70 percent of scientists believe religion and science are sometimes in conflict

"They interviewed a scientifically selected sample of 275 participants, pulled from a survey of 2,198 tenured and tenure-track faculty in the natural and social sciences at 21 elite U.S. research universities. Only 15 percent of those surveyed said they view religion and science as always in conflict. Another 15 percent said the two are never in conflict, while 70 percent said they believe religion and science are only sometimes in conflict.

[...]

The study was supported by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation with additional funding from Rice University.


[...]

Many of those surveyed cited issues in the public realm (teaching of creationism versus evolution, stem cell research) as reasons for believing there is conflict between the two. The study showed that these individuals generally have a particular kind of religion in mind (and religious people and institutions) when they say that religion and science are in conflict.

Other findings in the study:

    Scientists as a whole are substantially different from the American public in how they view teaching “intelligent design” in public schools. Nearly all of the scientists – religious and nonreligious alike – have a negative impression of the theory of intelligent design.

    Sixty-eight percent of scientists surveyed consider themselves spiritual to some degree.

    Scientists who view themselves as spiritual/religious are less likely to see religion and science in conflict."

Beliefnet, September 23, 2011

I've seen this survey cited in a number of places and nearly all of them has a headline indicating that science and religion are not in conflict, while the numbers clearly state that 70 per cent thinks religion and science are sometimes in conflict. Only 15 per cent thinks religion and science are never in conflict.

Evolution: 24 myths and misconceptions

"Evolution: 24 myths and misconceptions

[...]

Shared misconceptions:

Everything is an adaptation produced by natural selection

Natural selection is the only means of evolution

Natural selection leads to ever-greater complexity

Evolution produces creatures perfectly adapted to their environment

Evolution always promotes the survival of species

It doesn't matter if people do not understand evolution

"Survival of the fittest" justifies "everyone for themselves"

Evolution is limitlessly creative

Evolution cannot explain traits such as homosexuality

Creationism provides a coherent alternative to evolution

Creationist myths:

Evolution must be wrong because the Bible is inerrant

Accepting evolution undermines morality

Evolutionary theory leads to racism and genocide

Religion and evolution are incompatible

Half a wing is no use to anyone

Evolutionary science is not predictive

Evolution cannot be disproved so is not science

Evolution is just so unlikely to produce complex life forms

Evolution is an entirely random process

Mutations can only destroy information, not create it

Darwin is the ultimate authority on evolution

The bacterial flagellum is irreducibly complex

Yet more creationist misconceptions

Evolution violates the second law of thermodynamics."

New Scientist, 16 April 2008

Have a look at the article to check out each myth!

Anglo-Saxon attitudes

The March 29th issue of The Economist had some interesting charts showing how Britons and Americans differ on several issues:

It's not surprising how many believes in God and Hell and attitudes to Atheist presidents, but I thought it was interesting to see the differences on Creationism and Intelligent Design in USA. That 20 per cent of Americans believe in Intelligent Design while 40 per cent of them believe in "The Bible" is in a sense good news, because it just shows that the problem is a lack of basic education. Intelligent Design is in many ways more insidious, while the bible version is much more primitive. I think good education stand a better chance with Creationism than with Intelligent Design, because ID is stupidity on a much more abstract level disguising itself as science. You also see that in Britain, there's slightly more people who believe in ID than Creationism.


As for values, the only place they seem to concur is about death penalty.



This chart is a bit difficult to read, but I think it's a summary of how they responded in the other charts after party lines. Notice how even English Conservatives are much more liberal with regards to religion and values than American democrats.

Homicide and religion linked

"In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy, and abortion in the prosperous democracies (Figures 1-9). The most theistic prosperous democracy, the U.S., is exceptional, but not in the manner Franklin predicted. The United States is almost always the most dysfunctional of the developed democracies, sometimes spectacularly so, and almost always scores poorly. The view of the U.S. as a “shining city on the hill” to the rest of the world is falsified when it comes to basic measures of societal health. Youth suicide is an exception to the general trend because there is not a significant relationship between it and religious or secular factors. No democracy is known to have combined strong religiosity and popular denial of evolution with high rates of societal health. Higher rates of non-theism and acceptance of human evolution usually correlate with lower rates of dysfunction, and the least theistic nations are usually the least dysfunctional. None of the strongly secularized, pro-evolution democracies is experiencing high levels of measurable dysfunction. In some cases the highly religious U.S. is an outlier in terms of societal dysfunction from less theistic but otherwise socially comparable secular developed democracies. In other cases, the correlations are strongly graded, sometimes outstandingly so.

