The National Center for Science Education keeps an eye on public views on evolution. Recently it reported a poll conducted by Angus Reid Public Opinion, a UK organization, on the question of whether human beings evolved from less advanced forms over millions of years or whether they were created by God in their present form within the last 10,000 years. The result for Great Britain was 68% supporting evolution, 16% creation, and 15% unsure. The result for Canada was 61% evolution, 24% creation 15% unsure. The result for the US was 35% evolution, 47% creation, 18% unsure.
NCSE compared these results with a series of Gallup polls from 1982 to 2008 that asked respondents to chose from three options: (1) Humans developed over millions of years, God-guided; (2) Humans developed over millions of years, God had no part; (3) God created humans as is within 10,000 years. The results were fairly consistent over the years, the 2008 results giving 36% for God-guided but over millions of years, 14% for the long period with God having no part, and 44% with creation as is within last ten thousand years.
NCSE concluded that 50% of Americans therefore accept evolution. Looking at the same figures, I draw a totally different conclusion. While it is true that there were people before Darwin, including his own grandfather, who had speculated about evolution, today the term is understood to include the Darwin-Wallace mechanism of random mutations and natural selection. There is no crying in baseball, and there is no guidance, God or otherwise, in Darwinian evolution. Only the 14% who accept that God had no part in the process can be said to believe in the theory of evolution as the vast majority of biologists and other scientists understands it today. God-guided development is possible, but it is unnecessary and just another form of intelligent design.
How does this jibe with the Angus Reid result? Notice that their poll did not specifically ask about God guidance. I am sure that a good part of the 35% of Americans who said they supported evolution would have given a different answer if they had been asked about unguided evolution. So Gallup's 14% supporting evolution, not NCSE's 50%, seems more likely.
The National Center for Science Education is one of many respectable organizations, including most scientific professional societies and the National Academy of Sciences, that educate the public on science and its contributions to society. Most have taken what is called the "accommodationist" position in dealing with religion. That is, they avoid getting into disputes with those religious organizations, such as the Catholic Church and most moderate Protestant groups, who do not undermine science. In this way, it is hoped, science will maintain the support of an influential segment of society.
Certainly this policy has merit, but there are limits on how accommodating we should be. I think it is rather obvious that scientists and science organizations should not hesitate to challenge any misinterpreted science, even when presented in religious discourse, rather than quietly go along in order to avoid conflict and maintain political support.
Churches and clergy receive special treatment in America. It is hard to see why their tax breaks and faith-based funding have not been held to violate the U.S. Constitution, especially when they use the funds for political or religious purposes. We can't expect to eliminate these government benefits given existing demographics. But we scientists can at least challenge false or misleading claims made by religion instead of disingenuously sweeping them under the rug. NCSE should have commented on the fact that the 36% of Americans who believe in God-guided "evolution" evidently do not understand the role of random variation and selection pressure in the actual theory of evolution, and therefore do not accept the mechanism of evolution as scientists understand it. It is not being rude or polemical to correct a public misunderstanding of a scientific theory. It is not doing your duty as tax-exempt educational organization to ignore such misrepresentations for political gain.
Just because the Catholic Church and moderate Protestant congregations say they have no problem with evolution, that doesn't mean they don't. NCSE and other accommodationist groups insist that evolution is compatible with Christianity. They point to the statement by Pope John Paul II in 1996 that seemed to support biological evolution. However, he made it clear that it was still one of several hypotheses still under dispute. Furthermore, he unambiguously excluded the evolution of mind, saying that "the spiritual soul is immediately created by God" and that theories of evolution that consider mind as emerging from living matter "are incompatible with the truth about man." No doubt the Pope has never considered the possibility that the evolution of the human species was not controlled by God.
As I discussed in my book Quantum Gods, Catholic and Protestant theologians and scientists have grappled with the problem of how God can act in the universe in a way consistent with both science and traditional Christian teachings. Diddling with natural selection would interfere with a scientific law. But perhaps God can control evolution by interfering with randomness. We humans cannot detect whether any finite sequence of numbers is random, so we might not have a way of detecting this.
Einstein said he would never believe in a God who plays dice. Maybe God does after all, but the dice are loaded.
This article will also appear in the September 2010 issue of Skeptical Briefs.
Karl Giberson, Ph.D: How Darwin Sustains My Baptist Search for Truth
He is once again attempting to prove people wrong about something that, at this stage in human development, is basically unprovable.
I understand Darwin's theory perfectly but I still think it is a system that could have been "created' by a unique intelligence. The fact that our "Universe" is more or less self-perpetuating does not preclude that it is the result of a catalytic event ("created") and that the event was result of a supreme intelligence.
When it comes to our cumulative knowledge of the Universe and existence, I'd say that we probably only know of minuscule fraction of everything we could know. In other words, the jury is still out.
Take the "Singularity" model of the Big Bang, for instance. A singularity popped out of "nowhere and no-when." This is science's way of saying "I don't know.....um......G-d?" Once science can answer the question of where existence itself came from, then we can talk about how silly it is to believe in G-d. Until then, science itself seems to support a belief in G-d.
1. They could care less about science.
2. They have never read The Origin of Species and rely on those who misrepresent its contents:
2 a. That species are distinctly separate entities with characteristics on which every scientist agrees, which they are not. There is scientific agreement as to what defines a species.
