From a study reported by political science prof Benjamin Knoll at HuffPost:
– 37% reject God-guided evolution and believe in a literal Adam and Eve who were not the process of biological evolution. These Mormons have a more literalist/fundamentalist view.
– 37% accept God-guided evolution as the origin of life on Earth but also believe in a literal Adam and Eve created by God and not the result of evolution. Perhaps many in this group believe Adam and Eve to be a special exception to the evolutionary process while accepting evolution as the most persuasive explanation for all other life.
— 13% accept God-guided evolution and reject the idea that Adam and Eve were separately created by God outside of this process. This could include those who believe that God used evolution to create Adam and Eve or that God was just not part of the picture.[2]
– 13% reject God-guided evolution and reject a literal Adam and Eve as well.
More on the study.
Now this, from Knoll, is just plain disturbing: “Finally, what are the implications for other important issues in politics and society when a critical mass of a social community (Mormon or otherwise) is unable to be persuaded by a strong scientific consensus on a particular topic? More.”
What are the implications? How about this: Many (North) Americans are used to living in a free society where one is allowed to suspect that the experts might be wrong. Here’s a list of wrong theories that ruled, and sometimes ended, people’s lives for millennia, endorsed by all the experts:
The “four humours” theory of human physiology: From Hippocrates onward, the humoral theory was adopted by Greek, Roman and Islamic physicians, and became the most commonly held view of the human body among European physicians until the advent of modern medical research in the 19th century. The four humours of Hippocratic medicine were black bile, yellow bile, phlegm and blood.
Funny he should be asking that just when a big recent science news story-of-the-year is about expert beliefs about human evolution getting upended. Bet it won’t be the last time either.
See also: A top anthropology finding of year show humans cognitively closer to dogs than chimps “This raises as many questions as it answers because it is unknown whether the mental processes of dogs and humans work in the same way”? Given all the human-chimp similarity rhetoric, surely they somewhat understate the case…
Cosmos Magazine’s Top Ten includes: Universe’s underlying symmetry still baffling and human evolution timeline drastically stretched. Re human evolution, we hope no one’s career got wrecked in the past few decades, doubting whatever “ding dong Darwin” was the bumf of the day. It’s becoming increasingly clear that most of the certainty has been ideological, not scientific.
A top anthropology finding of year show humans cognitively closer to dogs than chimps
American Council for Science and Health’s 10 biggest junk stories for 2017 include… Stephen Hawking
and
Can Muslims believe in evolution? You can’t believe in Islam and in Darwin’s theory because Darwin’s theory, as he himself knew, rules out the idea that there is any kind of truth that the human mind is capable of apprehending. Major Darwinians like Daniel Dennett, fearing little resistance in a postmodern world, make that clear.