The magnitude of this effect should be explored in future research. Our results also highlight the importance of examining religious students separately from nonreligious students in evolution education. Because religious students have a set of worldviews that can create barriers to evolution acceptance that are not present for nonreligious students, relationships between variables and evolution acceptance will likely be different for religious and nonreligious students.
Although recent evolution education studies have probed the interactions between religiosity and other variables when studying evolution acceptance Weisberg et al. However, our results build on the growing body of literature that suggests this should become a common part of any protocol in which researchers are measuring evolution acceptance. Given these results and prior literature, we encourage biology instructors to think about how their own personal views of evolution and religion may affect how they communicate with students about whether evolution is atheistic or agnostic.
Seventy-five percent of biologists nationwide do not believe in a God Ecklund and Scheitle, ; Pew, , so presumably these biologists hold the personal view of atheistic evolution. However, do biologists who hold an atheistic personal view of evolution recognize and communicate to their students the bounded nature of science?
It is likely that instructors who do not have personal religious backgrounds themselves do not think or teach about this distinction in the context of evolution Barnes and Brownell, , , because the culture of science is generally seen as more compatible with atheism than theism Ecklund and Park, However, our data suggest that whether an instructor recognizes and communicates the bounded nature of science accurately during evolution instruction could matter for religious student outcomes in evolution education.
For these reasons, we encourage instructors to familiarize themselves with Religious Cultural Competence in Evolution Education Barnes and Brownell, , an umbrella framework of instructional practices identified in the literature to help nonreligious instructors better understand how to teach religious students about evolution in an effective and culturally competent way, which includes teaching the bounded nature of science Barnes et al.
We operated on an assumption about the nature of science that supernatural existence or influence is outside the scope of science. We agree that evolution operates from the assumption that a God is not needed for evolution to occur, but do not agree that this is incompatible with a personal belief that a God does exist and has somehow influenced evolution.
Researchers in evolution education have discussed and advocated for this distinction between methodological naturalism and philosophical naturalism in the evolution education literature Scott, ; Sober, We chose to aggregate scores from Likert-type response options to create continuous Likert scales and used parametric statistics in our analyses.
As argued by Norman , this issue has two parts: measurement and statistics. The conclusions from the parametric statistics are valid as long as the assumptions of the data distributions are roughly met. Substantial literature exists to show that parametric statistics are robust, giving the right answers even when assumptions are violated. In the Results sections of this paper, we have demonstrated that the assumptions linear regression has on data distributions are roughly met, which justifies the use of the parametric statistics methods on the data.
However, we would like to acknowledge the controversy in the measurement part. In our study, we followed a commonly accepted practice of summing individual items scores to form the score of the scale and use the summed score to represent the latent construct. We agree with the opponents of this practice that single Likert response format items are on an ordinal scale, but the proponents of this practice argue that many studies have shown that Likert scales as opposed to single items produce interval data appropriate for parametric statistics e.
As a further direction, one may consider applying item response theory Hambleton et al. Further, we found that having this perception predicted lower levels of evolution acceptance and comfort learning evolution as well as higher perceived conflict between religious beliefs and evolution among highly religious students.
We define religiosity as the extent to which one participates in religious activities such as prayer and service attendance i.
We would like to acknowledge Jim Collins for his feedback on earlier versions of the article as well as members of the Biology Education Research lab at Arizona State University for their feedback. Barnes et al. This article is distributed by The American Society for Cell Biology under license from the author s. It is available to the public under an Attribution—Noncommercial—Share Alike 3. Hayley M. Gale M. Taija M. Sara E. Add to favorites Download Citations Track Citations.
View article. Agnosticism is of the essence of science … It simply means that [we] shall not say [we] know or believe that which [we] have no scientific grounds for professing to know or believe … Consequently, agnosticism puts aside not only the greater part of popular theology, but also the greater part of anti-theology … Agnosticism simply says that we know nothing of what may be beyond phenomena. Options students were given for their personal view of evolution and then what they thought most closely represented the scientific view of evolution Choice Description presented to student Young Earth creationism All forms of life were first brought into being in their present form by God —10, years ago at the same time.
Old Earth creationism All forms of life were first brought into being in their present form by God at different times over billions of years. Creationism with some evolution Some forms of life evolved from earlier forms, but God created groups of organisms such as reptiles, birds, mammals, and humans separate from one another, and organisms that currently exist have evolved slowly from those first creations. Humans-only creationism Almost all forms of life evolved from earlier forms, but humans were created by God in their present form separate from the rest of life.
Interventionist evolution All forms of life evolved from earlier forms, but God intervenes from time to time to shape or override evolution. Deistic evolution All forms of life evolved from earlier forms, but life and evolution were first set in motion by God without a specific purpose or plan. Agnostic evolution All forms of life evolved from earlier forms, but it is uncertain whether God was involved in evolution. Atheistic evolution All forms of life evolved from earlier forms, but no God has ever played any role in evolution.
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Social Problems , 54 2 , — Creationism in its various forms is not the same thing as belief in God because, as was discussed earlier, many believers as well as many mainstream religious groups accept the findings of science, including evolution. Nor is creationism necessarily tied to Christians who interpret the Bible literally.
Some non-Christian religious believers also want to replace scientific explanations with their own religion's supernatural accounts of physical phenomena. In the United States, various views of creationism typically have been promoted by small groups of politically active religious fundamentalists who believe that only a supernatural entity could account for the physical changes in the universe and for the biological diversity of life on Earth.
