I am one of Jehovah's Witnesses - Please read on before you just dismiss what I have experienced.
Going door to door I have meet plenty of people who say "I don't believe in God, we got here thru evolution!".
So I ask the simple question which theory of evolution do they think is probably has the right idea.
Too often I hear, "Survival of the strongest." or "What? There is more than one theory about how evolution works?".
What is clear to me is that to these people evolution is a BELIEF and not something they thought of, it is as much a religion to them as mine is to me. Worse, I can study and agree or disagree with things I was taught, too often people are just blindly accepting because they do not want to put any efforts in.
Faith in religion is a completely different thing to believing the scientific method works. Science is self correcting. Religious faith is, by definition, the surrendering of any and every impulse to question the faith to a higher earthly authority. Those earthly authorities are notoriously unreliable (c.f. history of the Jehovah's Witness "end of the world" scenarios).
I know this is hard for religious people to understand, but if you have no belief in religious deities you can't just magic it up out of nowhere. There are people like me who simply can't believe in gods. We just aren't wired that way. I've had well meaning religious folk explain to me that I have apparently "hardened my heart" against (their) god and I need to stop doing that and he will sort it out but it simply isn't true
This certainly hasn't stopped people like me being involved in religions but it makes it a bit...difficult. This attitude that somehow the atheists in the community "do not want to put any efforts in" is wrong, plain and simple. There is no effort we can put in.
Well, that's not quite true. I'm an atheist, and I run a weekly Bible study (which has lately morphed into more of a general theological/philosophical study and discussion group) [1]. Religious traditions are worth studying even if you don't believe in them, if for no other reason, than as a way of better understanding the thought processes of people who do believe in them.
How do you know? Maybe if you studied the Bible you'd end up believing in it. :-)
It turns out that you actually can induce subjective experiences in yourself that I believe are similar to what religious people describe as "feeling the presence of God". It's an interesting and worthwhile exercise (though not what we do in my study group, that's a more academic format). But it's worth doing at least once in your life. It actually feels pretty good, not unlike taking certain psychoactive drugs.
Like a lot of atheists, I have studied the bible. My parents had me confirmed as an Anglican in my teens (ironically one of the first steps that took me from "I don't know if this is true" to "this particular religion is patently false").
It's impossible to understand western literature without a decent working knowledge of the bible (although choosing which one is problematic in itself), it's useful for that alone.
However, studying the bible made me less religious, not more.
After 20y of trying I'm done with mass hysteria, "you're holding it wrong", survivorship bias, and magical thinking. Give me consistently repeatable, experimental evidence.
Erm, the only way to know that is to put every effort you can into becoming a deist. "Every effort" is a lifetime of work, so you haven't done that, which makes your statement a statement of faith.
It sounds like you've already decided that you will never be a deist, and so you never will. How is that different from religious belief?
It's different because there is one less thing I have to invent. You might as well ask somebody to believe in a giant hamburger that circumnavigates the earth that only the truly faithful can see. I know you don't see the giant hamburger because you just haven't tried hard enough.
It started as an in-person meetup and moved on-line because covid. We now have more out-of-town members than in-town so it will probably be on-line forever. We may have the occasional in-person get-together, but I doubt it will ever go back to being regularly in-person.
> Faith in religion is a completely different thing to believing the scientific method works. Science is self correcting.
This is not at all accurate; the faith people express in science is generally identical to the faith other people express in religion, with no difference in the reasons, motivations, or justifications offered.
It is true that science is often self-correcting. The same is true of religion - you don't hear much about the Xhosa cattle-killing cult anymore.
> This is not at all accurate; the faith people express in science is generally identical to the faith other people express in religion, with no difference in the reasons, motivations, or justifications offered.
I think this is fundamentally incorrect. People believe in science because it produces results in the form of correct predictions and devices.
Just look at nutrition science as an example for why this isn't so.
Salt, fat, cholesterol, fructose, etc have each gone through several wild swings in good for you / bad for you. The science is entirely unsettled, yet forms the backbone of many doctors' recommendations.
Then, when the science gets taken in by mainline cultural space, it gets blown up into all sorts of utterly nonsensical, mystical woo-woo. Somehow moderation turns into paleo, vegan, fruitarian, or alkaline based diets.
People shoot wheatgrass or fast on lemon juice. All sorts of vaguely scientific sounding bullshit that isn't backed up by actual data.
You can't just pick and choose what is scientific and what isn't to try an conflate reason with religion. That is an argument in bad faith (ahem).
