaders.
All of this is the perfect storm for political manipulation.
I've known plenty of people who "accept" evolution but don't understand the concepts of emergence or how they apply to evolutionary biology. When any idea, no matter how right and true, decides that it needs to engage in ideological branding to promote itself, it invariably becomes a religion. Treating "belief in evolution" as a litmus test for being educated or knowing the truth just replaces internalizing and comprehending concepts with some tribal shibboleth. Everyone is obsessed with the what and the why, but the meat is almost always found in the how.
Catholic doctrine states that evolution is accepted by The Church. Not 100% related, but I dislike seeing everyone lumping Catholics with... Protestants.
Dr. Francis Collins, director of Human Genome Project under President Bill Clinton and director of NIH under Presidents Barak Obama and Joe Biden, wrote a book in which he argues that the Theory of Evolution and Religion do not contradict each other [1].
[1] Francis S. Collins "The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief", 2006
I'm no longer religious, but my parents—both PhDs—are.
Their take on this has always been along the lines of "The Bible says God created the world, and all the creatures in it. Evolution is the tool He used in that creation process."
So long as you're not dogmatic and don't insist on treating the Bible—particularly any one particular edition—as absolute, ironclad Truth, religion and science are absolutely not incompatible. Many of the professors—both sciences and humanities—at the college they both work at also go to their church (American Episcopal, fwiw).
IIRC from my evolutionary biology seminar back from 2012, I believe this is mostly true for most? Christian groups and they support evolution and teach religion along side it.
Like politics, it's the highly vocal christian groups that eschews evolution for creationism that make it an issue in the first place.
I am an atheist who went to a methodist university (but might as well be secular at this point) and I personally don't see conflicts between evolution and religion.
My best friend since college once sent me the book "Uncommon Dissent: Intellectuals Who Find Darwinism Unconvincing". Lots of positive reviews on Amaz*. I remember getting sent an essay, too, that argued that most eminent scientists gravitated towards a belief in g8d later in life.
Few eminent scientists produce great science at that point. It is no surprise that minds deteriorating with age reach absurd conclusions. The question before us is, of course, whether it is mental deterioration or accumulative wisdom.
After all, many eminent scientists also claim to not know their children in the last few moments of their life. Were they suddenly privy to some grand truth or were their minds breaking?
Richard Dawkins, enter even more impressive credentials here, also wrote a book "The God Delusion" in which he - as part of the overal story that there is no god - spends some pages completely debunking the claim of Collins.
I spent a lot of time as a young teenager on various message boards, particularly TalkOrigins, arguing against creationism and its various nonsensical offshoots. It taught me a lot about biology, but it also taught me a lot about the nature of truth, and how people believe things emotionally more often than they believe things rationally. The quantity and persuasiveness of evidence doesn't matter if a person has an emotional investment in their own version of the truth.
So when Trumpism came around, with all of it's big lies and little lies and conspiratorial thinking, I wasn't too shocked. It almost seems natural that as one set of emotionally-driven mythologies fades away (biblical literalism) some other version would have to fill the void.
Interesting, I also feel like I've been fighting this fight (in person, in debates that were a side project of our academic decathlon club) since I was a teenager, and learned some of the same lessons. Though I don't know that it's zero-sum: I don't think flat eartherism, evolution denial, anti-vaxxism or the like "made way" for Trumpism in the sense that they became less popular and Trumpism became more popular; it might be the other way around, that these tend to reinforce each other and have a large overlap. There seems to be an undercurrent in all of them that you can simply deny and disbelieve the facts you don't like and make them go away.
Denial of evolution often goes hand in hand with denial of the age of the Earth, which requires mental gymnastics to explain away the blatant evidence of Earth's age that are similar to the mental gymnastics required to explain why a spherical Earth is flat.
Flat-earthers have invented a modern controversy over a topic that has been considered settled ever since Aristotle, while evolution has only been widely accepted in the last 200 years. The one is a recently invented conspiracy theory, while the other is a rejection of a relatively recent scientific development.
Disbelief in Evolution as the origin of life is rooted in a belief about the origins of the universe that is fundamentally impossible to falsify either way.
