A number of science bloggers, myself included, often write about the current manifestation of creationism that is presently popular, but lately I've been starting to wonder why creationism is so well-received in the first place. Despite the fair amount of attention Expelled has attained on science blogs, it seems that most members of the public don't even know it's going to come out. Creationists have published their own technical journal for years, yet outside of a handful of "creation scientists," no one seems to care. Dozens of creationist books, essentially rehashed tracts of previously published material, are produced every year, yet I've met anyone who has ever read one. What is going on?
Although creationism (and its Trojan horse, intelligent design) receive seemingly wide support, it appears that many people don't need Ben Stein or AiG outlining the scientific evidence for what they believe. Whether Genesis is accurate or not is a faith issue, not a scientific one, and that's all that there is to it for many people. Films like Expelled and places like creation museums then serve to simply reinforce and edify pre-existing beliefs, not to educate or tell people about non-existent bleeding-edge research into "creation science." This is most abundantly clear from the statements of faith that many creationist organizations run under; they believe that their fundamentalist interpretation is without error, and so anything that contradicts their doctrine is immediately false.
It is often difficult for these people to hear that God is not evident in nature; there is no scientific evidence that any god actually exists. This runs counter to what the Bible says, most notably in Job;
But ask the animals, and they will teach you, or the birds of the air, and they will tell you;
or speak to the earth, and it will teach you, or let the fish of the sea inform you.
Which of all these does not know that the hand of the LORD has done this?
In his hand is the life of every creature and the breath of all mankind.
According to this the existence and beneficent of God must be obvious from the study of nature, but that isn't the case. While once explaining human evolution to a friend, they asked me, almost pleading, if there was any place in the fossil record where we could say "There; God did that." I replied that there was not, and if they tried to do so they'd just be pushing God into smaller and smaller spaces, thus making their beliefs more vulnerable rather than finding refuge for them. The lack of empirical evidence for a deity should not immediately cause someone to totally abandon their faith and give up on philosophical & theological issues tied to what they believe. There is conflict between science and religion, certainly, but the conflict stems from doctrines that make an assertion about the natural world that is either known to be false or that there is no evidence for. There's no reason to say the Bible is worthless because Genesis is not an accurate account of how humans came to exist.
The acceptance of creationism because it's consonant with pre-existing beliefs is difficult to overcome, but I think it can be fought if you happen to get a receptive ear. I've spoken to a number of people who believe in some sort of creationism, but when I talk about the evidence for evolution, the response I most often get is "I never knew about that." Granted, I've met some really antagonistic characters that have stormed off fuming at the very mention of the "e word," but with others I've been able to at least introduce them to the weight of the evidence that evolution is real and important to our understanding of nature (including ourselves). For one reason or another, most people just don't know about evolution, and I think it's a responsibility of those of us who have spent so much time studying it to at least try and tell other people about what makes us so excited.
On this blog, though, frustration can sometimes make me more venomous than I am in person, and when I rant about the latest creationist nonsense I'm almost always referring to people in charge of creationist ministries or organizations that I feel are dishonest, conniving individuals that do not deserve any modicum of respect. Being that I personally know some creationists, though, my invective here has sometimes strained friendships and landed me in a bit of hot water. To make things clear then, I don't think that people who believe in creationism or intelligent design are dim-witted by default. I may be extremely angry with people like Ken Ham, Ben Stein, Kent Hovind, Duane Gish, Jonathan Wells, etc. etc. etc., but my anger with their dishonesty and shady tactics does not extend to people who I have met that are extremely bright but do not thing evolution is accurate. I will firmly and vehemently disagree with what they say about science & nature, but they are by no means stupid.
Presently, I think most people have never properly been told what evolution is, what the evidence for it is, and why it is so important. If people hear anything about it, it's often from the television or their pastor, two of the worst sources if you want to learn about science. Not everyone is going to spend a lot of money on books or spend countless hours steeping themselves in evolutionary biology, but I think the biggest obstacle evolutionary science has to overcome in terms of relation to the public is that many people just don't know very much about what evolution really is. Changing this will require modifications to our education system and mass media outlets, but I don't think it's impossible.
As a final note, I sometimes feel that polls of acceptance of evolution muddy the issue more than they help it. Fundamentalist Christians and agnostics/atheists will end up being well-represented at the ends of the spectrum in surveys about evolution, but what about the people in the middle? If you think that evolution is the process by which God used to create, then your answer might be the same as someone who accepts an "old earth" but embraces intelligent design. The resolution on some of these surveys are not very good in terms of people who have mixed divine intervention & evolution (with a stronger emphasis towards one side or the other), especially since the issue is a very complex one that people have answered in a variety of ways. The point of all this, then, is that we shouldn't be basing our interactions with the greater public on our opinion of the Disco Institute or AiG.
[Hat-tip to Janet for inspiring this post]
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Most people I know who are religious and who believe in evolution don't embrace intelligence design. Or maybe I should be saying, they don't embrace Intelligent Design. From what I understand that they've explained to me, they believe god created the universe and may have set evolution in motion, but that's it. It'd like to say that this differs from the ID movement because these people get that this is a religious position, and don't want to see it in science class. I think its important that people understand the difference. There are a lot of religious people out there who understand that god cannot be explained by science and are fine with it, and don't want to see it forced into science as a pseudoscientific theory.
Good post, Brian, very thoughtful. I think the creationist movement gets a lot more press in the US, possibly because more people embrace it? I'm not sure. It gets much less attention in Canada, and I suspect even less in some western European countries, but that's just a gut feeling, and I don't actually know.
