I had a friend who was very intelligent, but their family chose to send them to Catholic school for education.
One day, we somehow got on the topic of dinosaurs, and they turned to me with an incredulous look on their face and said, "Wait, dinosaurs are actually real? I thought they were fake, like the Earth isn't actually that old."
Turns out that's what their parents and teachers told them since childhood.
Is that some weird American thing? I went to a Catholic school in Poland, and we were told about evolution as a matter of fact. No one questioned it. I think our biology teacher was actually a priest in fact. And as far as I understand the Roman Catholic church completely supports evolution as the dominant theory, maybe with a bit of "god helped along the way" somewhere but no one questions it being true. And suggesting that dinosaurs weren't real would just get you laughed out.
Well the point of the paper is that regardless of what your religion teaches (and the Roman Catholic church, in particular, is not anti-evolution; but not pro-evolution either, and offers its members essentially a choice of which mechanism of creation to believe), your "sociocultural environment" influences your beliefs more than what religion you say you're a part of. So yes, in accordance with the paper, it's probably more likely that even Catholics in the U.S. will be exposed to more anti-evolution indoctrination and more of their parents and teachers will try to deny evolutionary science, even if they aren't members of a specifically anti-evolution sect.
What the paper doesn't really go into is to how religion influences that "sociocultural environment"--it's just measuring effects for individuals. It's clear to me that "teach the controversy" movements, attacks on evolutionary science like the Scopes trial, attempts to remove evolution from biology texts and the actual removal in some schools are in large part motivated by religion, and comprise a lot of that "sociocultural environment" the paper refers to. Catholics have a choice whether to believe in a literal six-day creation and the creation of all life in its current form, so in a place like the U.S., where it's simply more socially acceptable to be an anti-evolutionist, they'll do so in more frequent numbers than where it's not.
It's a Protestant thing, I believe. Catholics have a central authority that is in charge of telling people more or less what to believe, but Protestants are free to make their own interpretations so they sometimes choose to believe stuff that sounds crazy to outsiders.
The Catholic Church happens to believe in evolution, so most Catholics accept evolution as well.
Yes, but no. It's still quite common in other places as well (take a guess), but none you are as likely to hear of as the US. The US may also be the developed nation in which such belief is most common and - more importantly - openly discussed.
It definitely is an American evangelical/fundamentalist thing. (Might also be elsewhere, I can't say) The history is that in the 1800s many seminaries, beginning with German seminaries, began teaching theology that differed from traditional orthodoxy. In the early 1900s a counter-movement emerged in the US which insisted on five fundamentals (hence "fundamentalist"): the Bible is "infallible" and inspired by God, the virgin birth of Jesus, the bodily resurrection of Jesus, that Christ's death atoned for our sins, and the reality of Jesus' miracles. It seems that over time the first point seems to become a literal interpretation of much of the Bible, in particular, Genesis 1. I assume this is because the Modernist theology has to symbolize the Bible if it wants to harmonize the Bible with Modern ideas about there is no literal God, miracles can't happen, etc., since a God that exists and intervenes (e.g. miracles) is kind of the whole point of the text. I'm not totally what happened or why, but it seems like the fundamentalists simplified things from "these are our assumptions" to "this is what the Bible says". YEC is the poster-child, but an unnuanced, one-sided view is endemic. I think evangelicals were originally more nuanced, but over time seem to have merged with the fundamentalists.
However, I don't think the Church has historically had an official position on how long creation took. I know some early Church fathers figured Creation took 6000 years: "a day is to the Lord as 1000 years". I also assume that "1000 years" had a similar feeling as "a million years" to us: you can do math with it, but a million years is pretty much an unimaginably long time.
It is also well-known that it is a hermeneutical error to interpret poetry literally, but there is little recognition, at least among evangelicals/fundamentalists that Genesis 1 is actually poetry, and hence interpreting it literally is what I would call a hermeneutical gaffe.
I think there's a strong evangelical influence over Catholic culture in the US. Church doctrine does acknolwledge evolution, but with certain exceptions such as human consciousness.
Indeed, and in particular it's the coupling of the eternal soul to the temporal body, that is held to be inaccessible to naturalistic inquiry. There are similar problems surrounding reproduction.
The thought process is probably the same reason we're all telling ourselves LaMDA and GPT-3 can't be conscious:
Our subjective experience of reality constantly eludes our ability to explain in terms of any physical or informational processes, so every time a system becomes explicable, it leaves the domain of "things which might be self-aware".
Some people take this in the other direction and attribute a soul to everything, others go further and say that even our self awareness is an illusion.
I was raised Catholic in a very rural rustic area of midwest USA, and we Catholics laughed at those of other religions who "didn't believe in evolution".
Yeah same here; not catholic but, for the Netherlands, very strict Christian (I do not know the particular name in English); we were taught evolution, dinosaurs and carbon dating etc.
> And suggesting that dinosaurs weren't real would just get you laughed out.
There's a contrarian part of me that sees this as somewhat negative. It suggests that perhaps some students may actually have hidden beliefs that they're simply unwilling to expose due to the lack of space for unconventional ideas in the environment. Are students being educated or merely bullied into a particular point of view?
That's another question from this study. They say students "given instruction on the nature of science" accept evolution more readily. What is the "nature of science?" And, what does that instruction entail, exactly?
