#42635: — 10/04  at  07:51 AM
PZ - Any chance in your opinion that this is a "hardwire", not a software, cultural issue? Could it be possible that those that "must" believe in a creator/ god(s) are remnants of an older model Homo? To continue with the computer analogy, are the "religiously inclined" a Windows 3.1 release, while those able to see beyond the "gods angry with us" outlook are more of a Windows XP / Linux Homo release?

#42636: — 10/04  at  07:53 AM
I would think the hardwire approach has some validity but not for the reasons you propose. I think our species tends to look to the 'alpha' member of the troup, much like many other animals and primates. Hence 'leaders' of a tribe such as pastors, who may spout nothing but jibberish are given special accord not for what they say but the position they hold. A position which is socially reinforced within the tribe itself.

#42638: Ron Zeno — 10/04  at  08:00 AM
Nice one, PZ! Yes, while some people (and groups) are extremely adverse to uncertainty, and some of the religious extremists are obviously overwhelmed with this fear, most anti-evolutionists seem to just be agreeing with a social group they identify with, granfalloon or not.

Their arguments aren't based on fear of uncertainty, nor anything but a superficial understanding of the issues. Instead the arguments come down to "I'm with them". It's about their personal identity and identification with a group. It's their unquestioning acceptance of the "you're either with us or against us" mentality.

#42639: LBBP — 10/04  at  08:03 AM
I agree, religion in general, and anti-evolution by association, are a desperate plea for self-worth. Our upbringing molds us to be compliant, then when we hit sufficient maturity to make our own decisions, there comes a crisis of self. Most fall back on religion to save themselves from the trauma of loss of purpose and or out of laziness to think of their own opinion.

It's much easier to just say "God give me strength" than it is to find the strength within yourself.

#42640: — 10/04  at  08:09 AM
Indeed, you don't see this kind of almost hysterical fear of quantum mechanics, even though that has so much uncertainty that there's even a principle named that. Most people think that's just weird if they bother to think about it at all.

Now evolution, that directly impacts them...where they came from and who they are. It tells them (in their minds) that they are nothing special, just another animal, a modified ape no more or less evolved than the chimp. Just different. That hurts.

#42641: — 10/04  at  08:10 AM
Fear of death drives sensient human beings to embrace religions (and reject evolutionary theory) that promise eternal life. Ironically, this 'survive at all costs' mentality may be just an extension of genetic evolutionary programming, which imbues all living things with a strong survival instinct.

#42642: — 10/04  at  08:13 AM
Might have something to do with the fact that humans aren't anything but ways for cells to feed themselves more efficiently. No one wants to admit that we are all subservient to the great cellular overlords. LOL (kinda)

#42644: Steve — 10/04  at  08:21 AM
Love the Vonnegut reference at the end there granfalloons indeed!

#42646: Bob Davis — 10/04  at  08:28 AM
PZ- Interesting theory, bringing tribalism to anti-scientism. It makes some sense. I've done some research into "us vs. them" attitudes and how we have to build up the "other" as more evil to make ourselves feel good. And now even with science. Kind of pathetic.

In other news, yesterday you posted about how maybe it was the Blue Fairies who did it, so I went onto DKos and took a poll. Results are:

Poll
"Who Did It?"
-Random mutations - 33%
-Intelligent Designer (Not God! Don't say that!) - 4%
-The Blue Fairies - 62%

So the results are in and it's looking pretty good for the Blue Fairies right now.

a modest experiment

#42647: Josh — 10/04  at  08:32 AM
I think that it takes a lot of training and experience to learn how randomness works. I commented on this regarding >a href="http://jgrr.blogspot.com/2005/09/polling-polls-uncertainty-and-war-on.html">people's views on sample size in polls</a>, and the same idea extends to evolution. Without practice, people don't appreciate the way that random selection can be used to represent a larger population, nor how non-random selection on a population with random variation can change that population. Then you have to combine these randomish steps into a chain, and people don't have an intuitive sense of that sort of integration.