But even these creationists hold very different views. Some, known as "young Earth" creationists, believe the biblical account that the universe and the Earth were created just a few thousand years ago.
Proponents of this form of creationism also believe that all living things, including humans, were created in a very short period of time in essentially the forms in which they exist today. Other creationists, known as "old Earth" creationists, accept that the Earth may be very old but reject other scientific findings regarding the evolution of living things.
No scientific evidence supports these viewpoints. On the contrary, as discussed earlier, several independent lines of evidence indicate that the Earth is about 4. Rejecting the evidence for these age estimates would mean rejecting not just biological evolution but also fundamental discoveries of modern physics, chemistry, astrophysics, and geology.
Some creationists believe that Earth's present form and the distribution of fossils can be explained by a worldwide flood. But this claim also is at odds with observations and evidence understood scientifically. The belief that Earth's sediments, with their fossils, were deposited in a short period does not accord either with the known processes of sedimentation or with the estimated volume of water needed to deposit sediments on the top of some of Earth's highest mountains.
Creationists sometimes cite what they claim to be an incomplete fossil record as evidence that living things were created in their modern forms. But this argument ignores the rich and extremely detailed record of evolutionary history that paleontologists and other biologists have constructed over the past two centuries and are continuing to construct.
Paleontological research has filled in many of the parts of the fossil record that were incomplete in Charles Darwin's time. The claim that the fossil record is "full of gaps" that undermine evolution is simply false.
Indeed, paleontologists now know enough about the ages of sediments to predict where they will be able to find particularly significant transitional fossils, as happened with Tiktaalik and the ancestors of modern humans.
Researchers also are using new techniques, such as computed axial tomography CT , to learn even more about the internal structures and composition of delicate bones of fossils. Exciting new discoveries of fossils continue to be reported in both the scientific literature and popular media. Another compelling feature of the fossil record is its consistency.
Nowhere on Earth are fossils from dinosaurs, which went extinct 65 million years ago, found together with fossils from humans, who evolved in just the last few million years. Nowhere are the fossils of mammals found in sediments that are more than about million years old. Whenever creationists point to sediments where these relationships appear to be altered or even reversed, scientists have clearly demonstrated that this reversal has resulted from the folding of geological strata over or under others.
Sediments containing the fossils of only unicellular organisms appear earlier in the fossil record than do sediments containing the remains of both unicellular and multicellular organisms.
The sequence of fossils across Earth's sediments points unambiguously toward the occurrence of evolution. Creationists sometimes argue that the idea of evolution must remain hypothetical because "no one has ever seen evolution occur.
Scientific conclusions are not limited to direct observation but often depend on inferences that are made by applying reason to observations. Even with the launch of Earth-orbiting spacecraft, scientists could not directly see the Earth going around the Sun. But they inferred from a wealth of independent measurements that the Sun is at the center of the solar system.
Until the recent development of extremely powerful microscopes, scientists could not observe atoms, but the behavior of physical objects left no doubt about the atomic nature of matter. Scientists hypothesized the existence of viruses for many years before microscopes became powerful enough to see them. Thus, for many areas of science, scientists have not directly observed the objects such as genes and atoms or the phenomena such as the Earth going around the Sun that are now well-established facts.
Instead, they have confirmed them indirectly by observational and experimental evidence. Evolution is no different. Indeed, for the reasons described in this booklet, evolutionary science provides one of the best examples of a deep understanding based on scientific reasoning.
This contention that nobody has seen evolution occurring further ignores the overwhelming evidence that evolution has taken place and is continuing to occur. The annual changes in influenza viruses and the emergence of bacteria resistant to antibiotics are both products of evolutionary forces.
Another example of ongoing evolution is the appearance of mosquitoes resistant to various insecticides, which has contributed to a resurgence of malaria in Africa and elsewhere. The transitional fossils that have been found in abundance since Darwin's time reveal how species continually give rise to successor species that, over time, produce radically changed body forms and functions.
It also is possible to directly observe many of the specific processes by which evolution occurs. Scientists regularly do experiments using microbes and other model systems that directly test evolutionary hypotheses.
Creationists reject such scientific facts in part because they do not accept evidence drawn from natural processes that they consider to be at odds with the Bible. But science cannot test supernatural possibilities. To young Earth creationists, no amount of empirical evidence that the Earth is billions of years old is likely to refute their claim that the world is actually young but that God simply made it appear to be old. Bennett and Gregg Davidson.
Are humans really the result of evolution from single-celled creatures until finally a branch of the primates developed into humans? Instead, proponents of evolution pointed to signs in human anatomy — remnants of a tailbone, for instance — showing common ancestry with other mammals. God discovers their misdeed and expels them from the garden to found the human race.
Grabbe suggests understandings of this account adopted by scholars who are also religious. They were not the first or only humans, since people had a long history, as shown by the study of primate evolution. By depicting such ways of accommodating both religion and science, Grabbe hopes his book will benefit readers.
In Streetwise Hebrew for the Times of Israel Community, each month we learn several colloquial Hebrew phrases around a common theme. So how reliable is the Bible chapter that relates to evolution?
Genesis 1 gives the order of creation as plants, animals, man and woman. Genesis 2 gives it as man, plants, animals and woman. The list goes on. Genesis says there were giants Nephilim before the flood and that the flood annihilated all creatures other than those on the ark, but Numbers says there were giants after the flood. Attempts to resolve these contradictions are almost as old as the Bible itself.
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