Why do fundamentalists reject evolution

This is potentially important, because students who are less accepting of evolution and perceive more conflict between their religious beliefs and evolution may be unlikely to use evolution in their thinking about science in the future or to pursue further learning about evolution beyond what is required of them in the classroom.

Indeed, in group settings, student comfort has been shown to be related to student outcomes such as persistence in a program and final grades in a course Micari and Drane, ; Eddy et al. We surveyed students from 10 introductory-level majors and nonmajors biology courses at a large public research-intensive university in the southwestern United States in which the population is moderately religious on average Barnes et al.

Students were surveyed in the last 2 weeks of their courses and all courses included evolution instruction. Instructors of the courses offered students extra credit as an incentive to complete the survey. The email recruitment told students that they would be filling out a survey about their conceptions of evolution.

Students were surveyed at the end of the semester after most evolution instruction had occurred. We used two separate measures of evolution acceptance that served different purposes. One measure let students define evolution acceptance for themselves self-defined measure and asked students to rate on a scale from 0 to the extent to which they accepted evolution; this is similar to measures used in other foundational studies in evolution education Bishop and Anderson, ; Sinatra et al.

The second measure we used is a published instrument called the Inventory of Student Evolution Acceptance I-SEA that predefines evolution acceptance for the respondents as the extent to which they agree with 24 items on a five-point Likert scale Nadelson and Southerland, The I-SEA has three subscales: acceptance of microevolution e.

We chose to use the I-SEA instead of other published instruments e. Further, there are claims that the I-SEA addresses many limitations of other evolution acceptance instruments Barnes et al. We measured student religiosity using a previously published scale Cohen et al. List as many things as you can think of. Inductive methods were used, because this specific question had never been explored among students, and we did not want to bias our findings, so we let themes emerge from the data.

A rubric was created by M. Next, the rubric was used independently by H. We used multiple linear regressions to determine whether writing that evolution is atheistic was related to lower levels of evolution acceptance depending on student religiosity level. After each regression model was fit to the data, we performed full regression diagnostics to make sure the statistical assumptions of this method i.

All results we report in the Results sections have passed the full diagnostics. Seventy-one percent of students were biology majors and the average end-of-semester GPA for these students was 3. This is similar to the overall student population at this institution, although the Asian students are slightly overrepresented in our sample compared with the broader population at the university, but that may be because Asian students tend to be overrepresented in biology National Science Foundation, National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics, Students reported an average of 80 out of on the 0— self-defined evolution acceptance measure.

A list of subthemes and their descriptions can be found in Section 1 of the Supplemental Material. Forty-one percent of students correctly reported that to accept evolution, a person would have to reject a literal interpretation of Judeo-Christian religious texts. Most biologists would agree that one would not be able to believe literally in many of the creation stories in the Judeo-Christian Bible to accept evolution.

TABLE 1. Students in this category most often indicated that a person would have to reject the existence of God or reject that God was responsible for the creation of life if that person were to accept evolution Table 1. We call this an atheistic perception of evolution Smith, ; National Academy of Sciences, , ; Gould, ; Scharmann, ; Nelson et al.

This suggests that perceiving evolution as atheistic is prevalent among highly religious students as well as students who score low on religiosity. For instance, the least religious student who is a biology major with a 4. Figure 1 illustrates this interaction effect of student religiosity and writing that evolution is atheistic on evolution acceptance scores from all four evolution acceptance measures.

Unstandardized predicted values from regression models predicting evolution acceptance scores plotted against student religiosity and labeled by whether the student indicated an atheistic perception of evolution. In our exploratory study 1, a large percentage of college biology students wrote that evolution is atheistic, and this was prevalent among both religious and nonreligious students. Further, we found that writing that evolution is atheistic was associated with lower levels of evolution acceptance, particularly among the most religious students.

