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Acceptance of evolution by high school students: Is religion the key factor?

heavyset_go 4y ago
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.
- gambiting 4y ago
  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.
  - saint_fiasco 4y ago
    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.
    - namdnay 4y ago
      Nah, no one believes that in Denmark or Germany either It’s a nutty evangelical thing, not a mainstream Christian thing
  - programmer_dude 4y ago
    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.
    - _dain_ 4y ago
      that hasn't been a relevant cultural force for at least a decade
    - mistrial9 4y ago
      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)
      - programmer_dude 4y ago
        > outside of college towns, you are going to be surprised at the actual education and literacy levels about anything Surprised how?
  - chmod775 4y ago
    > Is that some weird American thing? 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.
  - tluyben2 4y ago
    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.
  - analog31 4y ago
    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. Disclosure: Went to Catholic university
    - yarpen_z 4y ago
      Catholics teaching includes the existence of a unique soul in each human - this obviously cannot be a product of evolution.
      - mcphage 4y ago
        However, the soul isn't biological, so it is completely orthogonal to evolution.
      - analog31 4y ago
        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.
      - aarpmcgee 4y ago
        Why could the soul not be a product of evolution?
        ben_w 4y ago
        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.
  - heavyset_go 4y ago
    This was during the height of the teaching of "intelligent design" in schools debacle, so I'd say it's very much a US thing.
  - jessaustin 4y ago
    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".
  - partdavid 4y ago
    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.
  - akira2501 4y ago
    > 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?
    - kube-system 4y ago
      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.
  - 77pt77 4y ago
    >Is that some weird American thing? Almost certainly. Also, in there most protestants don't consider Catholics to be Christians. The place is completely bananas.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - prewett 4y ago
    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.
- psweber 4y ago
  I went to 12 years of Catholic education and the mindset you describe was never mentioned once.
  - heavyset_go 4y ago
    I wouldn't doubt that this was a regional or a diocese/parish/whatever thing.
  - mbg721 4y ago
    Yeah, as a Catholic-school graduate, that seems bizarre. It would be more likely to hear my teachers deny transsubstantiation than to deny evolution.
  - ghotli 4y ago
    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.
    - mbg721 4y ago
      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.
      - kube-system 4y ago
        In practice, most people are more influenced by their environment than they are influenced by official doctrine.
        4y ago
- radlad 4y ago
  I had a weird experience in high school as well. A friend 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
- lordgroff 4y ago
  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.
- mensetmanusman 4y ago
  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.” “
  - cjjuice 4y ago
    Don't forget George Lemaitre, Catholic priest and formulator of the Big Bang Theory.
    - aidenn0 4y ago
      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...
      - mensetmanusman 4y ago
        Which is great in hindsight because he wanted it dogma that the Sun was the center of the universe:)
- yarpen_z 4y ago
  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.
- cjjuice 4y ago
  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.
  - heavyset_go 4y ago
    I'm going by what they told me, I never attended Catholic school.
- simonh 4y ago
  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.
  - mistrial9 4y ago
    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.
- opportune 4y ago
  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
  - heavyset_go 4y ago
    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.
- searealist 4y ago
  This is obviously a fake story.
  - kube-system 4y ago
    Why do you think that? I personally know grown adults who believe (or doubt) that dinosaurs did not exist.
  - heavyset_go 4y ago
    If I was going to write a fake story, I'd make it actually entertaining.
- 77pt77 4y ago
  That's preposterous. The catholic church explicitly admits evolution. Let me guess, this was in the USA?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
criddell 4y ago
Is non-acceptance of evolution any different from believing in a flat Earth?
- partdavid 4y ago
  Only in terms of popularity.
- heavyset_go 4y ago
  Functionally, no. 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.
- lolinder 4y ago
  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.
- standardUser 4y ago
  Does anyone truly believe in a flat Earth in this day and age? I think it's mostly a joke, except maybe for some people with actual mental illnesses.
  - partdavid 4y ago
    Yes.
  - heavyset_go 4y ago
    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.
g42gregory 4y ago
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
- browningstreet 4y ago
  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.
  - renewiltord 4y ago
    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?
    - throwoutway 4y ago
      Don’t resort to ad hominem attacks
      - renewiltord 4y ago
        What a complete non sequitur.
- Pietertje 4y ago
  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.
standardUser 4y ago
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.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- partdavid 4y ago
  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.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
atian 4y ago
Incentive structures are as old as the hills. You can’t sell me evolution just to be correct.
jvanderbot 4y ago
I don't see how it couldn't be the key factor. 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.
- WFHRenaissance 4y ago
  Catholics believe in evolution.
  - TeMPOraL 4y ago
    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.
    - WFHRenaissance 4y ago
      Sounds like a skill issue on their part.
  - gjsman-1000 4y ago
    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.
  - yarpen_z 4y ago
    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).
lisper 4y ago
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. --- [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.
- WFHRenaissance 4y ago
  The Catholic Church is able to merge telos and evolution. YEC should try harder.
  - aidenn0 4y ago
    Per TFA, apparently not in Brazil...
- hammock 4y ago
  What is teleology and what is the alternative?
WFHRenaissance 4y ago
Catholic doctrine states that evolution is accepted by The Church. Not 100% related, but I dislike seeing everyone lumping Catholics with... Protestants.
joobus 4y ago
There are no reproducible scientific experiments proving evolution. Evolution is as much a religion as all the others.
- orwin 4y ago
  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?
version_five 4y ago
> 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
- moate 4y ago
  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.
  - mbg721 4y ago
    The Mythbusters had it right; the difference between science and screwing around is paying attention and writing it down.
andrewclunn 4y ago
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. EDITTED FOR TYPOS
Pxtl 4y ago
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.
- mcphage 4y ago
  The summary states: > 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.
jmyeet 4y ago
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.
mavili 4y ago
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.
- mavili 4y ago
  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.
- moate 4y ago
  >>Evolution is a theory and is not observable at all. Citation needed...
  - mavili 4y ago
    Well, as "scientists" always claim, the onus is on proponents of the theory to show me observable evidence, not me on the lack of it.
    - opportune 4y ago
      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
    - 4y ago
cbolton 4y ago
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).
- partdavid 4y ago
  Agreed. They studied something quite narrow, and I don't think the results are particularly applicable to broader circumstances.

