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Here are five facts about evolution and faith: 1 The Roman Catholic Church has long accepted — or at least not objected to — evolutionary theory. Share this link:. Bill Nye vs. This instrument was not published when the data from study 1 were collected. The instrument lists different views on the relationship between religion and evolution and asks students to choose among the views in a closed-ended survey Table 2.
TABLE 2. Options students were given for their personal view of evolution and then what they thought most closely represented the scientific view of evolution.
The list of views includes young Earth creationism, old Earth creationism, creationism with some evolution, humans-only creationism, interventionist evolution, theistic evolution, deistic evolution, agnostic evolution, and atheistic evolution.
The procedures for adapting and validating the instruments in their entirety are available in Section 3 of the Supplemental Material. We also created two new instruments see Section 4 of the Supplemental Material for development and validation of these measures. Students were asked to select from 0 none at all to 10 a lot for each of these items. Unlike other instruments in which the respondent can only choose a binary option Nehm et al. The second instrument measures how comfortable students felt while learning evolution and has eight items e.
Students were asked to answer on a six-point Likert scale from strongly disagree to strongly agree. 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. They don't view evolution as a threat to faith.
Both atheists and religionists polarize the debate. Atheists sometimes wield evolution as a hatchet to discredit religion, and religionists sometimes claim that evolution is incompatible with faith because it does not conform to a literal reading of the Bible's Book of Genesis.
Despite this, significant percentages see religion and evolution as compatible. Several prominent scientists, like Dr. Francis Collins , adopt the view that evolution compliments faith, while others, like Stephen Jay Gould, maintain that religion and science represent to different non-mutually exclusive understandings of the world. Theistic evolutionist, Dr.
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