How religiosity and science literacy interact: Evolution & science literacy part 2 - Cultural Cognition of Health

This is the second of two posts on science literacy and evolution.

And liberal democratic society as the naturally congenial but sometimes precariously raucous—or maybe better, simultaneously congenial and precarious because naturally raucous—home for science.

And how the common misunderstanding of what public “disbelief” in “evolution” truly signifies can actually interfere with popular dissemination of scientific knowledge.  Plus compromise norms of respect for cultural pluralism that are essential to the practice of liberal democracy.

Okay, well, in the last post I described the vast body of long established but persistently–weirdly–ignored work that social scientists have amassed on the relationship between public “disbelief” in evolution and public understanding of evolution and other basic elements of science.

That work shows that there isn’t any relationship. What people say they “believe” about evolution is a measure of who they are , culturally.  It’s not a measure of what they know about what’s known to science.

Indeed, many people who say they “believe” in evolution don’t have the foggiest idea how the modern synthesis hangs together. Those who say they “disbelieve” are not any less likely to understand evolutionary theory–but they aren’t any more more likely to either.

That so few members of the public have a meaningful understanding of the workings of genetic variance, random mutation, and natural selection (the core elements of the modern synthesis) is a shame, and definitely a matter of concern for the teaching of science education.

But it’s a problem about what people “know” and not what they say they “believe.” What people say they “believe” and what they “know” about evolution are vastly different things. That’s what the ample scientific evidence on public understandings of science show.

In this post I want to add a modest increment of additional evidence corroborating this important point.

The evidence has to do specifically with the relationship between religion , science literacy, and belief in evolution.

The evidence is from a survey of 2,000 US adults recruited and stratified in a manner designed to assure national representativeness.

The survey instrument included the NSF science indicators.

It also contained various measures of religiosity, including regularity of church attendance; regularity of prayer; and perceived “importance of God” in one’s life. These cohered in a manner that enabled them to be formed into a reliable “religiosity” scale.

And the survey contained an item that Gallup and other pollsters routinely use to measure the public’s “beliefs” about evolution.

Well, I’ll state in summary form what I regard as the findings of interest, and then supply the supporting details:

1.   Neither the “Evolution” nor the “Big Bang” items in the NSF’s “Science Indicators” battery can plausibly be viewed as reliably measuring “scientific literacy” in subjects who are even modestly religious.

2. When subjects who are highly science literate but highly religious answer “False” to the NSF Indicator’s Evolution item, their response furnishes no reason to infer that they lack knowledge of the basic elements of the best scientific understanding of evolution.

3. For respondents who are below average in religiosity, a high score in “science literacy” predicts a higher probability of “believing” in “Naturalistic Evolution”—and so does a low score !

4. For those who are above average in religiosity, a high score in science literacy doesn’t predict a higher probability of believing in Naturalistic Evolution. But it does predict a higher probability of believing in Theistic Evolution .

5.  A higher score in science literacy predicts a lower probability of believing in Young Earth Creationism—whether respondents are below or above average in religiosity.