However, using an open-ended response item may have caused us to misestimate the prevalence of atheistic perceptions. First, students could have had an atheistic perception of evolution but did not think to write about it; this would lead us to underestimate the number of students with an atheistic perception of evolution. Thus, to estimate the rate of atheistic perceptions of evolution, we developed a closed-ended survey in study 2 that asked students to choose whether evolution is atheistic or agnostic.

Students were surveyed at the end of their courses, and all courses included evolution instruction. A summary of the courses recruited for this study can be found in the Results section. The research team sent emails to the instructors of the courses asking them to disseminate the survey link to their students after the students had been taught evolution.

Instructors offered extra credit to students who completed the survey. We used similar instruments to measure evolution acceptance in study 2 as in study 1. Further, we wanted to reduce survey fatigue among students in our studies, and in think-aloud interviews some items on the full religiosity survey were confusing for nonreligious students i.

Thus, eliminating these items increased the content validity of the measure for nonreligious students. To determine whether students perceived evolution as atheistic or agnostic, we adapted a published instrument originally created to categorize the views that students have on the relationship between religion and evolution Yasri and Mancy, This instrument was not published when the data from study 1 were collected.

The instrument lists different views on the relationship between religion and evolution and asks students to choose among the views in a closed-ended survey Table 2. TABLE 2. Options students were given for their personal view of evolution and then what they thought most closely represented the scientific view of evolution.

The list of views includes young Earth creationism, old Earth creationism, creationism with some evolution, humans-only creationism, interventionist evolution, theistic evolution, deistic evolution, agnostic evolution, and atheistic evolution. The procedures for adapting and validating the instruments in their entirety are available in Section 3 of the Supplemental Material.

We also created two new instruments see Section 4 of the Supplemental Material for development and validation of these measures. Students were asked to select from 0 none at all to 10 a lot for each of these items. Unlike other instruments in which the respondent can only choose a binary option Nehm et al.

The second instrument measures how comfortable students felt while learning evolution and has eight items e. Students were asked to answer on a six-point Likert scale from strongly disagree to strongly agree. No previously developed instruments existed at the time of the study to measure either perceived conflict or comfort learning evolution.

These instruments are available in their entirety along with the procedures for development and validation in Section 4 of the Supplemental Material. Although it was not our main research aim, our research design allowed us to examine the percentage of college biology students who believe that life shares a common ancestor. Because these data have never been collected among college biology students across this many U.

Therefore, we examined the percentage of students who chose special creationist options for their personal view on religion and evolution and report those percentages.

To examine whether students perceived evolution as atheistic or agnostic, we calculated the percentage of students who chose atheistic evolution and agnostic evolution as the most representative descriptions of evolution.

We were interested in exploring differences among highly religious students who perceived evolution as atheistic versus agnostic. The same model diagnostics were performed on these data as in study 1 i. Of these students, TABLE 3. Summary of courses recruited and student response rate by course.

After they had learned evolution, we found that Finally, See Table 4 for the percentage of students who chose each view on religion and evolution. TABLE 4. We identified students as highly religious, and within this sample of highly religious students, Table 5 shows a comparison for the percentage of nonreligious and highly religious students who perceived evolution as atheistic or agnostic. TABLE 5. Student perceptions of the definition of evolution a.

Next, we focus on highly religious students only and compare those who perceived evolution as agnostic with those who perceived evolution as atheistic. Table 6 shows a comparison of the demographics of these students. Highly religious students who perceived evolution as atheistic or agnostic were similar with respect to major, gender, and race, but there was a lower percentage of Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints LDS students who perceived evolution as atheistic and a higher percentage of Catholic and other Christian students who perceived evolution as atheistic.

These results for LDS students may be due in part to recent attempts to help LDS college biology students in Utah reduce their conflict between religion and evolution Manwaring et al.

TABLE 6. Full regression tables with all omnibus statistics for each regression are available in Section 5 of the Supplemental Material. Highly religious student evolution acceptance a—d , comfort learning evolution e , and perceived conflict f between religious beliefs and evolution disaggregated by highly religious students who thought evolution is atheistic atheistic perception and highly religious students who thought evolution is agnostic agnostic perception.