Interesting post.
I agree that
In fact, on a survey that includes some of the language in this comment of yours
I would check strongly disagree with "God is not evident in nature" and strongly agree with "there is no scientific evidence that any god actually exists."
I find God evident in nature: a God of creativity and variety and beauty and development and close connections and interrelatedness of everything living. The more I've learned about evolution, the more evident God seems.
Melanie,
This is true of many religious people who accept evolution, but not true of many others. For others, God is the ground of all being and/or present/immanent in all things at all times or in some other way continually connected to, supportive of, and/or an ongoing cause of everything at all times.
Not everyone sees God as a separate entity, standing over in the corner, doing things in some way magically different from or separate from what evolution is doing. In short, one thing I think that can create, rather than solve, problems in communicating evolution to the ordinary religious person is making unnecessary comments about what the communicator imagines evolution says about limitations on God.
Terrific post, Brian.
I think that this is something that we need to make very clear. There is a mountain of evidence pertaining to the dishonesty of the leaders of the ID Creationism movement, and it would be perverse for us not to conclude that they really are dishonest and deserve to be known as such. But that obviously doesn't mean that those who would subscribe to those beliefs are also dishonest.
I have found that most of the time it is simply due to ignorance (and we are all profoundly ignorant of most of human knowledge) of the subject (and science in general) and an emotional attachment to the idea that we really can say that God is evident in nature, scientifically. It frustrates me that, particularly in the technological age, so many people believe that they are knowledgeable across a whole range of issues, when they know very, very little in reality. I have always been comfortable admitting that I am ignorant of almost everything that there is to know, and that while questioning should be encouraged, I have a duty not to contribute to what is a scientifically illiterate world by pretending that I know things that I don't.
Obviously, this is not something that we can enforce, but I really do think that too many people fail to consider that it is the duty of all of us not to contribute to confusion and misunderstanding. I firmly believe that the right to free speech also impresses upon me the need to use it responsibly.
Julia said:
That's fine, but it wouldn't pass as scientific evidence, as I am sure that you are aware (I have seen some of your excellent commenting on other blogs). Could it not also be that this universe is really just virtual reality being run on an incredibly advanced computer? I am not sure that it possible to work out the likelihood of either scenario, but I would imagine that it is actually more likely, especially given what we know.
I don't want to go in to it here, but I read what you said on Dispatches about interconnectivity and thought that, for me at least, it is the other way around. The interrelatedness of everything suggests that there is no "God" at the heart of the universe because nature can't cut corners, so it would necessarily have to be interrelated. A "God" could indeed (I would imagine) create a universe that isn't interrelated right back to its (the present state, anyway) beginning.
Also, most cosmologists say that the overriding message that they take from the universe is that at the heart of it all is randomness.
Damian,
To clarify what I said, I wasn't trying to make any argument here for either the existence or nature of God. My comment was meant to add to what I think was a quite accurate criticism of the way surveys and polls tend to get worded. I was a writing teacher, and I remain very interested in discussions of language use.
I was suggesting that the phrase "evident in nature" is not a particularly useful one for surveys and likely not so useful either for helping religious people learn about evolution. Why? Because it has a meaning not tightly tied to scientific evidence; that could result in a religious person who already accepts evolution still saying, "Yes indeed, God is evident in nature."
You say,
I agree that I see no god at the heart of the universe or up in the sky or over in the corner somewhere. That's really, it seems to me, a fundamentalist idea - God as one entity in a world of entities, just bigger and better and more powerful or more central than the other entities: a sort of man-behind-the-curtain. The vision I had of God when I was a teenager, which has remained convincing to me in the nearly fifty years since, is not of a god located somewhere or other, but of God the ultimate unity of everything, including randomness, with (like many other wholes with which we are familiar) qualities beyond those of any of the parts.
I've so far found nothing illogical, irrational, or anti-science in thinking that all the connections and laws and items and systems that we know about (and the ones we haven't yet learned about and the ones we may never learn about because they don't exist as realities in this universe)come together in an ultimate unity, integrity, oneness.
I know that fundamentalists see randomness and God as opposites, but it seems clear that the universe includes an element of randomness. My understanding of the science is that the element of randomness in evolution, for example, forms part of a total system: it isn't all of evolution or separate from evolution or even the heart of evolution (depending on what you're focusing on). It's a unified, necessary and interrelated portion of evolution. And, I think, of God.
The computer over in the corner generating everything else as a virtual reality is a fun idea. But ultimately I have the same response to the computer as I do to the god-over-there-somewhere-in-some-corner view. As a metaphor, it can possibly suggest some useful insights. But taken literally, it's limited.
Who put it there? Where is there? Why wouldn't the computer itself be virtual? If everything is virtual, is anything real? After all, virtual as we know it, is real in its own way (Second Life is certainly real, real programming, real visuals, real people involved). Who's watching the show? And what is the computer made out of? In short, all the same problems one encounters with trying to visualize God as a separate entity.
Sorry for such a long post, but you had a lot of interesting ideas to respond to.
As a person of the Jewish faith who accepts evolution and loves science, I'd like to say thank you. Too many ignore the many, many differences between different types of "people of faith". I think we forget one thing, however. Just as many who reject evolution do so from a position of ignorance, many who accept evolution do so from a position of ignorance. More than half of Americans accept evolution, but only 27% are scientifically literate enough to follow a simple science story in a newspaper. My view on the subject, as an "expert" as it were in communications, is that how people come to accept/reject a particular idea often has little correlation to the actual value of the idea. There's a tangent I could go off on, but I'll leave it there. Again, thank you.