I guess that means I agree that anti-evolutionism isn't about rational choice, but the mass of people who still think we should teach all sides aren't in a movement, either. They are just giving in to natural biases. That's why things like Cafe Scientifique is so important, it helps give people the background to understand how scientists think.

#42650: coturnix — 10/04  at  08:39 AM
<a href="http://www.pandagon.net/archives/2005/10/now_the_only_be.html">Amanda<a> also chimes in on this topic. I have already blogwhored in the comments there, so I do not need to repeat it here. Granfaloons indeed.

#42651: coturnix — 10/04  at  08:43 AM
Also, I assume from your post that you have read "Darwin's Cathedrals" by DS Wilson - IMHO the best explanation for the adaptive (social) function of religion.

#42652: The Count — 10/04  at  08:53 AM
I have to come back to one of my arguments concerning anti-evolution by god believers (trying for an all-inclusive term here).

Bear with me for a moment here as I set it up. While I completely agree with what you say about why these people believe what they do; support, belonging, lack of self reliance, etc. I think that there is another "impulse", perhaps one that is not always overtly expressed, but one that has great importance in driving a lot of their thinking/hoping. The concept of life after death. What it really means is that there is no death, it is immortality for some sort of a soul you are supposed to have. I cannot concieve of a more compelling belief, especially because it fits right in with any animal's survival instinct, which IMO has to be the oldest and strongest. Even if it is just a mind trick.

At its basest and most reprehensible form It's been used as an argument to convince people to go to war and not fear fatal harm because they will "never really die". Pure control over people. Even the invention of hell is a wonderful way of keeping people's behavior in check. I would have to agree that sitting in a lake of fire for eternity does not sound pleasant. The medieval catholic heierarchy certainly understood the above two points and refind them to an art form (though they are/were also understood and used by most religions extant or not).

The heart of the matter is that by attacking creationism we chip away at one of the core foundations of which supports that belief. The more fervent and fundamentalist one's belief is in their religion, the more important and overt the concept of life after death becomes.

That science in general is also under attack makes sense because sooner or later other foundations will come under attack or eventually "mere humans" will be able to perform miracles only reserved for god. Either outcome isn't good for them.

It drives people to willingly consider and/or accept intelligent design as a middle road. ID seems to be created not just as a wedge, but I think it is also a shrewdly thught out argument to provide those with less fervent faith a way of hedging their bets so as not to completely lose faith and leave whichever religion they belong to.

I think the first sentence of your last paragraph "One of our jobs has to be to convince people that they can trust in science without losing their identity as Baptists/Hoosiers/Southerners/Methodists/Republicans/whatever other granfalloon they associate with." is spot on. Science should not be feared and it should be able to coexist with thier own belief in a god. If we are to appeal to people of faith, that is the only way. Any other logical argument can simply be disproved by saying it is disproved (without need of proof or debate). Logical arguments just become an excercise in bashing our heads against a wall.

Actually, I rather wish that people would lose their belief in life after death. As an atheist I know there is no life after death, but it also drives my moral and ethical thinking, especially when it comes to the "golden rule". Instead, religions have perverted it to justify hate, ostracism, atrocity, and killing.

#42654: — 10/04  at  09:01 AM
Good piece. And it's all true. But religious granfalloons seem to have much more cohesion that others, and hence politcal & social power. In my view, they could never maintain this strong cohesion without promising their members immortality, salvation, eternal life, etc (or the flipside - condemning them to eternal suffering). Religion touches on it's members own selfish Darwinistic instincts for survival, and that may be the strongest hook you can use to control someone.

#42656: Arun — 10/04  at  09:12 AM
Without at least a comparative study of religions, the only motives for rejecting evolution that you can reliably locate are those of American Christians. You certainly can't hit upon anything universal (e.g., "remnants of older model Homo").

Examples to drive home the point (and I am not a scholar of comparative religions) can be provided upon request.