In fact you can believe evolution exists and also believe that it is not the ultimate origin of life without in any way disagreeing with established scientific fact.
It's falsifiable, but not trivially. For example, due to atmospheric refraction we can see some distance around the curvature of the Earth. A common Flat Earth "demonstration" / "gotcha" is to show examples of photographs taken of distant objects, that shouldn't be visible because they'd be below the horizon (checkmate, Globalists). The optics phenomena are complicated, and most people have to take it on faith that the physicists aren't lying. And if you already think there's a global conspiracy to deny the Flat Earth, that's a non-starter.
There are a lot of things like this where it's actually a bit more complicated -- some second-order effect that isn't satisfactorily explainable with high school physics. And they have them all memorized as talking points. So a naive debater can get caught unawares and look foolish.
Today when we can go into space and fly literally around the world it's trivially falsifiable. So no, it's not the same thing in any sense of the word.
I think one major difference is that flat earth-ism requires blatant worldwide conspiracies whereas young earth-ism could be compatible with mere worldwide incompetence.
It's not so hard to accidentally screw up radiocarbon dating of a sample. And it's not unheard of for a whole field of study to royally screw up (e.g. the replication crisis in psychology).
But it's very hard to accidentally screw up "this weather satellite takes a picture of the earth every hour and it clearly shows a sphere". And the flight paths of planes. And and and and ...
My friend works for a major aerospace corp and likes to engage (politely) with people who believe it's impossible to go into space and so forth, in hopes of possibly educating someone whose mind isn't already made up.
I was surprised to learn there is a very large proportion of flat Earthers in this group. They genuinely believe what they say. They also argue using every logical fallacy possible. He said he only had one genuine conversation, i.e. with someone trying to understand his argument and not just refute it, in several years.
Numerous people with these beliefs show up to ridicule the very idea of space travel or a spherical Earth on pretty much every single relevant video and article ever that has a comment section. That would seem to indicate that a lot of people hold these beliefs.
Yes, unfortunately. It's one of those things where an ironic meme/movement eventually gets coopted by people who don't pick up on the irony and are sincere.
It's similar to 4chan/TheDonald ironically meme-ing about Trump until it wasn't ironic, and boomers unironically taking shit they read on anonymous message boards as fact.
Yes. Although both are false non-acceptance of evolution is disbelief in abstract analysis of a world that was and cannot be directly perceived. Belief in a flat earth requires disregarding the direct evidence of your own eyeballs and perception of the concrete world as it is. The former is regrettable. The latter suggests that perhaps you belong in a facility with someone looking after you.
Very different. The earth being a globe is observable and is a fact. Evolution is a theory and is not observable at all. It is all based on a huge assumption (we THINK that is how things happened).
The wide-spread acceptance of evolution is because of lack of another explanation of how life must have come into existence when you cannot bring yourself to give any possibility to a supernatural entity.
No, it's based on observation and mathematical models. Computer science helped a lot in this regards, and i found myself at a loss when people on "Hacker"news don't seems to know about a whole field of their discipline.
Hell, we recently had a computer simulation that demonstrated HGT. I thought any engineer would have been interested on this story, but apparently not.
A computer simulation, programmed to simulate based on rules you have provided beforehand, and did you ever question that?!
Artificial intelligence models trained on content derived from society will produce content that conforms to what it was trained with. Likewise simulations given similar rules will of course result in an outcome favourable to the rules specified. But of course you will take things at face value because "it's all science"!
Wow, that's aggressive. I merely pointed out that in my opinion, the fact that HGT appeared from scratch in a computer simulation was interesting enough for engineers who feel strongly about the subject to be aware of it. This isn't particulary interesting to me and I know about it.
Also, when I was a student and had to much time, we built a genetic algorithm to train a connect 4 IA, and it helped me understand how a very simplified evolution theory actually work. I would advise you to do the same (let's face it, CS courses are a joke and you probably could do this during classes)
Very much so. Both are not rational, but for different reasons.
Flat earth is something that you can readily disprove through both personal experience and physical evidence. Fly around the world in an air plane or sail by boat, see the curvature from high elevation or low orbit, etc.