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.

gambiting 4y ago
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.
- saint_fiasco 4y ago
  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.
  - namdnay 4y ago
    Nah, no one believes that in Denmark or Germany either It’s a nutty evangelical thing, not a mainstream Christian thing
- programmer_dude 4y ago
  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.
  - _dain_ 4y ago
    that hasn't been a relevant cultural force for at least a decade
  - mistrial9 4y ago
    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)
    - programmer_dude 4y ago
      > outside of college towns, you are going to be surprised at the actual education and literacy levels about anything Surprised how?
- chmod775 4y ago
  > Is that some weird American thing? 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.
- tluyben2 4y ago
  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.
- analog31 4y ago
  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. Disclosure: Went to Catholic university
  - yarpen_z 4y ago
    Catholics teaching includes the existence of a unique soul in each human - this obviously cannot be a product of evolution.
    - mcphage 4y ago
      However, the soul isn't biological, so it is completely orthogonal to evolution.
    - analog31 4y ago
      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.
    - aarpmcgee 4y ago
      Why could the soul not be a product of evolution?
      - ben_w 4y ago
        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.
- heavyset_go 4y ago
  This was during the height of the teaching of "intelligent design" in schools debacle, so I'd say it's very much a US thing.
- jessaustin 4y ago
  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".
- partdavid 4y ago
  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.
- akira2501 4y ago
  > 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?
  - kube-system 4y ago
    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.
- 77pt77 4y ago
  >Is that some weird American thing? Almost certainly. Also, in there most protestants don't consider Catholics to be Christians. The place is completely bananas.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- prewett 4y ago
  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.
psweber 4y ago
I went to 12 years of Catholic education and the mindset you describe was never mentioned once.
- heavyset_go 4y ago
  I wouldn't doubt that this was a regional or a diocese/parish/whatever thing.
- mbg721 4y ago
  Yeah, as a Catholic-school graduate, that seems bizarre. It would be more likely to hear my teachers deny transsubstantiation than to deny evolution.
- ghotli 4y ago
  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.
  - mbg721 4y ago
    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.
    - kube-system 4y ago
      In practice, most people are more influenced by their environment than they are influenced by official doctrine.
      - 4y ago
radlad 4y ago
I had a weird experience in high school as well. A friend 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
lordgroff 4y ago
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.
mensetmanusman 4y ago
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.” “
- cjjuice 4y ago
  Don't forget George Lemaitre, Catholic priest and formulator of the Big Bang Theory.
  - aidenn0 4y ago
    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...
    - mensetmanusman 4y ago
      Which is great in hindsight because he wanted it dogma that the Sun was the center of the universe:)
yarpen_z 4y ago
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.
cjjuice 4y ago
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.
- heavyset_go 4y ago
  I'm going by what they told me, I never attended Catholic school.
simonh 4y ago
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.
- mistrial9 4y ago
  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.
opportune 4y ago
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
- heavyset_go 4y ago
  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.
searealist 4y ago
This is obviously a fake story.
- kube-system 4y ago
  Why do you think that? I personally know grown adults who believe (or doubt) that dinosaurs did not exist.
- heavyset_go 4y ago
  If I was going to write a fake story, I'd make it actually entertaining.
77pt77 4y ago
That's preposterous. The catholic church explicitly admits evolution. Let me guess, this was in the USA?