#42659: John Emerson — 10/04  at  09:24 AM
I think that a major factor, perhaps the major factor, is sex. Sexual excess is regarded by traditional religions as "animalistic", whereas humans are capable of self-control. Catholicism actually thinks sexlessness is the ideal, although unattainable by most.

In folk religion animal metaphors (dogs, pigs, maggots, wolves, jackals, etc., etc.) are used repeatedly as negative examples. Human virtue is defined by its difference from animals. Evolution is thought to imply that we should have sex without any restraint, like dogs.

During the relevant period (ca. 1920-1950) many of the same people were advocates of evolution, sex ed, and progressive ed (less authoritarian and punitive). Secular humanists or naturalists like John Dewey, Bertrand Russell, and Margaret Mead.

I really think that this is the main factor, and I rarely hear it spoken of. I grew up in a conservative Christian community and heard this stuff all the time.

(Don't bother to tell me that folk Christianity contradicts itself by also talking about chaste creatures like geese and, recently, penguins. Of course they do! They're not rocket scientists, but storytellers. "Even some animals are less disgusting than perverted, disgusting men and women....")

#42662: — 10/04  at  09:39 AM
And what do people fear, PZ? Uncertainty, and that their efforts will lack any justification in some greater purpose.

The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for own self, the more ready he is to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race, or his holy cause.

But of course. As Nietzsche noted, any sort of pain and suffering is bearable--if it can be justified in some way or another. This is where the dislike of uncertainty and the wish to cling to a "higher purpose" come in. They dislike science they don't understand telling them that their justification beliefs are not so certain as they once thought, since one can thus no longer simply hear and read "literally" in order to know that one's toils and hardships are bearable through some greater hope.

One thing that has occurred to me recently is that, in a naive way, for many IDists/creationists the whole issue is evidence. They don't see any evidence for evolution on the "grand scale", and in a naive, Puritanical sense, they demand that they might "see evidence" prior to giving assent to such "fairy tales". Yet because they really don't understand scientific evidence in the first place, let alone the interleaved correlations of evolution that make it a rock-solid theory (without fairies intervening), they're demanding the impossible, while feeling that they are justified in demanding something that they have never demanded of any other science (which is, naive justification of complex models).

There was a component of this demand for "plain evidence" in the Anglo-American development of science, and it was an asset in "Yankee ingenuity" and in a high regard for what could be pounded, seen to change form or color, or that could otherwise provide immediate evidence for what is claimed. It helped Americans to produce hands-on science, IOW, while "snotty continentals" thought about theory. Of course as time went on the Anglos and Americans had to adopt theory more like the continentals, but part of America culture, at least, tends to cling to a more naive "plain view" empiricism.

Their especial version of "empiricism" is part of the way they view their world, and regardless of "fear" or loss of "higher purpose", they simply don't know how to think otherwise. They "know what they know", and a mass of inferences supporting a theory is in fact not what they know in any way. Their sense of "fair play" even insists that something built upon inferences (we could squabble about such claims, but I'm willing to accept the "inferences" view as long as it is coupled to theory which ties so many "inferences" inescapably together) should be "balanced" by something they themselves might very well "infer" (inferred through tradition and prejudice, of course)--that organisms were designed.

The democratic "priesthood of believers" notion that Luther propounded successfully to the proto-Puritans remains a problem for more subtle theories. Puritans and their descendants think that they are proper judges (though they don't think of themselves as "judges" per se) of a Bible which is rather more inaccessible to the inquiring mind than is the evidence of biology. They also think they can judge science based on a few facts, not only because of cultural notions of "democracy", but even more so because it relates in a way to the Bible that they think they do understand.

Are they really going to believe us when we tell them that they don't understand these issues, when they have been told authoritatively that they do understand not only the Bible but the few shreds of science and anti-science that they "know" regarding evolution? How can they believe us when we say something so contrary to how they understand the world?