Further, using statements like "entirely unsettled" in reference to science is a fundamental misunderstanding of how science works. It's not "settled" like religious arguments where everybody agrees to a particular interpretation of the holy book. Science either works and we make stuff with it, or it doesn't and it gets tossed away.
"making stuff with it" is not the entirety of the scientific method. I suspect you know this. What you are arguing here is nonsense. Science isn't perfect and doesn't claim to be, so pointing out some corner case and saying "here, this bit is wrong" can't be used to dismiss the entire scientific method.
If you want to argue in that fashion, I'd like to point out to you that praying doesn't always work, so all religions must therefore be bunk.
The word 'science' has been co-opted by con men. Yet it's basic tenants like the critical method and repeatable experiments have provided me with far more value than half a life filled with religious 'teaching'.
But people make no distinction between believing in science in the same area where it makes correct predictions, and believing in "science" in an area where it has nothing valid to say, because it makes correct predictions somewhere else.
To most people, science is just a word, and they support it because they know that that is the right thing to do.
> In Indonesia, the Kantus of Kalimantan use bird augury to select locations for their agricultural plots. The anthropologist Michael Dove argues that two factors will cause farmers to make plot placements that are too risky. First, Kantu ecological models contain the Gambler's Fallacy and lead them to expect that floods will be less likely to occur in a specific location after a big flood in that location (which is not true). Second [...], Kantus pay attention to others' success and copy the choices of successful households, meaning that if one of their neighbors has a good yield in an area one year, many other people will want to plant there in the next year.
> Reducing the risks posed by these cognitive and decision-making biases, the Kantu rely on a system of bird augury that effectively randomizes their choices for locating garden plots, which helps them avoid catastrophic crop failures.
> The patterning of bird augury supports the view that this is a cultural adaptation. The system seems to have evolved and spread throughout this region since the seventeenth century when rice cultivation was introduced. This makes sense, since it is rice cultivation that is most positively influenced by randomizing garden locations.
> Whatever the process, within 400 years, the bird augury system had spread throughout the agricultural populations of this Borneo region. Yet it remains conspicuously missing or underdeveloped among local foraging groups and recent adopters of rice agriculture, as well as among populations in northern Borneo who rely on irrigation.
> This example makes a key point: not only do people often not understand what their cultural practices are doing, but sometimes it may even be important that they don't understand what their practices are doing or how they work.
> not only do people often not understand what their cultural practices are doing, but sometimes it may even be important that they don't understand what their practices are doing or how they work.
this is so wrong, it's "not even wrong".
It's always important to determine why something worked or didn't. If we did not do that, we would never be able to produce enough food to feed ourselves. Ignorance and blind adherence to nonsense is what creates famines in the first place.
If the people who believed in evolution more out of faith than true understanding actually did the legwork to remove their biases and objectively study/experiment on the subject, they would come to find that evolution is real. And if Jehovah's Witnesses actually did the legwork to remove their biases and objectively study/experiment on their religion, most of them would run as far away as they could.
Some things just have to be taken on faith because life is too short to get a PhD in every subject, but I sure hope the world continues to move towards evidence-based rather than magic-based foundations of default belief.
People believe in quantum mechanics not because they personally understand it, but because they believe/trust in the experts. How do the experts demonstrate their authority? ...by making electronics that do magic.
The difference between a belief of religious person and say a scientist is that the former asks you to trust them on blind faith while the latter asks you to trust them by proving they have more control over something than you do.
I share your frustration, the people who you were talking to likely also had a misconception of what evolution and scientific theories in general are, or were stating it poorly. It's not accurate to describe it as a "belief" it's more like "best current guess that we have but we'll change our mind if a new guess comes up that is better able to explain things".
Just because you met a few people with a fragile grasp of complex scientific topics doesn't mean the science is wrong.
Evolution is a fact. It has been demonstrated over and over again, is observable, and has predicative powers.
Religion has none of these things, and your particular religion is well known for being absolutely traumatic for people who follow it and even more so for people who leave it.
That seems like a trivial "gotcha" question. I'm not sure exactly what you mean by "which" theory.
Do you mean Lamarckism vs Darwinism? The correct answer is that Lamarckism is wrong.
Do you mean gradual change vs punctuated equilibrium or similar? That's not a "which theory of evolution", which is why people are confused by your question.
It really comes across as a classic "confuse people with trick questions and then try to inject religion into them while they're distracted" tactic. I'm glad I'm done with that sort of thing.