Unspoken political views are pretty common in the US, and they’re likely why identity (and dog-whistle) politics play such an important role in US politics.
Yes it is. To put it bluntly a large portion of the American population is scientifically illiterate. Some of them believe the earth is around 6000 years old. They even have museums dedicated to such things.
upvote this as an American but not for the reason that you might think; outside of college towns, you are going to be surprised at the actual education and literacy levels about anything. You can definitely find college undergrads and get them to say dumb things on camera, too (a reflection of their social surroundings)
It’s a slow process due to American fundamentalist culture.
“The church first brought evolution into the fold in 1950 with the work of Pope Pius XII.
At the same time, Catholics take no issue with the Big Bang theory, along with cosmological, geological, and biological axioms touted by science.
In fact, the Roman Catholic Church has recognized Darwinian evolution for the past 60 years. It openly rejects Intelligent Design and Young Earth Creationism saying that it "pretends to be science.”
“
Well Nicolaus Copernicus was maybe a priest (definitely received minor orders and served as a church canon), but that didn't seem to speed up the acceptance of heliocentrism by the church...
Catholic school here in Canada explicitly teaches evolution and has done so for a very very long time.
Since Catholicism is pretty "centralized" as far as religion goes and since the official ex cathedra position has been a-ok with evolution since 1950 and arguably earlier, I have no idea how this story could possibly be true.
Living in the south in America I've encountered this mindset over and over. One of the best people I ever hired, absolutely top tier intelligent and productive, completely believed in the young earth theory and that dinosaur bones were placed there by god. Not exclusive to catholics, southern baptists, etc. Just "religious people in the south".
It's depressing and my cousin's son who is being home schooled by the same sort of religious mother is just criminally under-educated for his age. We don't live in a small city, one of the larger ones in America. It's just sad to see that this is often the status quo around here.
> my cousin's son who is being home schooled by the same sort of religious mother is just criminally under-educated for his age
That's why home schooling is just a terrible thing to allow to happen to kids. They can't choose what bullshit they're fed at home, mandatory free public education to some level is the main thing that can help them have a decent start at life.
There is no panacea. Many children may be tragically under-served by their home educations, but a great many children are tragically under-educated in the public school system, too.
My partner and I, not at all religious, are home-schooling our eleven-year-old because the public school was completely failing him. Pandemic-era zoom classes were especially worthless. By contrast, a few hours of parental attention each day has him thriving. We have the freedom to work with his natural curiosity, and the normal variations in the pace of skill development, instead of boxing him into a fixed curriculum.
Is that genuinely true of Catholics in your area? I had thought the organized structure of the brand made them far less prone to young-earth theory than non-denominated Protestants.
They do a decent job, but members of Catholicism aren’t entirely immune to psychological biases.
If you grow up as a catholic in the south, you’re in the minority. Sunday mass is just a small part of someone’s week, and you’ll spend most of your time around Protestants.
Most people are heavily influenced by their peers, and it can be pretty jarring for someone to accept that an ideology they’ve surrounded themselves with is wrong.
That sounds strange, Catholic church and schools never had problems with evolution and enforcing literal creationism. It's a issue predominantly common among some of the Protestant denominations in the US.
While attending school in Poland, I met only two people my age who believed evolution was a hoax and could be considered to be young Earth creationists. One of them was a Jehovah Witness, and the other was a member of an American-style Pentecostal and evangelical church.
I had a weird experience in high school as well, with my now-partner. She was completely surprised by the age of the earth and everything else that comes with it (dinosaurs, evolution, etc.)
Her parents did not even feel this way, but the home school co-ops they sent her to had taught her this.
That has nothing to do with actual Catholic theology, which doctrinally has no problem with genetics, evolution, dinosaurs, etc. This is also true of most European Protestant religious groups.
They see the bible story as allegorical and so not expected to be taken literally. Evolution is seen as simply the mechanism through which god chose to act. Creationism is largely an American thing, in Europe most Christians consider such people fringe nut jobs.
I took comparative religion studies at University. The first weeks of class, the Christian teacher (the other was a formal Buddhist) said clearly, you can easily divide modern Christian denominations between those that take the Bible as literal Truth, and those that do not; the latter generally being the literate ones.
Is this for real? I have never heard of a catholic school teaching fundamentalism like this. Not saying it doesn't exist, but would have to be pretty fridge.
I went to Catholic schools and there I learned that evolution/big-bang were church doctrine, the Bible is not the literal word of God but divinely inspired, and that God probably wouldn’t hold it against a just non-believer when it came to determining their fate.
So I’m not sure when your friend went to this school or if they were in a weird sect (mine was Jesuit) but it does not match my experience
This was a conservative area at the height of Republicans' push to teach "intelligent design" in schools instead of evolution.
I wouldn't be surprised if this was the result of tribalism, or deliberately not teaching certain things to keep parents happy. At the time, parents were sending kids to private schools so they wouldn't be "indoctrinated" into an atheist/scientific agenda with evolution in the curriculum.
One day, we somehow got on the topic of dinosaurs, and they turned to me with an incredulous look on their face and said, "Wait, dinosaurs are actually real? I thought they were fake, like the Earth isn't actually that old."
Turns out that's what their parents and teachers told them since childhood.