Faith and Darwin

I'm hoping to get to see the Darwin film in the next couple of weeks, but it seems like a good time to revisit 'Faith and Darwin', a research piece done by Theos earlier this year. They even produced a map based on the results, so that if you want to move in next to a Creationist you know where to look.

They quizzed 2000 people on their ideas about God, science and evolution, and discovered the following:

54% of the sample knew Darwin had written 'Origin of Species'

37% agreed that evolution is proved beyond reasonable doubt (36% said 'not proven', 19% 'no evidence')

75% agreed that science could explain most things, but not everything.

53% believed in God: 8% used to believe in God but now didn't, and the same percentage had made the opposite journey.

Who's Who
The research breaks the sample up into 4 groups, according to what they believe about the origins of life on Earth:

1. Young Earth Creationists (believe earth is less than 10,000 years old) 17%
2. Intelligent Design (evolution, but with specific intervention by God to make certain stuff happen ) 11%
3. Theistic evolution (evolution, but with God as the ultimate agent behind creation) 28%
4. Atheistic evolution (life has evolved full stop, there is no God) 37%
Sorry the picture's a bit faint. The maths-heads among you will have already noted that 10% more people believe God had a hand in the origins of life, than actually believe God exists. The main finding of the survey seemed to be inconsistency: over 40% of the sample gave contradictory answers to questions on the same topic.

Demographics
Amongst those who consistenly fall into the above categories, there were a few demographic differences.

- 'Young Earth Creationists' more females, economic class DE, older people. Oddly, 8% of them don't have a religion.

- 'Intelligent Design' younger and more educated than average

- 'Atheistic Evolution' generally younger, more in the ABC economic groups, and with degrees. There's suggestions here of the middle class atheism referred to in some recent blog exchanges, and this today by Ariane Sherine.

Attitudes:
Some interesting snippets:
- 31% of those in the 'atheistic evolution' category think that Christianity and evolution are incompatible, and 21% that science undermines religion. That leaves a sizeable majority who don't hold to these views, even among folk who don't beleive God had anything to do with creation.

- Only 1/5 of these folk agreed that 'evolution tells us there's no purpose to life'. This gives the lie to the idea that atheists think that life has no meaning or purpose. Most of them clearly do, though whether that's a logically consistent position is another matter. I'm not even sure if 'meaning and purpose' are scientific categories, or unverifiable value statements.

- 18% of the sample believe Genesis is a literal and accurate account of the origins of life. Bizarrely, 22% of the 'theistic evolutionists' believe this, which doesn't really leave much time for evolution to happen!!!

- 85% of the sample believed that science and faith can coexist, though about half of these think that science challenges faith to some degree.

Spiritual beliefs
- 72% 'see a spiritual element in the universe', which is a lot more than the 53% who believe in God.

- Of those who believe in God, 1/5 see him/her/it as an 'impersonal force', and roughly the same amount are pantheists - that God and the universe are the same. Believing in God isn't the same as believing in the orthodox deity of Christianity.

Other spiritual beliefs:
Human soul 70
Heaven 55
Life after death 53
Ghosts 39
Reincarnation 27
Astrology/horoscopes 22
Fortune telling/tarot 15

Quotes:
It highlights that there is an element of confusion, and suggests that many people hold contradictory views. There is also evidence of significant variation in how people form their opinions and how much engagement with the topic they have previously had (p20)

It has been considered by some that Darwin’s theory of evolution has been abused by ‘extremists’ of two very different philosophical positions. From an atheistic position, some suggest that evolutionary belief must disprove belief in God and from a creationist point of view, considering evolution and Christianity to be incompatible has led to suggestions that evolution contradicts a theistic view of God and so theists cannot hold an omnipotent view of God together with evolutionary theory.

This research challenges both the extreme atheists and theists, who frequently join in this debate. In general people do not subscribe to such polarised views, but rather happily hold a spectrum of beliefs reconciling scientific theory and religious belief.

Thoughts:
Richard Dawkins gives the impression in his latest book that vicars are to blame for the prevalence of Creationism, and that if we get our act together, it'll all be sorted. Bad news Richard, there are far more Creationists out there than Anglicans.

There is a lot of confused thinking, and with sizeable numbers believing in astrology and horoscopes, we're dealing with a large chunk of the population who don't form their spiritual beliefs on the basis of reason alone (or even reason at all).

The strength of atheism amongst folk with higher education means that the 'new atheism' will continue to be a favourite of the chatterati* for some time to come. Given that the CofE is middle class, the temptation will be to think that this is the only argument we need to engage with. It will probably be the faith/God position which is held most forcefully, and by those most able to articulate it, but that doesn't mean we should stop listening to everyone else. The majority of the population, vague and confused though their beliefs might be, have a sense of the spiritual, and of life being more than just random acts of biology. These are the folk who accost our Street Pastors with questions about God, who want their kids baptised, and who sing along to Robbie Williams.

This creates a problem. The church needs to communicate with both groups. If we talk in spiritual terms to engage with the majority, there'll be talk of the Flying Spaghetti Monster in postgrad chatrooms. If we talk in scientific terms to engage with the rationalists, that will turn everyone else off. And of course postmodernism means that there'll be people who hold to both worldviews, and several others, all at the same time.

*over 1200 blog posts in, I guess that includes me too.

DIY Agnostibus, and David Attenborough on Darwin

Thanks to Maggi Dawn, Alan Wilson and pretty much everyone else, who has discovered the delights of the DIY bus slogan generator.

Caught up with one global treasure and one national treasure on TV over the weekend. Nelson Mandela keeps an incredible schedule for a 90 year old, it's hard not to be impressed with his determination to use his influence for good, and yet to keep on engaging with normal people.

Meanwhile David Attenborough was fascinating last night. In his previous series, he's presented us with evolution as a given fact, and not felt any need to argue for it. Now in Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life, he presented an appreciation of Darwins work, and spoke as an apologist and evangelist for evolutionary theory, which itself is a fascinating commentary on where we are.

What I want to know is: why, when Christianity is presented on TV, is it always unorthodox views which get the full treatment (see the current Christianity, A History), but when science (especially evolution) is presented there is never a heretical voice raised? Here's a couple, quoted by John Lennox in 'Gods Undertaker: Has Science Buried God?'

"We are now about 120 years after Darwin and the knowledge of the fossil record has been greatly expanded. We now have quarter of a million fossil species, but he situation hasn't changed much. The record of evolution is still surprisingly jerky, and ironically, we have even fewer examples of evolutionary transition than we had in Darwins time." (David Raup, Field Museum of Natural History)

"The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology." (Stephen Jay Gould). Gould also writes "the history of most fossil species includes 2 features particularly inconsistent with the idea that they gradually evolved:

1. Stasis. Most species exhibit no directional change during their tenure on earth. They appear in the fossil record looking pretty much the same as when they disappear...

2. Sudden appearance. In any local area a species does not arise gradually by the steady transformation of its ancestors; it appearas all at once and "fully formed". '

The idea that evolution is signed sealed and delivered, and that all scientists agree on how it works, is equivalent to saying that all Christians everywhere believe exactly the same things. Attenborough hinted at this in his interview with Andrew Marr yesterday, but you'd never guess there was an internal debate in the scientific community from the way evolution is presented on TV.

The Attenborough programme closed with a statue of Darwin being installed in a place of honour in the Natural History Museum, like some secular deity. It would be great if, in this bicentenary year for Darwin, there was a proper debate about his theories, and not merely idol worship.