The theological case for evolution

[struggle4progress]

Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite
Professor, Chicago Theological Seminary

... It is definitely “an impression that has been created” that faith and science are at war, and politics is one big reason this impression has been created ...

... “While leftists sit around congratulating themselves on their personal virtue, the right understands the central significance of movement building, and they have taken to the task with admirable diligence.” I certainly interpreted the Creation Science Museum as part of this “movement building” by conservatives ...

... The real reason to take up anti-evolutionary views as a conservative cause is to create a roiling distrust of liberalism. This generalized anger helps mobilize the conservative base and get enough votes for the real political agenda like letting polluters off the hook, rolling back regulation, and gutting the Environmental Protection agency ...

Worry about something that really matters, like the fact that if the Environmental Protection Agency is destroyed your children won’t be able to breathe in a few years ...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/on-faith/post/the-theological-case-for-evolution/2011/08/23/gIQAdp7rZJ_blog.html

[trotsky]

1. From the Pew poll the author references:

The poll, by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, also found that nearly three-fourths of Americans believe in heaven as a place where people who have led good lives will be eternally rewarded. And almost 60 percent believe in hell, where people who have led bad lives and die without repenting are eternally punished, the poll found.

Majorities also believe that angels and demons are at work in the world and that miracles occur today as they did in ancient times.

Sounds like yet another liberal Christian in clear denial about the state of her religion in America today.

40% of Americans Still Believe in Creationism
http://www.religiondispatches.org/dispatches/laurilebo/3952/40%25_of_americans_still_believe_in_creationism

We know those 40% are pretty unlikely to be Hindus, Muslims, Jews, Catholics, or non-believers. Leaving? Protestant Christians. Considering about half the population of the USA falls into that category, that's a huge supermajority of U.S. Protestants who really do believe in a literal creation, and do not accept evolution. Take the blinders off, liberal Protestants.

[dmallind]

2. Here's some data by belief group

Bible Stories Are "Literally True"
Red Sea Creation Noah
All 64% 61% 60%
Catholics 50 51 44
Protestants 79 75 73
Evangelical Protestants 91 87 87
Non-Evangelical Protestants 59 55 50
No Religion 32 24 29



http://abcnews.go.com/sections/primetime/us/views_of_bible_poll_040216.html

75% of Protestans believe the Creation story (well, presumably they pick one of the two inherently contradictory ones) in the Bible is/are literally true. 51% of Catholics do, whatever their theologians pretend.

[LAGC]

Wow, 24% of those with "No Religion" still believe in Creationism?

Are those just deists who believe in God but not Jesus?

Crazy.

:crazy:

[trotsky]

4. Remember, there's quite a few people who jump on the...

"spiritual but not religious" train. :)

[dmallind]

5. A lot of the extreme charismatics claim to have no religion

...but instead to have a "relationship with Christ".

[trotsky]

3. Wow, here I gave far too much credit to the lay Catholics.

Literalists abound, despite how liberal Christians would prefer their religion to be.

[struggle4progress]

8. That poll cannot actually be correct: if it were, we'd have a very different political situation.

The poll results are rather out-of-line with other polls over many years. I tried to find the data and methodology online but couldn't

The results will depend on whether cellphones were included; in 2004, it is unlikely that cellphones were included; DUers were discussing that flaw in many polls back then

The results may also depend on contact and refusal rates: who you contact depends on time-of-day; an increasing number of people screen their calls by examining the calling-number or listening briefly to an answering machine before picking up; and many folk nowadays simply hang up on such calls

This leads to a further way in which results can be skewed: results may depend on the statistical corrections applied. It is quite common not to report raw statistics but to "correct" the statistics by rescaling to reflect the expected distribution of various demographic groups. This can be justifiable but it involves further assumptions and can produce inaccurate results if the assumptions are incorrect

Results further depend on exactly how the questions were asked. In many cases, people are forced by polling to choose between alternatives, none of which actually reflect their views. In the case of the poll you cite, the ABC story mentions Gibson's "Passion of Christ" movie, and it might be important to know (for example) whether the movie was discussed in the course of polling

Finally, in regard to polling, it is generally important to know how strongly people hold to the alleged views: people typically have many opinions, but perhaps only the most strong-held opinions affect their behavior. I am, for example, entirely convinced marijuana should be legal, but the issue is quite low on my agenda: in practical terms, I don't much care

So if ABC called up a group of folk without cellphones at home during normal working hours and asked a question that many understood to mean "Do you believe the Bible?" they may have gotten 60%+ positive responses -- but the result wouldn't mean that 60%+ of the public feels strongly that the Noah story is word-for-word true

[dmallind]

9. Somewhere in that torrent of denial, I suspect the real crux is mentioned

albeit not I suspect as intended.

I've seen polls that return smaller (while still shockingly huge) numbers of literalists, it's undeniable. But the wording of survey questions is important as you say, and I think this one is the MORE accurate representation of the concern here.

The difference is that many surveys ask, as you refer to it, for "word for word" acceptance, and take a negative response to be one that does not accept that the Bible is literally true. This survey asked if the STORY was literally true, not if every single word were true. It's a subtle but important distinction. A secular example might be the difference between accepting that a biopic or autobiography is literally true - say that Madeleine Albright was honest in the stories in Madame Secretary - and accepting that every single word in it was true; every word in a conversation 40 years ago, every memory of how one of many thousands of dignitaries she met looked and acted.

While the people who believe she misremembered some detail but didn't flat out lie may be more capable of nuance than those who think there is not a scrap of detail that is incorrect, they each believe every story Ms. Albright tells as a true story

Now back to the Bible - people who believe that an omniscient God got mad enough about what his own creations did to slaughter them all except one family who got two of every species from every corner of the globe into a fairly small ferry are a concern to me, whether they believe exact details about, say, what kind of bird brought back the twig, or how drunk Noah was when he flashed his daughters in law or not. Believing the stories are literally true IS the problem, not just believing every single word of the story.

[struggle4progress]

11. Feel free to link the full description of the poll and its results, if you can locate that.

[dmallind]

12. Why - you think ABC made up the results of their own poll?

[struggle4progress]

13. I suspect the polling issues, raised by my earlier post, played a role

[dmallind]

14. Can you think of a realistic way to phrase the Q remotely akin to the summary

that would significantly confuse the term "literally true" to mean anything else but.....literally true?

[Silent3]

6. Accepting that plenty of people will remain religious...

...no matter what, for any time in the foreseeable future of our culture, I'm all for any strategy that brings more religious people into liberal politics, so long as the result isn't a shift away from support for separation of church and state among liberals.

For me, however, this courting of believers would be no more than a matter of strategy, a useful means to an end. I couldn't participate directly in this strategy myself without feeling a bit dishonest. I'd have to leave its implementation to believers who are trying to woo other believers. I don't see religion as compatible with science beyond a wink and a nod, leaving space open for concepts with the unimpressive virtue that they currently can't be disproved.

[Thats my opinion]

7. Some of us work very hard at this task.

And you are correct, it is our issue, not yours.

And religion and science are two hands of the same body--which is the good of the earth, which includes humans.

[digonswine]

10. The goal of science is not the "good of the earth"-

It just leads onward toward that. Science is a way of finding out how stuff works and building on that. Religion does not lead to "the good of the earth."