Religious belief is, practically by definition, belief in something that is not falsifiable. It is inherently not rational (otherwise it would be acceptance rather than belief). There are rationalizations and arguments that some will accept, but the heart of the matter is that belief is the difference between religion and science.
As a religious believer, I upvoted this because I think you have a very good point--denying sensory evidence without a good reason is weak. The strongest argument for religion, the Aquinas-style one, is that faith fills in the missing pieces of what we see and hear, not that it replaces them with outrageous lies.
This is a conciliation, it's not real. Of course religious beliefs are falsifiable. Religions make falsifiable predictions all the time. Gods live on Mount Olympus? Go meet them. Oh, they're not there? Hypothesis falsified. An angel protects you from harm. You're harmed? Hypothesis falsified. Prayer makes it more likely for a divine force to intercede on someone's behalf. Medical outcomes in a double-blind prayer study do not differ between groups? Hypothesis falsified.
The fact that we have not invented the craft which can travel to heaven, or created the instrument that can detect a djinn, does not mean that those things are not falsifiable from a first principles perspective: they are technological and practical challenges, not philosophical ones.
If you think otherwise, you must think that the definition of religious belief inherently incorporates its non-observability and non-potency: that which cannot be detected and which has no effect. In which case, it's clearly not "real" in any useful sense that you can share with someone else.
It's just that it's such an obnoxious and antagonistic thing to say to people who keep religion, and sometimes to ourselves, so we bend our discourse around it in an effort to preserve peace and avoid saying it directly: a conciliation.
> that which cannot be detected and which has no effect. In which case, it's clearly not "real" in any useful sense that you can share with someone else.
... and yet we pour tons of money into the search for dark matter and dark energy, things that we cannot observe directly and are hypothesized only because there are gaps in our mathematical models of how the universe ought to work.
Your analogy is inapt; the whole reason dark matter is hypothesized is precisely because of the directly observable, inarguable effects it has; we can even see that it is both not evenly distributed and not distributed congruently with matter, so we know enough of its nature to give a name to the phenomenon.
Regardless, you've misunderstood my point, which is that if you expect religious phenomena to be undetectable (not "we haven't observed it" but "you can never observe it") and ineffectual (not "we haven't observed its effect" but "you can never observe any effect") then it simply isn't real in any useful sense: religious, scientific, or otherwise.
And I don't think religious people believe that: I think they think their religion is real, in that it has effects (a volcano doesn't erupt because we've made appropriate sacrifices to it; my consciousness will live on in some way in the presence of other personhoods after my death, in another place; Florida will be hit by more frequent natural disasters because schoolteachers tell students that gay people exist) and is observable (my charismatic evangelical preacher speaks meaningful sentences in a foreign language when possessed by a spirit; unhappy dead emerge from the ground each year to be led by Hecate against the living).
I'm pointing out that while, as a conciliation (essentially, because people dislike it so much and grow antagonistic and violent when challenged), we often say that religion and science are separate, or that religion, as something that is taken as faith, is not investigable by scientific methods; in fact if religion has any reality or meaning then it is investigable. Not necessarily as a practical matter (though to some extent, it is practicable), but there's no principle that precludes any religious hypothesis from being tested.
To boil it down: if a religion were real, we could test it. An assertion that it's untestable is equivalent to saying that it's purely imaginary. That's different from saying that we just can't test it yet.
There is no reproducible experiment proving algebra either. It doesn't make algebra a religion. There is no reproducible experiment proving that French is an offshot of Latin. Is this a religion too?
Evolution is a theory and is not observable at all. It is all based on a huge assumption (we THINK that is how things happened).
The wide-spread acceptance of evolution in the west is because of lack of another explanation of how life must have come into existence when you cannot bring yourself to give any possibility to a supernatural creator. The same people who would fume when you mention a god will very happily accept an assumption when the word "science" is attached to it.
Just because we can observe mutations doesn't in any way prove evolution in a macro level that results in speciation. Yet it's treated as fact by so many without even knowing enough about it. An average person's acceptance of evolution is no different to a religious person's acceptance of a creator, no matter how much you'd like to think otherwise.