Higher scores represent higher evolution acceptance a—d , more comfort learning evolution e , and more perceived conflict f. We also found that When exploring differences in student scores between highly religious students who perceived evolution as atheistic and highly religious students who perceived evolution as agnostic, we found that highly religious students who thought evolution is atheistic were less accepting of evolution by all measures compared with highly religious students who thought evolution is agnostic.

Further, highly religious students who perceived evolution as atheistic perceived more conflict between their religious beliefs and evolution and felt less comfortable learning evolution compared with highly religious students who perceived evolution as agnostic.

These results, in tandem with prior literature, suggest that college biology instructors may be able to support highly religious student evolution acceptance by explicitly describing that evolution does not disprove the existence of supernatural entities. In other words, teaching the bounded nature of science in the context of evolution by describing evolution as agnostic rather than atheistic.

While prior literature suggests that religiosity and evolution acceptance are related due to specific religious beliefs that are incompatible with evolution Scott, ; Winslow et al. However, our methodology for this study does not allow us to make claims about the causality of the relationships we studied. However, student self-reports in interview studies suggest that helping students understand that evolution is agnostic may increase their evolution acceptance Winslow et al.

Our results build on the prior literature and confirm that the conception that evolution is atheistic is prevalent among students and statistically significantly related to lower evolution acceptance among religious students.

Together, this body of research and experience from evolution educators suggests that instructors can increase evolution acceptance among religious students by explicitly teaching them that evolutionary theory is agnostic rather than atheistic. The magnitude of this effect should be explored in future research.

Our results also highlight the importance of examining religious students separately from nonreligious students in evolution education. Because religious students have a set of worldviews that can create barriers to evolution acceptance that are not present for nonreligious students, relationships between variables and evolution acceptance will likely be different for religious and nonreligious students.

Although recent evolution education studies have probed the interactions between religiosity and other variables when studying evolution acceptance Weisberg et al.

However, our results build on the growing body of literature that suggests this should become a common part of any protocol in which researchers are measuring evolution acceptance. Given these results and prior literature, we encourage biology instructors to think about how their own personal views of evolution and religion may affect how they communicate with students about whether evolution is atheistic or agnostic.

Seventy-five percent of biologists nationwide do not believe in a God Ecklund and Scheitle, ; Pew, , so presumably these biologists hold the personal view of atheistic evolution.

However, do biologists who hold an atheistic personal view of evolution recognize and communicate to their students the bounded nature of science? It is likely that instructors who do not have personal religious backgrounds themselves do not think or teach about this distinction in the context of evolution Barnes and Brownell, , , because the culture of science is generally seen as more compatible with atheism than theism Ecklund and Park, However, our data suggest that whether an instructor recognizes and communicates the bounded nature of science accurately during evolution instruction could matter for religious student outcomes in evolution education.

For these reasons, we encourage instructors to familiarize themselves with Religious Cultural Competence in Evolution Education Barnes and Brownell, , an umbrella framework of instructional practices identified in the literature to help nonreligious instructors better understand how to teach religious students about evolution in an effective and culturally competent way, which includes teaching the bounded nature of science Barnes et al.

We operated on an assumption about the nature of science that supernatural existence or influence is outside the scope of science. We agree that evolution operates from the assumption that a God is not needed for evolution to occur, but do not agree that this is incompatible with a personal belief that a God does exist and has somehow influenced evolution.

Researchers in evolution education have discussed and advocated for this distinction between methodological naturalism and philosophical naturalism in the evolution education literature Scott, ; Sober, We chose to aggregate scores from Likert-type response options to create continuous Likert scales and used parametric statistics in our analyses. As argued by Norman , this issue has two parts: measurement and statistics.

The conclusions from the parametric statistics are valid as long as the assumptions of the data distributions are roughly met. Substantial literature exists to show that parametric statistics are robust, giving the right answers even when assumptions are violated. In the Results sections of this paper, we have demonstrated that the assumptions linear regression has on data distributions are roughly met, which justifies the use of the parametric statistics methods on the data.