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criddell 4y ago

Is non-acceptance of evolution any different from believing in a flat Earth?

partdavid 4y ago
Only in terms of popularity.
heavyset_go 4y ago
Functionally, no. 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.
lolinder 4y ago
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.
standardUser 4y ago
Does anyone truly believe in a flat Earth in this day and age? I think it's mostly a joke, except maybe for some people with actual mental illnesses.
- partdavid 4y ago
  Yes.
- heavyset_go 4y ago
  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.

g42gregory 4y ago

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

browningstreet 4y ago
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.
- renewiltord 4y ago
  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?
  - throwoutway 4y ago
    Don’t resort to ad hominem attacks
    - renewiltord 4y ago
      What a complete non sequitur.
Pietertje 4y ago
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.

standardUser 4y ago

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.

deleted 4y ago
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partdavid 4y ago
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.
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atian 4y ago

Incentive structures are as old as the hills. You can’t sell me evolution just to be correct.

jvanderbot 4y ago

I don't see how it couldn't be the key factor. 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.

WFHRenaissance 4y ago
Catholics believe in evolution.
- TeMPOraL 4y ago
  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.
  - WFHRenaissance 4y ago
    Sounds like a skill issue on their part.
- gjsman-1000 4y ago
  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.
- yarpen_z 4y ago
  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).

lisper 4y ago

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. --- [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.

WFHRenaissance 4y ago
The Catholic Church is able to merge telos and evolution. YEC should try harder.
- aidenn0 4y ago
  Per TFA, apparently not in Brazil...
hammock 4y ago
What is teleology and what is the alternative?

WFHRenaissance 4y ago

Catholic doctrine states that evolution is accepted by The Church. Not 100% related, but I dislike seeing everyone lumping Catholics with... Protestants.

joobus 4y ago

There are no reproducible scientific experiments proving evolution. Evolution is as much a religion as all the others.

orwin 4y ago
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?

version_five 4y ago

> 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

moate 4y ago
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.
- mbg721 4y ago
  The Mythbusters had it right; the difference between science and screwing around is paying attention and writing it down.

andrewclunn 4y ago

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. EDITTED FOR TYPOS

Pxtl 4y ago

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.

mcphage 4y ago
The summary states: > 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.

jmyeet 4y ago

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.

mavili 4y ago

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.

mavili 4y ago
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.
moate 4y ago
>>Evolution is a theory and is not observable at all. Citation needed...
- mavili 4y ago
  Well, as "scientists" always claim, the onus is on proponents of the theory to show me observable evidence, not me on the lack of it.
  - opportune 4y ago
    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
  - 4y ago

cbolton 4y ago

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).

partdavid 4y ago
Agreed. They studied something quite narrow, and I don't think the results are particularly applicable to broader circumstances.