2 b. That Darwin's OoS reveals how life began, which it does not.
3. That the Bible is a literal historic account.
4. That if they disbelieve ToE they will go to Hell when they die.
5. They haven't the faintest idea how a scientific theory differs from a popular theory.
Fortunately, there are plenty of people who embrace science and who make good company.
On a recent PBS program, Neanderthals had an unchanging technology for 500,000 years. Then modern man evolved (or selected himself for) a better brain in response to the need to identify up to 150 people in his social group. The paradox is we then used that social skill set to change technology at a much faster rate than our ability to get along has changed. The result is a society that probably peaked in 'happiness' before 1914.
Neither evolution nor divine meddling can or will change what is fated--self extermination of some sort.
Whether I believe I was selected or created, it is what it is.
Does a poll taken of the 'man in the street' have any relevance to or influence on the geological record; will the poll lengthen my life? The tail is wagging the dog here. People make an unconscious choice about their life, e.g., causa sui project or god as all-powerful taker-of-responsibility, THEN they select a religion or belief to fit their bias, and answer the poll accordingly.
The results of the poll might be of some to a social scientist. Why should any other sort of scientist even be concerned?
“…consciousness, as Sartre has shown, always includes an implicit self-awareness (of death; a standing apart = ekstasis)” …”for self-realization…my own freedom, of my existing as simply that part of Being which brings Nothingness into the world….Death is actually the suppression of Nothingness, not of Being.” p. 441 in Barnes, Ex Ethics (see index for ‘nihilation’; p. 57 for Being, Nothingness, freedom.
He also said "the eternal mystery of the universe is its comprehensibility", because what science has discovered of the cosmos has been something calculable with numbers we can understand, phenomena we are capable of observing, and logical rules by which we can abide, but in many cases quantum physics defies these. He believed there had to be some hidden variable governing in a rational way the subatomic world. But that hasn't been found yet.
If you yourself do believe in a personal god (I don't, but I find it an endlessly interesting philosophical debate) then you might find a lot of fun and perhaps some insight in reading about this stuff... I can't get enough of it.
We should recognize that believing in evolution guided by god is a bit worse that simply not understanding evolution as scientists do. This is outright intellectual dishonesty. To say evolution was guided by god is arbitrary and is not supported by any of the evidence. It is just inserting a random idea into a good scientific theory to make it consistent with one's religion.
Sorry, evolution did not proceed with god involved. That is what the evidence points to. So in particular god did not individually design the animals. The diversity and apparent design of life is an excellent example of how the appearance of design could arise without any deities.
Moreover, given that one old argument for the existence of god was the apparent design of the world and we know that apparent design could arise via natural processes without god, I think the case for god has gotten weaker. In fact, the case for god is perpetually getting weaker. As a result, I think it is fair to conclude that god is mere made-up nonsense and dismiss god as likely nonexistent. I am very sorry, but it seems that science has rejected the god hypotheses.
To think to the contrary of any of this is just deliberate intellectual dishonesty in favor of personal religious beliefs. This deserves no respect whatsoever.
I was at the time still grappling with the implications of the 2nd Law of thermodynamics, which also asserted that stuff in a closed system( like my disheveled house) just doesn't organize itself, but tends to dis-organize itself-becoming more chaotic without an outside arranger imposing order again.
But "Natural selection" Was Darwin's Master stroke, it implies a robot housekeeper materialized in my house, which I never order, or indeed paid for: to keep things arranged properly. However, in my thought-experiments at the time I could not conceive of a way in which my house designed and built the robot to keep itself in order without outside plans or assistance.
Even Darwin's choice of the word "natural" is problematic. For the word "nature" originally was just another word for "God working prescriptively in History". Its the sense in which everything is working within the prescribed conditions we recognize as being of the Creative order of things: a religious term to be sure. If then, "Selection" was not "Natural", than what was it?
I believe the entire edifice stands or falls, on that one word.
It sounds like you're confusing "Mother Nature" (which does have supernatural overtones) with actual nature. Mother Nature is merely a label, a personification for assigning causality to events that occur in nature.
You started of by assuming the existence of a Creator ("outside plans or assistance"), but that doesn't come from nature, it comes from your own willingness to embrace magical beliefs. It's a slippery slope from that to "dinosaurs were on Noah's Ark"...
Fortunately for the earth's entire population in general, and for those of us who make their living as scientists in particular, what you "believe" makes no difference to either the practice of science, the benefits mankind reaps from that practice, or the nature of reality...because you are sadly mistaken.
There are plenty of phenomena to be observed, measured and reproduced (DNA, quarks, pulsars, planets orbiting other stars), and plenty more still to be discovered.
Science is doing just fine. It's not in in "the Dark Ages" at all.
http://www.venganza.org/
The core of evolutionary change is MUTATION.....natural selection comes afterward. There is no "logic" to it......critters don't change because they "need" to. Many critters needed to change and didn't. And went extinct. Others didn't "need" to, but changed anyhow. The changes that survived are ones that fit in with the local environment.
To say that critters evolved under the guidance of "God" may be one definition of the broad term "evolution", but it is not evolution as scientists understand it.
It's like the atheist who, on his death bed, accepts God...on the chance that he may be wrong.
No wonder the USA is so f'ed up right now. Thanks a lot Fundies. (unfortunately including almost my whole extended family)
http://30145.myauthorstie.com/