Legend: A = Australia, C = Canada, D = Denmark, E = Great Britain, F = France, G = Germany, H = Holland, I = Ireland, J = Japan, L = Switzerland, N = Norway, P = Portugal, R = Austria, S = Spain, T = Italy, U = United States, W = Sweden, Z = New Zealand.

Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies. Gregory S. Paul, 2005.

Plenty of other figures and text in the article.
See also a new article (1. February 2008) by Gregory S. Paul: Why is Secular European Society Doing so Much Better Than God-Fearing America?

Non-believers mushroom in Switzerland

"When it comes to the growth of secularism in Switzerland, the figures speak for themselves.
More than one in ten of the Swiss population – 810,000 people – claims "no religious affiliation", up almost 60 per cent on a decade earlier.

[...]

According to Bovay, religion is no longer being passed down from the parent to child as it was in the past, and children are being allowed to decide for themselves at an earlier age.

With more young people turning away from religion and older believers dying off, Bovay expects the number of non-affiliated to increase for the foreseeable future."

Swissinfo.ch, August 20, 2007

It's not all well, though, because creationists are popping up too:

"Creationism controversy evolves

A heated debate over the inclusion of creationism in a school science book highlights the success Swiss evangelicals are having sowing seeds of doubt about evolution.
The debate over the textbook raises questions about why increasing numbers of Swiss are willing to turn away from science and accept creationist views that God created the earth a few thousand years ago.

[...]

But the Swiss proponents of creationism are working on fertile ground. An international survey last year found that 30 per cent of the Swiss reject evolution, one of the highest rates in Europe."

Swissinfo.ch, November 28, 2007

Former Evangelical Minister Has a New Message: Jesus Hearts Darwin

"WN: Couldn't someone just as easily argue that we ought to obey our base instincts, since we evolved that way?

Dowd: That's where it's important to understand the direction of evolution. When we look at the pre-human world, then at human cultural evolution, we see greater spheres of cooperation, of complexity and interdependence at an ever-wider scale. At first we cooperated with family and clan; then at the level of tribe; then, later on, at the level of the kingdom; and now, at a planetary level. Our list of enemies keeps shrinking, and the people for whom we have cooperation and compassion keeps expanding. Why don't we go act on base instincts? Because it goes counter to this trajectory.

[...]

Dowd: God didn't stop communicating truth vital to human well-being thousands of years ago, when people preserved insights on animal skins. God communicates through science. Facts are God's native tongue. Who of us would let a first-century dentist fix our children's teeth? Yet every day we let first-century theologians fill our children's brains."

Wired.com 12.05.07

The Revelation of Evolution!

Poll finds more Americans believe in devil than Darwin

"The poll of 2,455 U.S. adults from Nov 7 to 13 found that 82 percent of those surveyed believed in God, a figure unchanged since the question was asked in 2005.
It further found that 79 percent believed in miracles, 75 percent in heaven, while 72 percent believed that Jesus is God or the Son of God. Belief in hell and the devil was expressed by 62 percent.
Darwin's theory of evolution met a far more skeptical audience which might surprise some outsiders as the United States is renowned for its excellence in scientific research."

Reuters, Nov 29, 2007

One has to wonder for how long the excellence will last with generations of kids being dumbed down by religious stupidity.

The Law of Evolution

"This is the central argument of evolution deniers: Evolution is an unproven "theory." For science-savvy people, this is an incredibly annoying ploy. While it's true that scientists refer to evolution as a theory, in science the word theory means an explanation of how the world works that has stood up to repeated, rigorous testing. It's hardly a term of disparagement.

But for most people, theory means a haphazard guess you've pulled out of your, uh, hat. It's an insult, really, a glib way to dismiss a point of view: "Ah, well, that's just your theory." Scientists use theory in one specific way, the public another — and opponents of evolution have expertly exploited this disconnect.

[...]

What does she suggest? For truly solid-gold, well-established science, let's stop using the word theory entirely. Instead, let's revive much more venerable language and refer to such knowledge as "law." As with Newton's law of gravity, people intuitively understand that a law is a rule that holds true and must be obeyed. The word law conveys precisely the same sense of authority with the public as theory does with scientists, but without the linguistic baggage."

Clive Thompson, Wired.com 10.23.07

Can't believe this hasn't been done already.

Monkeys show sense of justice

"Researchers taught brown capuchin monkeys to swap tokens for food. Usually they were happy to exchange this "money" for cucumber.

But if they saw another monkey getting a grape - a more-liked food - they took offence. Some refused to work, others took the food and refused to eat it.

Scientists say this work suggests that human's sense of justice is inherited and not a social construct.

[...]

