Geoff Arnold

Americans, evolution, religion, and post-modernism

During the recent US election campaign, the issue of American's attitudes towards evolution popped up again. It's usually presented as "X million Americans don't believe in evolution...", with the corollary at election time "...and they all vote Republican". As I was dozing on the flight from Boston to Seattle on Friday, I found myself musing about this "fact" in various ways.

• Do non-evolutionists get flu shots? After all, they don't believe in the science that underlies the development of flu vaccines, and some of them (in Kansas) clearly don't want their children growing up with the kind of education that would equip them to work on new vaccines.
• How do Biblical inerrantists pick and choose those bits of the Bible they'll use and those bits they'll ignore? There are so many bits of blatantly allegorical and magical thinking, not to mention contradictions galore. Does consistency actually matter? If not, why not? Etcetera.
• Why should I worry about all of this? Things like belief in quaint creation myths, or circumcision, or not eating meat on Fridays, are all just tribal membership memes, ways of identifying that you are a member of a group in a way that is relatively resistant to mixing or diaspora. True... but it becomes important when people seek to impose it on others, whether it be banning the teaching of evolution in Kansas or orthodox Jews stoning tour buses in Jerusalem on Shabbat.

After all this fact-free speculation, it was nice to be proved wrong... or at least to get a chance to appreciate the true complexity of the situation. Over at People for the American Way there's a fascinating report on Evolution and Creationism in Public Education [PDF format]. It's based on a 1999 survey of 1,500 people. Among the more intriguing findings is the fact that for many people the inclusion of creationism in schools is based not on their religious beliefs, but on what the report calls a "Post Modernist" perspective.

A second important contextual point is what we term the “post-modernist” influence. For about a third of Americans, their fundamentalist religious beliefs drive their support for including Creationism in the public school curriculum. However, for most Americans who would like to see some mention of God or a Divine role in the development of humans, along with the teaching of Evolution, it is not primarily religion behind their opinions. It is much more of what can be called a Post Modernist perspective (a “Hey, you never know” mentality). This perspective is characterized by a wide tolerance for many different beliefs, since no single belief is seen as the final and complete answer to any issue. Also, many parents want their children to be exposed to a wide range of views. Their reasoning is, “our kids should be given enough information so, when they grow up, they can make up their own minds.”

Of course this meant that the vast majority of people were opposed to the Kansas evolution decision because it reduced the "wide range of views" that kids would be exposed to. And as one would expect, support for creationism and opposition to evolution were generally linked with poor education and based on ignorance of the ideas involved. Ironically, people were far more confident in the "proven" status of the Theory of Relativity than of Evolution. The basis for such a belief seems hard to understand....