Evolution vs. Gravity
How religion affects acceptance of theories
JoeUser Forums
It never ceases to amaze me how blinded some people are by their religion. They seem to be completely unaware of how their religion has biased them taking a more open-minded approach to scientific research.
Let me give you a tale of two theories.
Evolution is a theory that stipulates a set of principles on how life on earth changes (evolves) over time. It has a great deal of documented evidence to support it. However, because evolution contradicts the bible, many religious people try to find ways to discount it. They close their minds to it. In the bible, life as we know it did not evolve but was rather created directly by the hand of God. This is especially true of humans. Most religious people either take the stories in Genesis to not be true in the literal sense but try to argue that it is true symbolically (though even that's a stretch). But the point being, because evolution contradicts an existing deep held religious belief, some people have trouble accepting it.
But compared to the theory of gravity, evolution is rock hard fact. We actually do not know how gravity works. We have observed that gravity is related to mass. And we have made some formulas that describe how gravity is related to mass (F=MA for example). But we still do not have a clue as to what causes gravity. Why does mass create gravity? No idea (and things get sketchier about strong and weak forces too but we'll hold off that for another time). But religious people don't challenge the theory of gravity even though it's on weaker ground. But imagine if the bible had stated something vaguely that God's arms push down on all things to keep them in place on the world. That his infinite arms pushed objects towards bigger objects.
One can imagine the debates we'd be having if the bible spoke on gravity. Instead of the accepted belief that gravity PULLS objects towards each other, we would instead have people arguing that no, God PUSHES people towards things based on their size or something. We'd have "Intelligent Gravitation" or something like that. And because of that, we could potentially have real damage done to genuine scientific research because some people would insist on looking for data that supported that some mystical, super natural force was pushing people against objects rather than focusing on mass creating a pull effect (gravity) and trying to figure out why that is.
That's why things like intelligent design are so problematic. Because they're not based on any scientific evidence (no more than the belief that some unknown force is pushing all things towards other things based on their size) it can slow down scientific advancement and cloud education.
I much prefer to have my beliefs be based on the evidence rather than looking for evidence to support my pre-existing beliefs. But religion tends to be pretty dogmatic and blind people to looking at other possibilities. It's not as if religion doesn't get its shot for explaining the universe. Most Americans who believe in evolution (statistically) were raised in a Christian household. That means most of them changed their views because the data supporting evolution was more compelling than the data supporting Creationism.
Evolution wasn't taught in my high school. I, like most people, started out believing in the bible's explanation on how humans got here. It was only over time that I found that the bible's explanation was not plausible. The earth was simply too old. There were too many extinct creatures. There was too much rather obvious local adaptation by animals to believe that some super natural being (or alien) was sitting around tweaking some caterpillar to look like the local vegetation in South America that had only been growing there for the past 8 million years.
As time went on, evolution and natural selection became more and more compelling as causes of where the bio-diversity we have came from. And even once I was convinced that the theory of evolution was fact, more evidence still came my way. Just a few years ago when DNA came to be better understood there would be occasional reports on how scientists tweaked some gene in some animal to produce a radically different animal. Then came Mitochondrial DNA tracking in which we can tell when one species was another and when.
But such evidence doesn't exist in the same form for the theory of gravity. Luckily, the bible doesn't speak about it (which is odd since gravity is a pretty crucial thing that you would think a super being would want to talk about unless of course the writings were not by a higher being but rather by pre-industrial humans with a limited understanding of their environments but I digress).
Terry Goodkind puts it this way: You're free to ignore reality, but you're not free to ignore the consequences of it.