However, we would like to acknowledge the controversy in the measurement part. In our study, we followed a commonly accepted practice of summing individual items scores to form the score of the scale and use the summed score to represent the latent construct.

We agree with the opponents of this practice that single Likert response format items are on an ordinal scale, but the proponents of this practice argue that many studies have shown that Likert scales as opposed to single items produce interval data appropriate for parametric statistics e. As a further direction, one may consider applying item response theory Hambleton et al.

Further, we found that having this perception predicted lower levels of evolution acceptance and comfort learning evolution as well as higher perceived conflict between religious beliefs and evolution among highly religious students. We define religiosity as the extent to which one participates in religious activities such as prayer and service attendance i.

We would like to acknowledge Jim Collins for his feedback on earlier versions of the article as well as members of the Biology Education Research lab at Arizona State University for their feedback. Barnes et al. This article is distributed by The American Society for Cell Biology under license from the author s. It is available to the public under an Attribution—Noncommercial—Share Alike 3. Hayley M. Gale M. Taija M. They argue that the order in which living things were created according to the Bible may have similarities to the order scientists accept evolution took place plants, sea creatures, flying creatures, land animals and finally humans and that this makes the Bible's account more credible.

Theory of evolution Evolution of human beings over millions of years from ape-like ancestors In , a British man called Charles Darwin published a book called 'On the Origin of Species'.

These reasons included: The theory of evolution seemed to go against religious teachings that God made the Earth and created all living things, as they knew them. Christians believed that God had created humans 'in his own image', that humans were superior to all other creatures and had a soul that is immortal. The theory of evolution challenged the idea that God is the designer of the universe and that the beauty, order and complexity of the universe is evidence of this the design argument.

The idea that living things adapt to their environment was opposed to their belief that God had created the perfect environment for them. The Bible says humans were created on the sixth day of creation, not over a period of millions of years.

Is the theory of evolution compatible with Christianity? Why might it be compatible? The Genesis creation story does not seek to offer a scientific answer to questions about the origins of the universe. Why is there controversy about modern Darwinism? Australia: Matthias Media. Darwin C The Origin of Species. Jastrow R Ed The essential Darwin.

Canada: Little, Brown and Company. Specialists' panel Various specialists have stated here why the acceptance of evolution poses no threat to their faith, or to them teaching evolution at school. The convergence, neither sought nor induced, of results of work done independently one from the other, constitutes in itself a significant argument in favor of this theory. The sciences of observation describe and measure with ever greater precision the multiple manifestations of life and place them on a timeline.

The moment of passing over to the spiritual is not the object of an observation of this type, which can nevertheless reveal, on an experimental level, a series of very useful signs about the specificity of the human being.

But the experience of metaphysical knowledge, of the awareness of self and of its reflexive nature, that of the moral conscience, that of liberty, or still yet the aesthetic and religious experience, are within the competence of philosophical analysis and reflection, while theology extracts from it the final meaning according to the Creator's designs.

HTM Stephen Jay Gould, a prominent evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould has frequently argued that science and religion deal with two separate realms and seek to answer different questions; he sees no conflict between the two: " Theology and religious views should not be confused with science. There is a very vocal minority of Minnesotans who are passionately determined to have the theory of "intelligent design" offered as an alternative to the scientific theory of biological evolution.

The theory of intelligent design -- while an interesting, and for some a compelling argument -- is not a scientific theory. The science that underlies biological evolution should not be minimized to appease this group. Allow me to briefly explain my understanding of how science works. Observations are made.

Data is analyzed and relationships between data laws are described. Explanations as to how the world works theories are proposed. Predictions are made based on the observations, relationships, and explanations. These predictions are checked for their validity, and the relationships and explanations are verified or altered.

Laws are statements -- usually mathematical -- that describe cause-and-effect relationships. Newton's laws of motion and universal gravitation are examples.

