Darwinian materialists Gregory Graffin and Will Provine of Cornell sent a detailed questionnaire on evolution and religion to 271 professional evolutionary scientists elected to membership in 28 honorific national academies around the world, and 149 (55 percent) responded. The results were interesting:
Religious evolutionists were asked to describe their religion, and unbelievers were asked to choose their closest description among atheist, agnostic, naturalist or "other" (with space to describe). Other questions asked if the evolutionary scientist were a monist or dualist-that is, believed in a singular controlling force in natural science or also allowed for the supernatural-whether a conflict between evolution and religion is inevitable, whether humans have free will, whether purpose or progress plays a role in evolution, and whether naturalism is a sufficient way to understand evolution, its products and human origins.
The great majority of the evolutionists polled (78 percent) [regarded] themselves as pure naturalists. Only two out of 149 described themselves as full theists, two as more theist than naturalist and three as theistic naturalists. Taken together, the advocacy of any degree of theism is the lowest percentage measured in any poll of biologists' beliefs so far (4.7 percent).
Most evolutionary scientists who billed themselves as believers in God were deists (21) rather than theists (7).
[The respondents] were strongly materialists and monists: 73 percent said organisms have only material properties, whereas 23 percent said organisms have both material and spiritual properties. These answers are hardly surprising given previous polls. But the answers to two questions were surprising to us.
Only 10 percent of the eminent evolutionary scientists who answered the poll saw an inevitable conflict between religion and evolution. The great majority see no conflict between religion and evolution ... because they see religion as a natural product of human evolution (emphasis mine). Sociologists and cultural anthropologists, in contrast, tend toward the hypothesis that cultural change alone produced religions, minus evolutionary change in humans. The eminent evolutionists who participated in this poll reject the basic tenets of religion, such as gods, life after death, incorporeal spirits or the supernatural. Yet they still hold a compatible view of religion and evolution....These eminent evolutionists view religion as a sociobiological feature of human culture, a part of human evolution, not as a contradiction to evolution. Viewing religion as an evolved sociobiological feature removes all competition between evolution and religion for most respondents.
These scientists believe religion is compatible with evolution in the same way they believe that vestigial structures like the appendix are compatible with evolution. It's not that they believe that any religious claims are true but rather that evolution gave rise to religion because it served a particular function in our racial history.
Seeing religion as a sociobiological feature of human evolution, while a plausible hypothesis, denies all worth to religious truths.
Actually this last sentence is a non-sequitur. Even were it the case that religious awareness dawned slowly in man's evolutionary history, it doesn't follow that there's no truth to the beliefs that men came to hold. It's quite possible, perhaps even plausible, that men originally developed a belief in God because that belief conformed to the way the world really is. Indeed, it seems to me much more plausible to think that we evolved strong beliefs that were accurate representations of reality than that we evolved strong beliefs that were fundamentally illusory. If evolution is all about survival value then I think the former would better suit us for our environment than the latter.
Anyway, I have a question. If belief in God is a consequence of evolutionary forces why is not disbelief deemed also to be a result of evolution? How did atheism arise in a population of organisms (humans) that is so overwhelmingly theist? Is atheism a dysgenic mutation, like sickle cell, that coincidentally confers some sort of benefit upon those who have it? If so, what does that say about its truth value?
It would seem that truth has nothing to do with whether one is a theist or an atheist, our beliefs are all programmed by our genes, and apparently the genes for atheism are linked to the genes for studying biology so that those who have one often have the other. In other words biologists are atheists for completely non-rational reasons.
Aren't evolutionary explanations cool?
RLC