It is a cultural quandary that we have to deal with in all of its complexity, and it is strangely different from most other Western cultures (the British were never quite so caught up in the sense of "priesthood of believers"). French Catholics never believed that they knew theology or science in the way that many uneducated Americans, especially, think that they know both. Some cultures know when to defer to actual experts, while Americans tend to think that they are in charge in all spheres of life, and then unthinkingly defer to "experts" like Dembski because they really have no conception of what constitutes an expert in either theology or in science (Dembski thinks he's both, and obviously, ignorant bootlickers like Salvador Cordova will defer without any meaningful questioning of such "authority").

#42663: velid — 10/04  at  09:42 AM
Very interesting discussion. I have always approached the question in terms of why people feel they need religion. Short answer: it provides relief from existential anxiety.

But the question of why they reject evolution is different. Not all religions are so passionate about it. In fact, as far as I know, it is only American fundametalists for whom evolution creates such a passionate hostility. And many evangelicals have migrated from their family or tribe religion to this more extreme belief. I don't have the stats ready at hand, but I seem to recall that the fundamentalists and hence the anti-evolutionists are among the fastest growing sects in America. What accounts for their increasing popularity?

Consider the following quote from the self-proclaimed "best weasel killer in Houston" Tom Delay. DeLay contends that high crime rates and tragedies like the Columbine assault will continue as long as schools teach children “that they are nothing but glorified apes who have evolutionized [sic] out of some primordial soup of mud”

Assuming this is not just meaningless posturing, where is the passion coming from here? I think he sees evolution (ironically enough) as an assault on his sense of purity and specialness. There also seems to be a horror at natural processes in general, and a desperate attempt to maintain a fantasy of distance from all that is dirty, changeable, temporary and therefore, for him, meaningless. Perhaps that is what drew him to his original profession as an exterminator. Hoffer's analysis seems to be on target in this case too.

At a deeper level, I think the question needs to be framed in terms of social psychology. What about society here in the US has changed that so many people feel the need for such a radical belief system? There is definitely a whiff of desperation and anxiety about the fundamentalist revival in the US, that I think is in part related to decreased social stability and the bewildering pace of change.

#42665: — 10/04  at  09:48 AM
Humans have all kinds of built-in machinery for dealing with other humans. We anthropomorphize our environment. We see a face in every pair of dots. We talk about software as though it were full of homunculi. We're obsessed with people, so of course we see people hidden everywhere.

One interesting facet of our people obsession is our obedience to authority. As Milgram demonstrated, most humans will pretty much do what they're told, even if it's pretty horrible. We obey those in charge.

Given our obsession with people, and our willingness to obey, it doesn't surprise me that morality is often seen as orders from some authoritative, invisible person--that's one of the easiest ways through our thick skulls.

(Of course, morality must eventually become more than order-taking. Nobody, religious or otherwise, admires a man who refrains from beating his neighbor soley because God's commands. And sure enough, even the Bible wants something more than good behavior--it tells us to actively love our neighbor.)

#42666: — 10/04  at  09:51 AM
I'm with The Count. I think a lot of it is the Life after Death thing.

I went from religious to atheist over a period of a few years. One of the big 'Whoa.' moments I had was the loss of a belief I had taken for granted up to then, of some kind of post-mortem consciousness or awareness. Really, that was one of the harder beliefs to give up.

I disagree with PZ on this one, though:

I'd add one other minor component to why people reject evolution, though: fear.  One message of evolutionary history is that in addition to human beings not being the end target of evolution, we are just like every other species on the planet…and species go extinct.

Biologists might fret about that one, but I don't. My genome may worry (not literally) about its survival, but I only worry about my own and a generation or two of offspring.

I doubt that most creationists consider this point one way or another. It's rarely stated explicitly, so most creationists probably aren't even aware of this as an issue, given how uneducated they seem to be about evolution in general.