The researchers were not surprised that the monkeys showed a sense of fairness, but they were taken aback that they would turn down an otherwise acceptable reward.

"They never showed a reaction against their partner, they never blamed them," Sarah Brosnan said."

BBC.co.uk, 17 September, 2003

A few years old story, but it was recently posted at Dawkins' site and is no less important now.

Is ‘Do Unto Others’ Written Into Our Genes?

"Where do moral rules come from? From reason, some philosophers say. From God, say believers. Seldom considered is a source now being advocated by some biologists, that of evolution.
At first glance, natural selection and the survival of the fittest may seem to reward only the most selfish values. But for animals that live in groups, selfishness must be strictly curbed or there will be no advantage to social living."

New York Times, September 18, 2007

See also some of my previous posts:
This, this, this, and this.

Islamic evolution

"Animals engage in a struggle for existence; for resources, to avoid being eaten and to breed. Environmental factors influence organisms to develop new characteristics to ensure survival, thus transforming into new species. Animals that survive to breed can pass on their successful characteristics to offspring."

Encounter (ABC Radio transcript) 11 June 2006

So who wrote this? Darwin? Dawkins? No, an Islamic scholar called al-Jahiz (781–868/869) in the book Kitab al-Hayawan (Book of Animals). The Islamic golden age was surely impressive and is quite a contrast to the appalling conditions that Muslims today live under. The worst thing is that many Muslims today seem to think that the Golden Age mysteriously will come back with a little more Koran reading. But it wasn't Muhammed who made the Golden Age. He thought humans were made out of clay.

An Open Letter Concerning Religion and Science

"Within the community of Christian believers there are areas of dispute and disagreement, including the proper way to interpret Holy Scripture. While virtually all Christians take the Bible seriously and hold it to be authoritative in matters of faith and practice, the overwhelming majority do not read the Bible literally, as they would a science textbook. [...] We the undersigned, Christian clergy from many different traditions, believe that the timeless truths of the Bible and the discoveries of modern science may comfortably coexist. We believe that the theory of evolution is a foundational scientific truth, one that has stood up to rigorous scrutiny and upon which much of human knowledge and achievement rests. To reject this truth or to treat it as "one theory among others" is to deliberately embrace scientific ignorance and transmit such ignorance to our children. [...] We urge school board members to preserve the integrity of the science curriculum by affirming the teaching of the theory of evolution as a core component of human knowledge.

[...]

Signatures are current as of 5 September 2007
10,900 signatures collected to date"

Not bad.

So Much for Another Stereotype

"According to this survey, 59 percent of the 1,088 Canadians surveyed think the evolutionary model is the right one, 22 percent think the creation model is right and 19 percent said they are not sure.

[...]

The perplexing part comes when one looks at a provincial breakdown of the numbers. Particularly striking are the Ontario and Québec numbers. Ontario pretty much reflects the national average in percentages of its population who are believers (84 percent) while this survey indicates that 51 percent of Ontarions think evolution is the correct answer.

In Québec, the percentage of believers is much higher (94.7 percent), but the percentage of Québécois who opt for evolution is 71 percent, the highest in Canada. The numbers for British Columbia make more sense because 65 percent of its surveyed citizens agree with evolution and 21 percent with creation and British Columbia also has the second-highest percentage of non-believers (35.9 percent) in the country."

HumanistNetworkNews.org, July 3, 2007

Most Canadians say God created them

The Canadian Press-Decima Research survey suggests 60 per cent of Canadians believe God had either a direct or indirect role in creating mankind, shattering the myth that Canadians had long ago put their faith strictly behind the scientific explanation for creation.
The poll suggests Canadians divide in roughly three groups on the issue of creation: 34 per cent of those polled said humans developed over millions of years under a process guided by God; 26 per cent said God created humans alone within the last 10,000 years or so; and 29 per cent said they believe evolution occurred with no help from God.
"These results reflect an essential Canadian tendency," said pollster Bruce Anderson. "We are pretty secular, but pretty hesitant to embrace atheism."

hfxnews.ca 04/07/07

Inferior Design

I had expected to be as irritated by Michael Behe’s second book as by his first. I had not expected to feel sorry for him.

[...]

It commits the logical error of arguing by default. Two rival theories, A and B, are set up. Theory A explains loads of facts and is supported by mountains of evidence. Theory B has no supporting evidence, nor is any attempt made to find any. Now a single little fact is discovered, which A allegedly can’t explain. Without even asking whether B can explain it, the default conclusion is fallaciously drawn: B must be correct. Incidentally, further research usually reveals that A can explain the phenomenon after all: thus the biologist Kenneth R. Miller (a believing Christian who testified for the other side in the Dover trial) beautifully showed how the bacterial flagellar motor could evolve via known functional intermediates.

