As the Worm Turns

Being religious is incompatible with belief in Darwinism or modern biology. That’s the lesson of this Gallup poll. It’s big news and is filtering through all the atheist blogs. Starting with Pharyngula, of course.

For those too lazy to click through to the source material, what we have is this:

This shouldn’t surprise anyone. In fact, it confirms the deepest prejudices of most of us atheists: belief in god is highly correlated with antipathy toward Darwinism and, you know, all those pesky scientific facts.

More bad news — and I subject PZ Meyers to withering criticism — after the jump:

Since religiosity (as measured by church attendance) is correlated with political affiliation we should see these results reflected in party membership:

Wingnuts, it appears, really are nuts.

It’s nice to know where the crazies are. Makes it easier to avoid ‘em at parties. But if these poll results are to do any good we also need to know the causal factors involved. As we all know (what with our famous atheist scientific literacy and all) teasing apart causation from correlation is a notoriously difficult task. Pure statistics don’t give us enough information to properly infer causal relationships. What we do next is eminently scientific: we try to produce an inference to the best explanation.

Religion as Miseducation

Most commonly you’ll find the idea that early religious indoctrination puts false beliefs in the heads of the young, leaving no room for true Darwinian facts once the kids reach school-age. PZ Meyers seems to think so:

Yeah, being a Republican may not be causal, but going to church every week since childhood probably induces brain damage.
…
Maybe it’s about time that we recognize religious miseducation as child abuse.

And Hemant Mehta from Friendly Atheist agrees:

To teach a child that evolution is wrong because the child’s family is Christian (or what-have-you) is mental abuse. We wouldn’t accept it in other areas of education; we shouldn’t let it slide in science.

I agree that there is connection between youthful experiences and later attitudes toward science. But I think the vector of contamination is more complex — and more dastardly — than Mehta and Meyers allow for. And I think the difference is crucial in figuring out what to do about it.

The general idea — which Meyers hints at, above, but seems to be found everywhere in the blogosphere — is that religious parents get to teach their kids false things about god and creation before public school science teachers get the chance to fill their heads with true things; this gives theism an unfair advantage over science education. I think this explanation is way too simplistic, for two reasons. First it assumes the conflict between creationism and Darwinism is purely between incompatible beliefs; and second, it is rather naïve about how and why people believe what they believe.

The Psychology of Belief

Part of the reason why I think this is here. (I hope the link works. The abstract to the original paper is here.) We can’t reduce political affiliation to just a set of beliefs or to voting behavior, and to account for a person’s political outlook we need to understand the psychology underpinning that outlook. From the summary in The Economist:

[B]undles of personality traits do tend to cluster together in people. Some are sceptical [sic] of tradition, open to new experiences, rebellious, pleasure-seeking, egalitarian and risk-prone. Others value tradition, duty, close family relationships and security.
…
Dr Thornhill and his colleague, Corey Fincher … think an individual’s early environment is responsible for switching on one pattern or the other, but that this switch is an evolved—and thus genetically controlled—response.

For Thornhill and Fincher the environmental trigger is childhood stress and parental attachment; children with “secure childhoods with strong attachments to one or both parents, and low stress” tended to be conservative, while kids with “stressful childhoods and weaker attachments to their parents” tended to grow up to be more liberal.

Obviously we can all think of people we know who could act as counterexamples; we all also know that specific instances can’t be a counterexample to a general claim. ( “Most swans are white.” “Not true! That one there is black!” ) It is also true that this is a single controversial study, and it directly contradicts an earlier study done at the University of California, Berkeley. But whether or not Thornhill and Fincher are right or not about the details, the method they are using — and the general assumptions underpinning it — seems to me to be correct in outline.

If this is right, then our normal tendency to sort people into political categories in virtue of what they believe is exactly backwards. People aren’t conservative because they believe in unrestricted gun ownership, and they aren’t liberal because they believe in the right of a woman to make choices about tissues in her own body. No, if this is right, people choose their beliefs because of their political temperament and not the other way around. ‘Liberal’ and ‘Conservative’ need to be seen as clusters of personality traits and stable overall worldviews, and not political creeds consisting of enumerable doctrines.

Wherein I Start to Rant a Little Bit

This is why the whole Darwin versus Creationism debate isn’t just about the beliefs of the debaters. For many people the choice between Darwin and between Genesis, chapter 1 verse 1, is predetermined by their psychology and their temperament. No amount of rational discussion, no amount of evidence, no amount of explicating evolutionary pathways of flagellum protein development will ever convince someone with this inflexible worldview that Intelligent Design is false, because they don’t believe on the basis of evidence. They believe because they found the notion of god, of design, of meaning built into the universe absolutely compelling, and they were convinced long before Dembski and Behe ever tried to put some empirical muscle behind ID. They believe because Intelligent Design is satisfying, because it fits with their emotional understanding of how the universe works. Darwinism — no matter how it is phrased, no matter how much evidence is presented — will ever be satisfying in the same way.

Here’s the real secret (and one that many will vehemently deny): many Darwinists feel the same about evolution. I know that natural selection just seemed obviously true to me when I first read about it because it just fit with my intuition that the world was random and chaotic, without an overall plan. Luckily for me, Darwinism also happens to be true and supported by the facts. But if I do find myself standing before the Pearly Gates, waiting for St. Peter to tell me which escalator to take — I’ll be profoundly disappointed that my buddy Darwin was wrong, because a world with god in it seems much less interesting than one without.

This is why Meyers’ problem with religious education is misguided. If Thornhill and Fincher are right, then people don’t become conservatives because they are taught to be religious; they become religious because they are taught to be conservative.

Even if we could deny the right of parents to teach their kids lots and lots of funny fairytales about floods and incest and walking on water, we’d still have the primary cause of the problem: people develop their life-long political temperament as children, as a response to their childhood environment. What they believe later in life — whether science or religion — depends (at least in part) on that temperament. So even if we keep them away from false beliefs when they’re brats, that’s no guarantee that they’ll want to believe the true facts once they get to their junior-high biology class. There’s no guarantee that Darwinism will be satisfying and compelling enough to overcome the pull of religious, theistic explanations for the universe, for human origins, for life.

It would be nice if there were a simple solution to life’s problems. It would be nice if we could protect the pride-of-place that science deserves in modern culture just by insulating it from false beliefs taught to children. It would be nice if saying true things over and over — and loudly, and publicly — automatically led to people believing true things. If this were so then ensuring kids got taught evolution — and making sure they weren’t exposed to religious miseducation until they were old enough to consent — would end the Culture Wars and keep the Religious Right at bay.

Unfortunately, human minds are much too complex for that. If only natural selection had designed us to be simpler, life would be much easier.

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