Chris Mooney, the author who wrote "The Republican War on Science",
has this article up at Mother Jones magazine
where he goes over seven reasons
why people are more likely to believe in God
than evolution.
And it's actually a great article because it shows you that there are
a lot of smart people out there,
but they have reasons, that they think are legitimate,
for not wanting to accept evolution.
And so I thought it would be helpful. Let's go over some of these reasons because
those are things that we, as science advocates,
have to put up with.
And we have to find a way to overcome that, at least in the way we talk about science,
if we really want to get people to accept evolution.
Number 1 is biological essentialism.
And what this basically means is when you see a group of lions,
you assume that... A lot of people are prone to assume that
those lions have nothing to do with us as humans.
Like they are that species,
or spiders are that species and we're a totally different species,
and we're not interconnected.
And evolution teaches us that no, we actually are all distant relatives,
like every living thing
is connected in this web.
Even though we may be distant relatives of some creatures
and very close relatives... relatively close to all of these other creatures.
So, a lot of people find it very hard to believe that
we're related to trees,
that we're related to bugs,
and we're related to elephants.
And that's something we have to overcome if we want to teach people
how evolution works.
Number 2 is teleological thinking.
And this is the idea that everything has a purpose.
So, if you ask, like a little kid, you know,
why is that cloud so dark?
Or what's the point of that cloud?
The kid has an explanation: It's to bring rain,
you know.
Why does the zebra have stripes? Well, there's a reason for it.
Everything has a reason.
And evolutionarily speaking, yeah, there are reasons for a lot of these things.
Why does the zebra have stripes? There are reasons for that.
Why does the chameleon change color? There are reasons for that.
But then we automatically think everything has a purpose.
You know, why is that mountain there?
Well, because God put it there.
You know, are we designed the way we are?
Well, there had to be a designer who made us the way we are.
And we've seen that sort of thinking when it comes to intelligent design
and trying to push that into science curriculums across the country.
Not everything has to have a purpose that goes back to God.
There may be natural explanations for it.
But for a lot of things that don't have a natural explanation,
and for things that look so
incredibly designed,
that they couldn't possibly have been,
you know, naturally designed, at least from people's perspective,
they're very apt to just say a higher power must have been involved.
So, it's easy to believe that. I mean, I can understand why people believe that,
but it's not true.
And there's no evidence for that.
Number 3 is overactive agency detection.
Have you ever seen those like
pieces of toast that are burnt, and people say they see Jesus or the Virgin Mary in it?
Why does that happen?
That sort of pareidolia happens because we look at something and we're very prone to see
a face. We're very prone to see
humans at work even if we don't have direct evidence for it.
And so when you see humans
designed as seemingly amazingly as we are,
you don't just say a higher power did it,
we want to say a person did it. We want to say God did it.
And so, for an evolutionary biologist to come around and say,
"Well, no, you are the process of natural selection just like that tree was, just like that mountain was".
That's very hard to overcome when you think God designed you
and a person had a hand in your creation.
Number 4 is dualism.
And without getting too philosophical about this, dualism is this idea that there is a difference
between your mind and your body.
And a lot of people have this belief that, you know, yeah, they have a physical body here,
but there is a soul.
And when they die, their body may die, but their soul will live on.
And those are two separated things.
And because biologists haven't really come up with this good explanation for how our conscious evolved,
how our ability to think evolved the way it did,
it's very hard for people to believe that
we just naturally grew our brains and our ability
to think cognitively, and do all these amazing processes with our brains.
So, they assume that God has put that smart into us.
And it's hard for them to realize that no, our mind and body evolved at the same time, and this
concept of a soul is just fictional.
But it is hard to explain to people, you know, how did our mind evolve
even if they can't kind of understand where our bodies evolved from.
Number 5: inability to comprehend vast time scales.
I think this is probably one of the main reasons that there is.
You know, the Earth has been around for
like 4.54 billion years.
And humans, as we know
humans, has been around for like less than a million years.
And people have no idea how to think
about these sorts of time frames. I mean,
think about this. If you're looking at this screen,
and this is a billion years,
where did humans exist?
And the truth is
they existed like
less than a pixel on this side of the screen. I mean, we are so recent,
given the vast time
that has existed for-- That our universe has existed,
that it's crazy to think about. I think
I've heard it said by some scientists, you know, if you stretch your
hands completely out,
humans existed on the tip-- Humans came into existence
at the very tips of your fingertips,
at the end of your fingernails. That's when humans came into being.
