So I've identified three types of Christians. I mean, obviously social scientists, we make big generalizations here and there are all sorts of subgroups that fit into these categories. But there are three types of Christians: Catholics, conservative Protestants, and liberal or mainline Protestants. I've identified three possible types of conflict. And sociologists have examined with religious people and we can make some conclusions about whether these types of conflict exist for different religious groups. So let's start with the question of systemic knowledge conflict. Do ordinary religious people have a different way of knowing fact claims about the world? Now, people certainly think so. So when you look at popular culture, in the United States at least, we know this Christian fish that I think people have often seen. Okay? It's a symbol of Christianity for whatever reason, historically. But, in the U.S. people who oppose Christianity have taken that fish and printed the word Darwin on the inside of it. Okay? And sometimes this fish even has little feet implying that the fish evolved feet. So it's the claim somehow that belief in evolution somehow invalidates Christianity. How could that possibly be? It only makes sense if Christianity is an entire way of knowing about the world, science is an entire way of knowing about the world, and if you believe in one claim you have to reject the other entirely. If you believe in Darwin, you can't believe in the fish, in Christianity. Now, of course, the people who are opposed to Christianity aren't the only people who do this. Okay? The religious people fight back. There's a famous version of this in the U.S. with the Darwin fish flipped over on its back, like it's now died, with a religious message underneath saying essentially – that Christianity is true. So, this perspective of this systemic conflict is shared by all sorts of people in the U.S. But is it correct? Are religious people actually in systemic conflict with science? So first off, social science, in general, would be skeptical that citizens at any form of systemic knowledge be it religious or otherwise. The systemic knowledge perspective assumes that ordinary people have this logically consistent, coherent systems of belief back to first principles. That is, that you could look at the Bible at the top of some knowledge claim all the way down to fact claims. Well, social science research would conclude that various elites, like academics, probably do think that way. Okay? But regular people probably not. As one social scientist says, "Social scientists should no longer build into their assumptions or methods, the idea that culture the ideas are a definition of system, like an ideology”, but instead, we should measure the amount of coherence that actually exists. So do regular citizens sit down and organize their ideas in a coherent manner? Do they think to themselves, "Well, I believe that the Earth is 6,500 years old like it says in the Bible. And that's based upon not on a scientific method but scientists claimed this based on a scientific method. And therefore since I don't believe in one but not the other, I can't then accept this one". To put it bluntly, the only people who engage in this form of reason are people who are rewarded for doing so. So, you know, college professors will be punished indirectly if they do not use a logically coherent form of belief. But ordinary citizens don't have the time and are not rewarded for doing this. So in general, social science is skeptical of the idea that any regular people have these coherent conflicting ideas systems. But let me turn to the specific claim about religion and science as totalizing idea systems. So in a series of studies that I conducted, I examined whether religious groups are different in the extent to which they've been exposed to science. The assumption here is that, if a religious group was truly in systemic knowledge conflict with science, they would avoid all science because that would be in conflict. So what I did was, I compared members of each religious group to the non-religious. And comparing these two groups does one avoid science more than the other. What I found was that all Christian groups in the U.S., including the conservative Protestants, are less likely than the non-religious to believe that scientific claims about human origins. But, there is no difference in the fact, in the extent to which they know uncontested scientific facts like how electrons move and the like. The extent to which people have taken science classes, have a scientific occupation, and so on and so forth. So there's a disagreement about one limited scientific claim, human origins. But this one fact claim does not lead to disagreement over other scientific fact claims and does not lead to a systemic avoidance of science. So in other words, they are not in systemic knowledge conflict with science. Now, other research can be interpreted in a very similar way. There's been a number of studies of whether higher education leads people to have fewer religiously based beliefs about the natural world. The premise here being that higher education exposes you to science which I think is generally true. So if there is, again, if there is systemic conflict exposure to any science should lead to less belief in any religion. But particularly religious beliefs that directly conflict with science. So one study shows that education in general does not lead to the decline of religious belief during young adulthood. But if you look at young adults, the religious belief declines the most among people who didn't go to university. Other studies show that attending college has no influence on pre-existing belief about evolution, and that taking classes in the natural sciences does not cause a great decrease in religious belief compared to taking classes in other fields. Or social psychologists, for example, have conducted experiments and conclude that people have no problem holding seemingly contradictory beliefs like evolution occurred naturally and evolution was caused by God. The social psychologists conclude, that quote, "There is considerable evidence that the same individuals use both a natural and a supernatural explanation to interpret the very same events, that there are multiple ways in which both kinds of explanations can coexist in individual minds." So again, if there was a conflict between holding any scientific claim and religion, then being religious should make a person likely to avoid all science but that's not what we find. So social science conclusion is that there are no religious groups that are in systemic conflict with science. But, Christian groups are in propositional knowledge conflict over human origins. Now, that was expected to be found with conservative Protestants, and it is a bit of a surprise for Catholics and liberal Protestants to have the same view. All I can say given the limited time in this lecture is that members views of things are often quite different from what the leadership would say about things as I articulated before, these sort of official positions. Now, I think that the primary conflict between religion and science for the public is moral and it's not about knowledge at all. Yes, there are these disagreements about a few fact claims. But even those fact claim disagreements, seem to be largely motivated by moral concerns. So let's return to the conservative Protestant opponents of evolution and Darwin. So if you go back to the 1920s, in America was the time of the Scopes Monkey Trial. A very famous court trial in American history where a schoolteacher was convicted of violating a state law that forbade the teaching of evolution in a public school, of a government funded school. So in the 1920s, what motivated those people? So if you go back to the time, there was a very famous figure in politics named William Jennings Bryan, the presidential candidate at the era and later took on leader of the anti-Darwinist movement. And he was definitely the most famous anti-evolution activists of his day. Yet, even he was opposed to the scientific fact claim about evolution, but he was motivated by the belief that learning Darwinism somehow corrupts people's morals. For example, he thought that World War I had been caused by the impact of Darwinism on the minds of Germans of the time. It made people think of all of humans in this sort of animalistic way. In fact, if you go back to that trial where William Jennings Bryan was the defender of the anti-Darwinist position in that trial itself. The textbook that the teacher was accused and convicted of using which was a, evolution textbook, it was called, "A civic biology. " And like most Darwinian text of the times, it was actually advocating for eugenics, which is a moral project if there ever was one. There's a famous pamphlet produced in the 1960s by anti-Darwin activists in the U.S. and it tries to get people to be motivated in this anti-Darwinian effort. And what is wrong with evolution from this perspective it says, essentially, that evolution causes relativism, abortion, racism, all of these social ills. Okay. Now, whether or not this is true, doesn't really matter. What is important to say is that people at the time thought that the conflict about Darwin was that it leads to all these moral problems. You go to the present age – one of the intellectuals whose most opposed to Darwinism is the U.S. historian who makes the case that the Holocaust and what happened in Nazi Germany wasn't directly the result of Darwinism, but that Darwinist ethic was sort of required precondition for all that to happen. So in general, there's been much conflict over Darwin, but from the very beginning, this conflict was about morality, not necessarily about facts about the natural world. So again, if you reach back to the Victorian era right after Darwin finishes publications. Yes, there was conflict about whether or not it's true that humans evolved from other primates. But the motivation and much of the discussion that time was about the moral impact of believing in such a thing. This continues to this day with the intelligent design movement is what it's called in the contemporary era. And if you look at what motivates the intelligent design movement, it's similarly a moral concern that Darwinism teaches a form of materialism, this materialism has a negative impact on the morals of the youth of America.