Sorry, but this falls into the category of "not even wrong". Writing "evolution is just a theory" implies that you have a foundational misunderstanding of terminology that means it's not worth engaging with the rest of your comment until that is cleared up. You may want to start here:
> A scientific theory is "a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world that can incorporate facts, laws, inferences, and tested hypotheses"
Your comment tells me you have preached this a few times that you've memorised it. I say this because you added "just" when I actually didn't have that in my comment. Read again. "Evolution is a theory and not observable" is not the same as "evolution is JUST a theory". Theory, scientific theory, whatever, it's not fact, is it? The "scientific" community have been so desperate about labelling it as fact that they've redefined what a scientific theory means and are trying to pretend that it's actually a fact, completely disregarding observability and repeatability of the hypothesis.
You 'believe' in evolution, I believe in a supernatural creator. We're both believers.
That's just not how any of this works. You need to start from scratch and at the very least learn basic terminology before making broad sweeping claims. Saying "Theory, scientific theory, whatever, it's not fact, is it?" means you lack a basic understanding of the topic.
So much delusion, so much effort to make things sound complex and sophisticated to justify your beliefs. A fact is something like the sun existing, giving out heat.. etc. A theory or scientific theory isn't that, is it? So what if there is difference between the terminologies, not that I'm ignorant of the difference but in this context it doesn't matter because neither is fact.
Exactly my point. So in absence of a better explanation we will just acceptance SOMETHING to give us some comfort so we can distance ourselves from religious people. Doesn't matter that our BEST explanation may not be true
This one is tough, because the validity and utility of scientific theories / models is not based on a simple true/false dichotomy. The Standard Model of physics can describe phenomenon to an astounding level of accuracy, but it still has plenty of unsolved problems.
I don’t think some new model of physics will come along and radically upend it, but if there is a new model that is more accurate, then that new model will supersede it.
For instance, special relativity did not falsify Newtonian mechanics and we still use the latter all the time in the scientific and engineering world.
If I thought the religious argument was better, I would accept it.
I have to be satisfied with the best until something else comes along that is better :)
Like plate tectonics or helicobacter pylori.
But, as Faraday apparently said: “I hold my theories on the tips of my fingers, so that the merest breath of fact will blow them away”. Some people don’t. Dogma.
We were able to show the evolutionary behavior on the microscopic scale. And there were multiple experiments doing it so far - your statement on the lack of observability is false.
You won’t believe it anyway. I can point to SNP mutations leading to macro-scale changes right now - achondroplasia. It’s not worth trying to convince you the obvious implication that concentrating many of these changes in a separate breeding population eventually results in speciation because at this point anybody in denial of evolution is doing so simply on the basis of faith
Incorrect. You're making an affirmative claim "X can't happen" in spite of mound of evidence to the contrary. You need to explain why you refute say, the origin of species specifically. This is how scientific criticism/refutation actually works, by pointing out specific issues in the reasoning or methods, not by saying "You're wrong".
Let's start with that: Why was Darwin wrong? Take as long as you'd like
Here, if we're going to keep going like this please do me a favor and read here: https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/common-logical-fallacies. You'll at least be better prepared to deal with the counter-trolling you encounter on message boards.
Don't get me wrong, the notion of evolution makes sense; small changes leading to bigger changes long-term. but just because the logic makes sense doesn't mean that is what happened.
That's... not relevant? We've discovered quite a bit about how the world works in the last century and a half since then. For example, we've discovered that people trying to propagate a concept of "micro" vs "macro" evolution are simply parroting an anti-intellectual rejection of fact.
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[1] Teleology is the assumption that things have a purpose. The divergence between teleologists and whatever its opposite is (scientists?) is that the latter starts by asking what is the cause? and the former starts by asking what is the point? Everything can be traced back to that initial flapping of the butterfly's wings.
[2] An extremely abridged version goes something like this: a cursory inspection of the world around us seems to indicate that it was designed. So let us adopt that as a hypothesis. What would be expect to see? Well, one thing we would expect is that the designer might have provided a manual to go along with his/her/its designed creation. And lo and behold, there is such a manual. Actually, there are many such manuals. Collectively they are referred to as holy texts. The logical rabbit warren branches out from there.