And it's such a small percentage of all the time that has passed.
So, when we say humans evolved over millions of years,
that really is a long time.
I mean, there's so much time for evolution to work
and for natural selection to have an effect.
But people think like, no; they think it has to happen in their lifetime.
That's the sort of flaw you see when people say like,
"Oh, I've never seen a monkey give birth to a human".
I mean, there's a lot of problems with someone who says that.
But, they're thinking, "Oh, it has to happen immediately", like we go from one species to another species like that.
And that's because they have a hard time understanding.
No, like,
we're only alive for like a blink.
But, you know, the time it takes for evolution to happen,
we're talking about several lifetimes
and several millions of lifetimes.
That's how long it takes.
And when think of it that way,
it actually does make sense how evolution could happen like that.
But we're not tuned in to see things that way.
Number 6 is group morality and tribalism.
And basically, think about this: you go into any church in this country
and the people there think
they are good.
And they probably are generally good, but they believe their religion
is the reason they are good.
And Christians believe God is the reason, you know,
is the social glue that holds people together.
And so an atheist come around and, you know, start trying to dismantle their religion.
They're not just worried on the philosophical sense or theological sense,
they're worried that our entire social structure's coming apart.
I mean, you hear that sort of argument when people try to fight for gay marriage.
They say, "You're trying to ruin the family".
Because they know things through the context of God.
And all of a sudden, evolution comes along and says,
"Well, you know how you thought God created you and it happened 6000 years ago and all that?",
that's not true.
This is what actually happened, and we have the evidence to back it up.
Well, now you're worried that, no, because if I agree with that,
and my, you know, my belief start to crumble,
what else is going to fall alongside it? Am I going to start, you know, doing wicked things?
You know, those people who say, you know, if you believe in evolution,
the Social Darwinism: let's kill all the handicapped people, let's kill all the babies.
These are the people who think that if you allow evolution, or the thinking
of how it works, to permeate into our minds,
everything will just crumble in our society. And it's ridiculous.
But there is the tribalism; this idea that we are, as a group, cohesive because of certain beliefs,
and as soon as those beliefs go away,
everything else is going to fall by the wayside as well.
That's not going to happen,
but you can understand why people might fear that.
And that sideways into number 7, which is fear and the need for certainty.
I mean, think about the options you have on the table here.
Do you believe that God... You know, the stories in Genesis?
God just puffed us into existence several thousand years ago?
Which is very easy to understand; very simplistic.
Or do you believe that nature guided us into existence, you know,
over the course of million, billions of years if you go back to the microbes?
And that explanation, where the evidence backs it up,
is a lot harder to understand. You have to put a lot of thinking into understanding how evolution works.
There's a lot of stuff we don't know about how it works. How that very first organism even come into being?
There's a lot more uncertainty with evolutionary thinking.
Whereas the Genesis account the story of creation, the story of Adam and Eve,
and even if you believe that, this idea that God just created us,
that doesn't take a lot of thought.
You just have to believe it.
And so, for people to say, "Oh, evolution's coming along and I need to believe in that",
that requires them to let go of something they always believed in, that they always knew the answer to,
and jump ship to this thing where
we don't know everything about how it works, and why it works and,
you know, all the mechanisms of it.
But, you know what? I'm okay with that because
that's exciting for me. There's more to learn. We don't know everything. That to me is exciting.
And not to mention the fact that the evidence just supports it.
Whereas the evidence doesn't support anything the bible says in regards to creation.
But you can understand why people would be afraid of
believing in evolution after a lifetime of believing that God created us.
Remember, the point of all this is not to give any justification
to why people should believe in God,
but to point out that there are reasons why people
don't quickly accept evolution, even though you can throw mountains of evidence at them,
and they're still not going to accept it.
And what I think Chris Mooney was trying to show us is that
there are reasons that people
are afraid to jump ship to evolution.
That doesn't mean they're all good reasons. It doesn't mean those are good defenses.
But it means
if we want to be good science communicators, if we want to convince people
of why they should accept evolution,
we have to understand those are some of the big obstacles
that we have to help them overcome if we want them to,
you know, accept evidence.
My name is Hemant Mehta, and I write for FriendlyAtheist.com
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