Theories are complex and broad in scope. For example, Einstein's theory of general relativity explains gravity through the idea that objects travel in straight lines through four-dimensional space-time. According to the theory, objects with mass affect the fabric of space-time so that a straight line in four dimensions does not appear straight in three. Theories do not become laws. Laws are statements of relationships.

Theories attempt to develop a broad and rational explanation for observations and relationships. A theory may be so overwhelmingly supported that it is accepted as true -- but it does not become a law. There is a common misconception about science, perpetuated by everyday language, that theories are easily created, tested and modified.

Scientific theories form the framework for the scientific view of the world. Modern scientific theories are interwoven and offer a cohesive and integrated understanding of how the world works. Occasionally there is a "revolution" in science, and a theory is replaced. In order for this to happen, the new theory must offer a more compelling explanation for everything the old theory did, and more.

It must be rational, logical, and based on observation. Some examples that come to mind include: the rejection of the existence of an "aether" through which light was theorized to travel through space, the rise of plate tectonics, and the quantum model of the atom.

Scientific theories do not address theological questions that people wrestle with such as "Why are we here? People are free to ascribe whatever controlling force they personally choose to understand how God fits into the workings of the world.

Biological evolution blends factual observations and theories from multiple disciplines within science such as the geologic principle of superposition, genetics, microbiology, radioisotopic dating, and biochemistry to develop a coherent and rational explanation of as much data as possible.

The theory addresses specific mechanisms of how the biological diversity seen today, and in the fossil record, could have occurred. It is important to point out that this theory does not attempt to include or rule out an "intelligent designer. It would give a false message regarding the rigor that goes into establishing or altering a scientific theory. Intelligent design simply does not rise to the level of a scientific theory. We have an obligation to the citizens of Minnesota to ensure that the K Academic Science Standards enable our students and citizens to understand how science works and to know the scientific view of our world.

Intelligent design is a wonderful idea and certainly worth exploring -- but not as science. The theory of biological evolution is how science understands the fossil record and the diversity of life that is observed through time". Republished with permission of Star Tribune, Minneapolis-St. No further republication or redistribution is permitted without the written consent of Star Tribune. I start from the assumption that we really must all of us educators find a way of getting a basic and accurate knowledge of Darwin's theory to our students.

I am aware that many of my colleagues in science do not want to teach anything in their classes that is not "science" and I respect them for this. Tactically I would be willing to experiment with alternative teaching strategies. I do not believe public school teachers should "cave" to popular pressure about what is taught in their classrooms. I reject the thesis that religion or for that matter irreligion should be taught in the public school classroom.

Having said all of this, as one who also insists that students do responsible research on their topics, and who has made a career of teaching classes where controversial topics constitute much of the curriculum I think it is possible for people in my profession and yours to learn from one another-in ways that will promote public education and the knowledge of science esp.

Professional science educators are thinking about ways of addressing the natural questions that students have and finding ways of addressing them in ways that will foster the teaching of biology rather than foster students being suspicious of science because they think it is out to challenge their religion.

If I have a panacea it is this-teaching inquiry allows teachers to use controversy to advance knowledge. I say there has to be a way to use student's questions as goals to further learning rather than as blocks.

Each of our guests kindly answered the questions we posed: If the literal account of the creation, given in Genesis, is incorrect - which is what Darwinian evolution tells me - then what does this mean for the authority of the rest of the Bible? Professor John A. Campbell: "If a student asked me that I would say "Sally that is a good question. Clearly there are religious people who do and there are religious people who do not. This is not a question for me to answer for you, but one for you to decide yourself.

I might say that most scholarship on the Bible does not favour a literal interpretation of Genesis. Again I would be tempted to say "Here are some books I have found helpful on the question.

Or, I might just limit myself to specific questions in biology or science. I might say "As a biologist Dr Carolyn Kim King: "Fundamentalists say yes, but few academic theologians agree - creationism is largely a matter of American politics, rooted in a deep fear of social freedom and change - but there is a very large body of rigorous and intellectually respectable theology that is much more interesting and fruitful than creationism. Campbell: "Sally this is another good question.