Earlier this month Pope Francis caused something of a media storm by announcing to the world he believes in evolution. Quite why this counted as news I’m not sure, given that the Catholic Church has accepted evolution for decades. It’s not even a particularly controversial opinion amongst religious people. Whilst young-earth creationism may be a loud and problematic group they nevertheless represent a minority view (although barely). Most religious people are perfectly fine with evolution as an explanation for our planet’s biodiversity. But why do they agree with the scientific community when such a significant minority don’t?
One popular explanation is that it’s all to do with scientific knowledge. Acceptance of evolution is often correlated with education and scientific understanding. Thus it might be that some religious groups actively teach (or foster learning about) evolution; or at the very least don’t tell people to shy away from it. This leads to increased scientific understanding, which in turn explains the increased acceptance of evolution.
So some researchers decided to test this hypothesis by taking trip to the Milwaukee Public Museum. There they conducted a survey, identifying visitors’ knowledge of evolution, their acceptance of the theory and their religious denomination. The goal being to identify whether or not religious denomination was correlated with knowledge and acceptance of evolution; indicating that some groups were indeed fostering scientific understanding.
And as you might expect they found a link between knowledge and acceptance of evolution. People who knew more about the subject were more likely to believe it. They also found a correlation between religious denomination and acceptance of evolution. Catholics, for example, were about as likely as college graduates to accept the theory of evolution as true. Protestants had a similar rate of acceptance, whilst non-denominational Christians had a very low rate of belief in evolution.
Left: the acceptance of evolution of various religious denominations. Right: the knowledge of evolution of various religious denominations
Crucially though they failed to find a link between religious denomination and knowledge of evolution. A Catholic might have been as likely as a college graduate to accept evolution, but they typically knew less about the subject than a high school dropout. In other words, there were two paths people took to accepting evolution: they either knew something about the theory, or they belonged to a religion that said the theory was true.
This strongly suggests that the religious people who accept evolution tend to do so because of dogma. Because some authority figure – like the super pope – said its ok. They haven’t understood or evaluated the evidence, they’re just being obedient.
Reference
Barone, L. M., Petto, A. J., & Campbell, B. C. (2014). Predictors of evolution acceptance in a museum population. Evolution: Education and Outreach, 7(1), 23.
EvoAnth 
Being religious is all about thinking and doing what others tell you (teachers or the Lord himself). Not exactly helpful when it comes to science.
Isn’t there a Dawkins quote along the lines of, “Evolution is almost universally accepted among those who understand it and almost universally rejected by those who don’t.”
Clearly then that statement needs revising. Almost everyone who understands evolution accept it, and almost everyone who doesn’t accept it doesn’t understand it. But there are those who don’t understand it yet also accept it.
I’ll accept that.
Back in the dark ages (50s and 60s), we learned about evolution in Catholic elementary school science class. We had to memorize the orders of animals and humans were listed as primates. We were also told that Adam and Eve was a metaphore because it was the best explanation people back in the day could come up with. And the Earth goes around the Sun too. I have no idea what they’re teaching kids now.
From what I here some religious schools (especially catholic schools) offer a really good education. The issue seems to be that religious organisations don’t. Turning up to church isn’t going to lead to you being more informed about evolution
I presume that intelligent religious believers who accept evolution do so because of the overwhelming evidence presented by science over the last 150 years but they are not convinced that this rules out a creator or some higher intelligence because science hasn’t yet explained the origins of life. Evolution explains the process but not the fundamental question of why we are here. I doubt that science can ever answer this satisfactorily because it is essentially a philosophical question. Why is there something rather than nothing?
Sure, this study simply notes that the majority of religious people who accept evolution don’t do so because they understand it. There’s still the possibility that some of them do understand it.
And sure, there’s also the fact that evolution doesn’t necessarily exclude the possibility of a deity. But it does make one irrelevant. Whilst our understanding of the subject is incomplete, we’ve yet to find anything that would be impossible without divine intervention. So either there was no such intervention, or God is indistinguishable from nothing.
And I find all this talk of fundamental questions rather curious. After all, we don’t spend all night discussing how gravity explains the process of falling, but not the fundamental question about why we fall. It just doesn’t seem like an issue. So why the double standard?