#42671: — 10/04  at  10:25 AM
I have a library in my basement filled with spiritual and New Age books. I bought these over the many years, when I was a believer. Why did I need so many? (In fact, why do believers need so many books, so many sermons, conferences, meetings, etc?) Well, it's because there was always that hint that I may be wrong. I remember being deep into the 4th or 5th year of a New Age teaching, going to classes, reading book after book, meditating daily, and I went to a restaurant (as we often did after karate class). The subject of the teachings came up. I gave an overview of the religion to my curious instructor, who was also a NASA physicist. He calmly asked me, "How do you really know that what are are experiencing or that what you have read is true?" Nervously, I tried to explain, but he would persist. "Are you sure?" I told him it all made sense and explained my perception of reality. "Is your perception the truth?" I couldn't answer, yet this didn't stop me in my pursuit of this and other explanations for life.

The dialog had stayed with me for 15 years. I feared it. It was insidious. No one had ever challenged my belief system until then or even after. Though it didn't stop me from searching, I have now come to realize how important that chat was for me. It was a gentle nudge, not an attack, yet it stuck.

I bought those books, searched for answers, because I was never 100% sure that my spiritual "truths" were true. And others made money off of me. Steve Salerno, a Rodale Books editor at one time in his life writes in SHAM:

At considerable expense, Rodale undertook extensive market surveys, the results of which dictated each business unit’s editorial decisions. In the case of self-help books specifically, the surveys identified the customers’ worst fears and chronic problems, which we were then supposed to target in our editorial content. One piece of information to emerge from those market surveys stood out above all others and guided our entire approach: The most likely customer for a book on any given topic was someone who had bought a similar book within the preceding eighteen months."

Many of our books proposed to solve, or at least ameliorate, a problem. If what we sold worked, one would expect lives to improve. One would not expect people to need further help from us–at least not in that same problem area, and certainly not time and time again. At some point, people would make the suggested changes, and those changes would “take.”"

Perhaps the religious continue to search in their many ways because there is that spark of doubt (and, no doubt, the churches and self-help gurus will take advantage of that). I give thanks to my karate instructor for seeing the doubt within me.

#42672: Arun — 10/04  at  10:26 AM
This thread is full of the "just-so" stories of the type that emanate from Evolutionary Psychology.

Anyway, here is a piece of a competing narrative, from Prof. Balu of U.Ghent:


"1. Consider the everyday *phenomenon* of sunrise and
sunset. We see the movement of the sun on the horizon
and, for a very long period of time, people thought
that they observed this because that is the way the
reality is: the sun moves around the earth. With
Galileo Galilei, two things happened. (a) He argued
that the earth moves round the sun. (b) On the basis
of this theory, he claimed that we are compelled to
observe the movement of the sun around the earth.
Because of this, a distinction became necessary: the
movement of the sun is merely a phenomenon, whereas
the movement of the earth is the real truth. What we
previously thought as reality became downgraded to a
mere appearance and something we did not know until
then became the reality underlying this appearance.

Of course, appearance is as much a part of Reality as
the essence (or underlying reality, or whatever
terminology you feel like using) is. So, we have three
notions: appearance, the underlying reality, and the
Reality that unites appearance with the underlying
reality. (One might as well call them reality1,
reality2 and reality3. But one does not do this
because of the deep-rooted western *metaphysical
assumption* that there is only *one reality*. However,
since I do not want to quarrel with this assumption
now, I will make no further remarks on this issue.)

Notice though that this degradation of what was once
thought of as reality to appearance is acceptable (and
possible) because Galileo proves that one is compelled
to observe the movement of the sun on the horizon
precisely because of the motion of earth around the
sun. That is, he shows that the movement of the sun is
a *necessary appearance*.

2. Consider now another everyday *phenomenon*: human
beings are intentional. That is, each one of us
experiences oneself as a being that wishes, dreams,
hopes, desires, fears, sets up projects, pursues
ambitions, etc. In short, it is our experience that we
are intentional agents. All of Semitic theology, most
of western philosophy and psychology and all of our
commonsense assumes the *truth* of this experience.
This, if you like, is the reality that Homo Erectus
Erectus is. This is what we experience and we
experience this, we believe, because it is the
reality.

