Is Some Belief in Evolution Superstition?
In rereading Stephen Meyer's Signature in the Cell, I was struck by those who disdain his well-reasoned book and believe that the origin of life came about by chance or some unknown naturalistic mechanism: Isn't that rather superstitious?
One definition of "superstition":
a belief or practice resulting from ignorance, fear of the unknown, trust in magic or chance, or a false conception of causation
It struck me that belief that Darwinian evolution is the best explanation for the Cambrian Explosion could also be considered superstition.
Then I came across this opinion piece by Mollie Ziegler Hemingway:
The Gallup Organization, under contract to Baylor's Institute for Studies of Religion, asked American adults a series of questions to gauge credulity. Do dreams foretell the future? Did ancient advanced civilizations such as Atlantis exist? Can places be haunted? Is it possible to communicate with the dead? Will creatures like Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster someday be discovered by science?Hmmm.
The answers were added up to create an index of belief in occult and the paranormal. While 31% of people who never worship expressed strong belief in these things, only 8% of people who attend a house of worship more than once a week did.
Labels: Mollie Ziegler Hemingway, Signature in the Cell, superstition
posted by Lawrence Selden @ 8:33 AM
1 comments
1 Comments:
The "study" (it wasn't one) was created by a Baptist university. It asked questions such as about beliefs in ancient aliens on earth and astrology. If survey subjects answered they did believe in those things, they were considered to be gullible. However, questions such as whether the subjects believed "the sun stood still in the sky," or the "Adam and Eve" story, or the "Resurrection," or "Virgin birth, or the Great Flood, or raising the dead, or that the Red Sea parted to let the Israelites escape the Egyptians, or whether praying would get the subject to "heaven," were never asked. Had they been, they likely would have discovered that the subjects, by religion or denomination were equally gullible. They just accepted different notions about what was factual and what wasn't likely to be.
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