Why do we misunderstand natural selection, and why does creationism do so well in a Christian fundamentalist environment? The answer is that our minds are naturally inclined to a creationist view. After all, creationism was created by the human mind, whereas evolution by natural selection is a fact that was discovered. Without the Book of Genesis, there would have been some other creation story. The Incas, the Egyptians, and the Aztecs all had exotic creation myths, and that probably goes for all extinct civilizations.29 Every culture has a creation story because humans are naturally inclined to understand the world in terms of patterns, purpose, and causality. Everything about evolution runs counter to how our natural mind design makes sense of life on an earth made up of different animals and plants. We are not naturally inclined to a theory that is nonpurposeful, nondirected, and yet capable of all the extreme diversity of life forms. To top it all, we are then expected to believe that we are all related to bananas.
Rather, our intuitions from an early age provide a fertile soil for creationism, whether we stumble on it ourselves or are led to it through religious doctrines. These intuitions include:
1.
There are no random events or patterns in the world.
2.
Things are caused by intention.
3.
Complexity cannot happen spontaneously but must be a product of someone’s plan to design things for a purpose.
4.
All living things are essentially different because of some invisible property inside them.
The developmental psychologist Margaret Evans has studied creationist beliefs in children raised in both fundamentalist and nonfundamentalist homes in the US Midwest.30 She asked children a series of open-ended questions about the origins of different animals, then coded their responses in terms of whether they were creationist (‘God made it’), spontaneous (‘It just came out of the ground like that’), or evolutionist (‘It came from an earlier different kind of animal’). The youngest children in her group, the five- to seven-year-olds, gave a mix of creationist and spontaneous explanations, depending on their community. As expected, they provided no evolutionary explanations. Also not surprising, those raised in Christian fundamentalist homes were more likely to say that God was responsible, whereas children from nonfundamentalist homes gave an equal mixture of ‘God made it’ and ‘they just appeared’ answers.
However, something very strange happens around eight to ten years of age. Irrespective of their home environment, all children of this age gave mostly creationist accounts for life on earth. Something is happening around middle childhood that makes creationism a very appealing explanation to most children. Only at age ten to twelve did children start to show an awareness of evolution and, not surprisingly, this awareness was predominantly shown in the nonfundamentalist households, where families had taken children to natural history museums.
We can know that natural selection is the correct account for the diversity of life on earth, but like the dormant naive reasoning we saw with college students guessing the speed of falling cannonballs, intuitive beliefs can still linger in the educated mind.
RELIGIOUS SCIENTISTS
If God is a delusion and creationism wrong, what can be done to change this state of affairs? It has been suggested that a good grounding in science education can combat the spread of the religion virus. Our best scientists are elected as Fellows of the Royal Society, an august institution that dates back three hundred years to the time of Newton. Around 3 per cent of Royal Society Fellows who responded to a recent survey said they were religious, though I suspect that this figure may be an underestimate, since three-quarters of the Fellows did not respond at all. It may be that religious scientists are aware that their faith beliefs put them in direct contradiction with their science and that they do not want to be ‘outed’. There is caution for good reason. When the openly religious member, the Revd Prof. Michael Weiss called, in 2008, for Creationism to be debated as part of the schools’ curriculum, he was duly forced to resign as its director of education for bringing the Society into disrepute. It’s a similar story in the US. Only 7 per cent of the members of the prestigious US National Academy of Sciences are religious. At first pass, these tiny minorities of 3 to 7 per cent seem to support the idea that scientists are not religious.31
The problem with this is that these figures are based on a highly selected group of individuals – the ‘A-list’ celebrities of the scientific community. The most comprehensive study, conducted in 1969 by the Carnegie Commission, surveyed more than sixty thousand US professors and revealed that around 40 per cent regularly attended church.32 Of course, society changes over time, and someone who attends church is not necessarily a believer. I had dinner once with Dan Dennett, who surprised me by revealing that he liked going to church. Dennett is famously atheistic and was in the United Kingdom promoting his latest book, which argues that religion is a natural product of mind design. When I heard that he regularly attends church, my jaw dropped into my soup. (I was ‘gob-smacked’, a quaint British phrase I love, as it captures so well the visual image of one’s mouth [gob] when it has been unexpectedly slapped open.) I was aghast. Hold the press. Dennett going to church did not compute until he explained that he enjoyed the choir and the singing. Not all atheists are church-burning militants, and Dennett is still a committed nonbeliever.33 We were reminded of this recently on his recovery from heart surgery. With typical wit, Dennett thanked those who had prayed for him but wondered whether they had also sacrificed a goat for good measure!
The most recent study, a 2007 survey of 1,646 academics from twenty-one top American universities, reports that only four out of every ten of the physicists, chemists, and biologists interviewed said they did not believe in God.34 In other words, most of the scientists had some degree of indecision or belief. I find this remarkable, since these academics were from the very ‘hard’ sciences that demand argument based on objective and reliable evidence. What does this all mean? Basically, that a good science education does not stop you believing in God. Can we really expect the general public to reach the intellectual standards of members of the NAS and Royal Society for them to cease being religious? Science education is essential, and every child can benefit from scientific training, but we must not make the mistake of thinking that science education inoculates the child from religion.
Rather, it appears that culture, not education, is the main factor in the spread of religion. Currently Europe is more secular than the United States, but that does not mean that Europeans engage in less supernatural thinking than Americans. Atheists can still have supernatural beliefs. A popular poll of one thousand typical UK adults in 2002 revealed that 36 per cent did not believe in God, but nearly twice as many believed that psychics have real powers.35 As the writer G. K. Chesterton pointed out, when people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing, they believe in anything. Even prominent atheists can maintain the possibility of the supernatural. The neuroscientist Sam Harris is a voracious critic of religion.36 He evokes rational argument to support his attack on faith, and yet, at the end of his book The End of Faith, he endorses supernatural aspects of Eastern mysticism and the possibility of the sorts of mental telepathy I address and criticize later. Just because someone rejects conventional religion does not mean that he or she denies all supernaturalism. Some critics quickly denounced Harris’s apparent double standards, but I think such criticism is unfair.37 It is unfair because most of us, including atheist neuroscientists, are naturally inclined to supernatural beliefs.