3. Some have found it fit to challenge this. Mostly,
within the western intellectual traditions, they are
called 'reductionists.' They believe that human beings
are not intentional agents and that a future
scientific psychology will show that our commonsense
psychological theories, which attribute these
intentional states to human beings, will turn out to
be as false as theories that postulated an 'élan
vital' to explain life.

However, these reductionist explanations are not
*scientific*. By reading their tracts, or writing
their articles, one does *not* stop dreaming, or
hoping, or desiring, or acting as moral agents. That
is to say, they do not tell us why, if we are under
the illusion that we are intentional creatures, we are
*compelled* to live with this illusion, where it comes
from, how it reproduces itself, and so on. These
theories blandly assure us that we are all deluded,
and no more than that.

None would have taken Galileo's theory seriously, if
we had blandly assured us that all of us are *deluded*
in observing the motion of sun on the horizon. The
same with respect to these reductionist theories.
There is no reason to take them seriously in their
*present form*.

4. What do they have to do, if they have to be taken
seriously? They have to tell us not merely where this
illusion of being an intentional creature and a moral
agent comes from but, more importantly, whether and
how we can be rid of this illusion. This is the
requirement for any scientific theory regarding this
issue. However, one point is worth noting at this
stage: because being an intentional creature (i.e. a
creature which hopes, dreams, desires, etc) is
*experiential* in nature, any explanation that claims
the contrary should help us *experience* the illusory
nature of intentionality as well.

5. Here is where the Indian traditions step in: *they
fulfil precisely this condition*. They do not merely
tell us where the illusion of being an intentional
agent comes from, but help you *experience* its
illusionary nature as well. They are scientific, in
the best sense of the term. (In the sense I have just
outlined.)

6. Because of this, much like Galileo's theory, the
reality of being an intentional creature is degraded
to the level of appearance. (Or, say, reality1.) That
one is not an intentional creature is the underlying
reality. (Or, say, reality2.) The ultimate reality
(or, reality3) unifies the appearance (reality1) with
the underlying reality (reality2).


If one looks at the issue this way, the question 'how
does one know that one has discovered a higher
reality?' answers itself. In exactly the same way we
know about these things in scientific endeavours.
There is nothing 'mystical' or 'esoteric' about the
Indian traditions. They are the *sciences* of some
aspects of the kind of creatures we human beings are.

#42673: — 10/04  at  10:31 AM
I tend to agree with The Count and Wilson, believing in life after death requires a supernatural existence of some kind, evolution is a threat to that belief. The other half though is purpose in life. I think alot of religious people need to feel that their life has a special meaning. They argue that without God there is no basis for morality. Therefore, again, evolution eliminates the need for a God, and therefore it will be the end of morality. (oh the horror!) I don't buy that argument, I see no correlation between theistic beliefs and moral behavior.

#42674: Edward Braun — 10/04  at  10:32 AM

Dave S. said:

Now evolution, that directly impacts them...where they came from and who they are. It tells them (in their minds) that they are nothing special, just another animal, a modified ape no more or less evolved than the chimp. Just different. That hurts.

But I would add, both we and common chimps are clearly less evolved than bonobos. I would advise Mr. Delay that telling schoolchildren that they were cousins to the coolest primates on the planet might cause them to... well, make love, not war! But, then again, I suspect Mr. Delay isn't into "making love, not war". Money laundering for tawdry political gain... yes. That is family values! But bonding through sexual behavior? That isn't "family values" man!

P.S. Yes, I'm aware of assertions that the bonobo has actually retained more of the ancestral character states than either humans or common chimps, though I have to admit I haven't seen the proof in the scientific literature. My comment regarding them being more evolved is simply a non-scientific statement about how cool these primates are. We have worse cousins (in fact, I hear the other hymenoptera are upset about their relationship to the chalcidids, braconids, and ichneumonids...)

#42675: Edward Braun — 10/04  at  10:35 AM
oops... I meant to say "We could have worse cousins"