The center is a subsidiary of The Pew Charitable Trusts, its primary funder. Follow her on Twitter surveyfunk. Greg Smith is associate director of religion research at Pew Research Center. Follow him on Twitter DavidJMasci. Already a subscriber? Sign in. Thanks for reading Scientific American. Create your free account or Sign in to continue.
See Subscription Options. Go Paperless with Digital. Get smart. Sign up for our email newsletter. Sign Up. 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. I cannot tell you how to do this.
There are opinions on both sides of the question. As your teacher I have to tell you that most scholarly opinion on the Bible follows regards the scientific and religious issues as separate.
Here are some books about this debate that you might want to consult. Dr Carolyn Kim King: "As literal stories, Gen 1 and Gen conflict, so one or both cannot be taken as literally true. For people who insist on finding at least some literal truth there is some salvation in realising that the text of Gen 1 says clearly that God's commands were addressed to the earth and to the seas, not to the creatures themselves, so creation was indirect from the start let the earth bring forth, etc.
Also, God rested after the 7th day so the earth had to continue producing without supervision either, after that. So traditional Anglican theology that is, before American fundamentalism was ever thought of always assumed creation was indirect, running according to laws laid down in the 1st 6 days. 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. Sara E. Add to favorites Download Citations Track Citations.
View article. Agnosticism is of the essence of science … It simply means that [we] shall not say [we] know or believe that which [we] have no scientific grounds for professing to know or believe … Consequently, agnosticism puts aside not only the greater part of popular theology, but also the greater part of anti-theology … Agnosticism simply says that we know nothing of what may be beyond phenomena.
Options students were given for their personal view of evolution and then what they thought most closely represented the scientific view of evolution Choice Description presented to student Young Earth creationism All forms of life were first brought into being in their present form by God —10, years ago at the same time. Old Earth creationism All forms of life were first brought into being in their present form by God at different times over billions of years.
Creationism with some evolution Some forms of life evolved from earlier forms, but God created groups of organisms such as reptiles, birds, mammals, and humans separate from one another, and organisms that currently exist have evolved slowly from those first creations.
Humans-only creationism Almost all forms of life evolved from earlier forms, but humans were created by God in their present form separate from the rest of life. Interventionist evolution All forms of life evolved from earlier forms, but God intervenes from time to time to shape or override evolution. Deistic evolution All forms of life evolved from earlier forms, but life and evolution were first set in motion by God without a specific purpose or plan.
Agnostic evolution All forms of life evolved from earlier forms, but it is uncertain whether God was involved in evolution. Atheistic evolution All forms of life evolved from earlier forms, but no God has ever played any role in evolution. Vision and change in undergraduate biology education: A call to action. Washington, DC. Google Scholar Barbour, I. Religion in an age of science. Google Scholar Barnes, M. Practices and perspectives of college instructors on addressing religious beliefs when teaching evolution.
Experiences and practices of evolution instructors at Christian universities that can inform culturally competent evolution education.
Science Education , 1 , 36— Different evolution acceptance instruments lead to different research findings. Evolution: Education and Outreach , 12 1 , 4. American Biology Teacher , 79 2 , — Evolution: Education and Outreach , 10 , 7. Experiences of Judeo-Christian students in undergraduate biology. Differential impacts of a culturally competent genetics curriculum on student perceptions of conflict between religion and evolution at an evangelical Christian university.
All of these fatwas and statements against the theory of evolution discourage schools and even colleges from teaching evolution, because of the fear of provoking the majority of society. It is noteworthy that most theologians in Muslim institutions do not have degrees in STEM subjects science, technology, engineering and mathematics but in branches of Islamic studies. The rationale for this is that warding off evil should take precedence over bringing benefits, a controversial idea in Islam that can be a double-edged sword: it can serve to hold the fate of science and technology hostage to the interpretations of religious institutions.
In other words, it dictates thoughts and opinions and asks that these shape the way evidence is viewed. Islam is a religion that supports and urges its followers to seek knowledge and search for the origin of life.
So, Muslims are required to pursue a journey of understanding, a journey that cannot be begun by ignoring scientific evidence. The theory of evolution is under siege by fatwas. To end this siege I propose that we first consider the theory a purely scientific one, alongside the theory of relativity and its explanation of gravity, both of which are taught freely in Islamic countries.
Scientific theories should be evaluated through discussion among scientists, not by decree of theologians. Secondly, we should question the deliberate effort by few theologians to create and spread misconceptions about the theory of evolution. Many Muslim theologians believe that the purposes of religion and science are different; therefore, there is no need for a religious filter for new ideas.
Religion is the source of theological, moral and spiritual values, whereas science is the source of innovation, discovery and improved quality of life.
This separation of religion and science has been called for by scholars and scientists alike. You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar.
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