Also, belief in evolution is great, faith in evolution is not. Belief != faith, and religious people need to stop conflating them. If someone came up with an alternate theory for how we got here that explained all of the evidence better, I'd have no trouble believing it, because I don't have "faith in evolution" or any such thing.
> too often people are just blindly accepting because they do not want to put any efforts in.
Sure but nonbelievers experience the same thing with believers. I was asking a Christian about his interpretation of the two creation stories in Genesis. He didn't even know there were two. Most Christians don't.
And they always shut down when I want to discuss in detail the possibility of mistranslation changing their understanding of God. They seem to not understand that it's possible to lose meaning or change meaning when translating from one language to another. Even if you try hard not to.
I am totally respectful in these interactions. I'm not ambushing them with questions... I just genuinely want to learn something from someone who apparently should have deep and intimate knowledge of Christianity... and it's always disappointing.
> What is clear to me is that to these people evolution is a BELIEF and not something they thought of
Everything you consider to be true is a belief. That's the very definition of a belief: beliefs are the things you consider to be true. So you saying that this is a belief to them carries little information.
The main difference is that for evolution most people can point to (or try to point to) a legitimate source of authority for why they believe evolution is true.
Whereas for religion, there is nothing to point to other than blind faith.
> why is a university a more legitimate source of knowledge than a church
Because knowledge has to be justified in order to be knowledge. Universities produce justifications (in form of repeatable experiments, studies, proofs, etc.), churches don't.
There’s a big difference between trust in a process that has so consistently yielded results vs something like faith or political adherence. It’s about the foundations upon which those results lie more so than the belief themselves, and also an amenability to update beliefs. If humanity really gets something wrong about how the natural world operates it will usually be revealed. The trust ergo is largely warranted, even if the human execution of said process is flawed.
The canard that every individual has to maximally recapitulate the entirety of hundreds of years of human discovery is just absurd. Trust exists at all levels of human intellectual discourse.
Disappointed that this is downvoted. You are absolutely right: most people don’t actually investigate the origins of their beliefs and just adopt whatever their social tribe believes. The average urbanite atheist knows as much about evolution as the average rural creationist. It is almost entirely a social phenomenon, not an epistemological one.
Is this an American thing? I remember being taught the basics of evolution in year 8 or 9 science class in a way that was impossible to misunderstand ("children resemble their parents" + "some parents more likely to survive" => small changes in distribution of traits among each child generation => specialisation to local environment over many generations).
I do have a Christian friend who believes that it was God who set the wheels of evolution in motion, but there seems to be little misunderstanding where I am (Melbourne, AU) about what Darwinism is or denial that it's a strong force at play.
Yes, evolution is taught in schools. But that doesn’t mean the average person can explain how evolutionary theory works beyond a few sentences, in the same way that the average person cannot tell you more than 2 or 3 of the amendments to the Constitution.
Linked article conveniently forgot to mention the relevant footnote from original article:
> This may seem paradoxical, since atheists and agnostics have very low levels of religious commitment and yet score very well on the survey questions. However, atheists and agnostics account for a relatively small share of the total number of people with low levels of religious commitment; 4% of Americans describe themselves as atheists or agnostics, while fully 35% have low religious commitment. Atheists and agnostics answer an average of 20.9 questions correctly, compared with an average of 15.4 correct answers among people with low religious commitment who do not describe themselves as atheists or agnostics.
Btw survey questions them selfs are a bit nitpicky.. (who cares if jesus realy changed water into wine or if that was just symbolic)
Religious people seem to care quite a bit about whether the bible is literally true.
Further to that, some religions also heavily use traditions that don't appear in the bible at all. Catholics, for example, are meant to believe that the sacrament literally turns water and wine into the flesh of Christ. As in, it's actual flesh and blood (Transubstantiation).
So either Jesus was a walking breadstick or Catholicism as it is currently practised is obviously wrong.
There are so many varieties of Christianity based on "those other christians are definitely wrong" that I guarantee you somebody cares about those distinctions.
Going door to door I have meet plenty of people who say "I don't believe in God, we got here thru evolution!".
So I ask the simple question which theory of evolution do they think is probably has the right idea.
Too often I hear, "Survival of the strongest." or "What? There is more than one theory about how evolution works?".
What is clear to me is that to these people evolution is a BELIEF and not something they thought of, it is as much a religion to them as mine is to me. Worse, I can study and agree or disagree with things I was taught, too often people are just blindly accepting because they do not want to put any efforts in.