[...]

If mutation, rather than selection, really limited evolutionary change, this should be true for artificial no less than natural selection. Domestic breeding relies upon exactly the same pool of mutational variation as natural selection. Now, if you sought an experimental test of Behe’s theory, what would you do? You’d take a wild species, say a wolf that hunts caribou by long pursuit, and apply selection experimentally to see if you could breed, say, a dogged little wolf that chivies rabbits underground: let’s call it a Jack Russell terrier. Or how about an adorable, fluffy pet wolf called, for the sake of argument, a Pekingese? Or a heavyset, thick-coated wolf, strong enough to carry a cask of brandy, that thrives in Alpine passes and might be named after one of them, the St. Bernard? Behe has to predict that you’d wait till hell freezes over, but the necessary mutations would not be forthcoming. Your wolves would stubbornly remain unchanged. Dogs are a mathematical impossibility.

Nytimes.com, July 1, 2007

Poll shows belief in evolution, creationism

A new poll on American attitudes to evolution and creationism:

"Evolution, that is, the idea that human beings developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life

Definitely true (18) Probably true (35) Probably false (16) Definitely false (28) No opinion (3) Total true (53) Total false (44)

Creationism, that is, the idea that God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years:

Definitely true (39) Probably true (27) Probably false (16) Definitely false (15) No opinion (3) Total true (66) Total false (31)"

USA TODAY, 8. June (poll conducted June 1-3, 2007)

This would be fucking ridicolous if it wasn't so sad at the same time.

(See more numbers in the article.)

Evolution timescale

"This is a great resource. Children often have trouble conceptualising the huge timescales involved in the development and evolution of life on Earth, in fact, many adults have trouble as well. So have a go yourself and point your mouse and slide through evolution."

Picked up from The Labour Humanist

Turkey: Scientists face off against creationists

"A geneticist at Istanbul University, Haluk Ertan, sums up the situation succinctly. "Turkey," he says, "is the headquarters of creationism in the Middle East."

"Not just the Middle East, the world", insists Tarkan Yavas, the dapper, youthful director of the Istanbul-based Foundation for Scientific Research (BAV). The 15-year-old institute had generated a prodigious amount of information, publishing hundreds of titles.

Headed by a charismatic preacher, Adnan Oktar, BAV’s latest production is the 770-page "Atlas of Creation" which it sent free of charge to scientists and schools in Britain, Scandinavia, France and Turkey this February.

[...]

The claims may sound outrageous, but it is part of a formidably effective propaganda machine. A survey in 2006 showed that only 25 percent of Turks fully accepted the principle of evolution. According to another poll in 2005, 50 percent of biology teachers questioned or rejected evolution."

Eurasianet.org, 5/24/07

See also this booklet on Evolution if you need it.

Revealing The Origins Of Morality -- Good And Evil, Liberal And Conservative

"Haidt['s] own research demonstrates that people generally follow their gut feelings and make up moral reasons afterwards. "Since the time of the Enlightenment," Haidt says, "many philosophers have celebrated the power and virtue of cool, dispassionate reasoning. Unfortunately, few people other than philosophers can engage in such cool, honest reasoning when moral issues are at stake. The rest of us behave more like lawyers, using any arguments we can find to make our case, rather than like judges or scientists searching for the truth. This doesn't mean we are doomed to be immoral; it just means that we should look for the roots of our considerable virtue elsewhere -- in the emotions and intuitions that make us so generally decent and cooperative, yet also sometimes willing to hurt or kill in defense of a principle, a person or a place."

Haidt argues that human morality is a cultural construction built on top of -- and constrained by -- a small set of evolved psychological systems."

Sciencedaily.com, May 18, 2007

Notice that you can also take a few interesting moral tests at Yourmorals.org

[Opinion] Gov. Huckabee, Here's "What In the World" Evolution Has To Do With Being President

"But then [Mike Huckabee] said "I'm not sure what in the world that has to do with being President of the United States."

Maybe we can help.

You see, Governor, it was you and your fundamentalist buddies who dragged your religion into everybody's government. From evolution to abortion to stem cell research to abstinence-only sex education to HIV prevention to global warming to the Middle East, Republican policy follows the religious doctrine of right wing Christian extremists. It dictates policy on every single social issue.

[...]

Governor, in case you're still confused, your faith-based views on matters like evolution have everything to do with being President, because you won't stop trying to impose them on the rest of us. Your faith puts you on the wrong side of a lot of social issues; luckily, it looks like Darwin's theory is about to be proven again."

Huffingtonpost.com, 05.05.2007