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I've spent many years studying YEC and interacting with YEC's. I've even spent some time on the YouTube YEC debate circuit. I've come to one over-arching conclusion: the roots of YEC belief go down to the very foundations of one's philosophical outlook. Specifically, it is rooted in an acceptance of teleology [1]. It is a very long chain of reasoning from there, but this it the thing that most detractors of YEC miss: this reasoning is logically sound [2]. And because of that, you cannot successfully combat it with logic. You have to go to the very roots of the belief and address its foundations, which is to say, you have to deal with the fact that YEC's accept teleology as a philosophical foundation, and it is very hard to dislodge someone from that position without also sending them into a spiral of existential despair. That is the reason that these beliefs are so persistent despite being so violently at odds with [EDIT: the scientific view of] reality.

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[1] Teleology is the assumption that things have a purpose. The divergence between teleologists and whatever its opposite is (scientists?) is that the latter starts by asking what is the cause? and the former starts by asking what is the point? Everything can be traced back to that initial flapping of the butterfly's wings.

[2] An extremely abridged version goes something like this: a cursory inspection of the world around us seems to indicate that it was designed. So let us adopt that as a hypothesis. What would be expect to see? Well, one thing we would expect is that the designer might have provided a manual to go along with his/her/its designed creation. And lo and behold, there is such a manual. Actually, there are many such manuals. Collectively they are referred to as holy texts. The logical rabbit warren branches out from there.

This makes a tremendous amount of sense to me. Sorry to be political (what a crime), but I think it's a useful framework for thinking about the modern conservative movement. So much of the right now defines itself not with a cohesive ideology or specific set of policies, but rather in knee-jerk opposition to anything their supposed enemies believe. When your starting point is "these people are 100 percent wrong no matter what they say" you are now forced to explain why. And the result is a whole universe of shared lies and conspiracy theories (and people trying really hard to create some consistency or reasoning to back up those lies).
> It is a very long chain of reasoning from there, but this it the thing that most detractors of YEC miss: it is logically sound.

OF course it's not and most counter arguments knock it on it's face at that point. Any idiot can see that just because something looks designed doesn't mean it has a designer.

>[2] An extremely abridged version goes something like this: a cursory inspection of the world around us seems to indicate that it was designed. So let us adopt that as a hypothesis. What would be expect to see? Well, one thing we would expect is that the designer might have provided a manual to go along with his/her/its designed creation. And lo and behold, there is such a manual. Actually, there are many such manuals. Collectively they are referred to as holy texts. The logical rabbit warren branches out from there.

Except all the actually useful manuals were built by man and not provided by a Designer.

How can something be both logically sound and violently at odds with reality? What you’re saying is that those who hold YEC beliefs have an inconsistent belief system, but the belief in YEC is constructed with valid arguments within that belief system. That’s like the opposite of logically sound.
I've only done it twice, but both times were with very logical people, engineers.

My conclusion was that we had different base assumptions. They assumed that an omnipotent God existed. With that assumption, it's quite straight forward to build a logical case for evolution.

For the uninitiated, what is "YEC"?

Google wants to define is as "Young Entrepreneur Council" but I doubt that's what you're referring to.

Edit: Thank you kind internet strangers.

The Catholic Church is able to merge telos and evolution. YEC should try harder.
This point will be nitpicked , and I'm tempted to do so myself, but it only goes to show how deep rooted the conflict is when this appears at its face value to be contradictory with very reality.
I like the point that "logic" is not going to win the argument. I see so often people arguing against those with vastly different views and basically talking to them like children, like linking to articles or studies that explain a belief that is obvious and well known. When the source of disagreement is as you say far deeper, often outside the realm of fact and down to philosophy, and just gets ignored in favor of assuming people that disagree must be stupid
What I find interesting in all of this is the number of assumptions that are made on all sides. The assumptions are often not documented or discussed. It's easy to look at religion or YEC to pull out the assumptions. Yet, I've found assumptions show up in all views on the topic.
The belief that everything has a purpose is not very distinctive among Christians, so within a church, what separates young earth believers from the rest of the church?
What is teleology and what is the alternative?
I had a friend who was very intelligent, but their family chose to send them to Catholic school for education.

One day, we somehow got on the topic of dinosaurs, and they turned to me with an incredulous look on their face and said, "Wait, dinosaurs are actually real? I thought they were fake, like the Earth isn't actually that old."

Turns out that's what their parents and teachers told them since childhood.

Is that some weird American thing? I went to a Catholic school in Poland, and we were told about evolution as a matter of fact. No one questioned it. I think our biology teacher was actually a priest in fact. And as far as I understand the Roman Catholic church completely supports evolution as the dominant theory, maybe with a bit of "god helped along the way" somewhere but no one questions it being true. And suggesting that dinosaurs weren't real would just get you laughed out.
It’s a slow process due to American fundamentalist culture.

“The church first brought evolution into the fold in 1950 with the work of Pope Pius XII.

At the same time, Catholics take no issue with the Big Bang theory, along with cosmological, geological, and biological axioms touted by science.

In fact, the Roman Catholic Church has recognized Darwinian evolution for the past 60 years. It openly rejects Intelligent Design and Young Earth Creationism saying that it "pretends to be science.” “

Catholic school here in Canada explicitly teaches evolution and has done so for a very very long time.

Since Catholicism is pretty "centralized" as far as religion goes and since the official ex cathedra position has been a-ok with evolution since 1950 and arguably earlier, I have no idea how this story could possibly be true.

I went to 12 years of Catholic education and the mindset you describe was never mentioned once.
That sounds strange, Catholic church and schools never had problems with evolution and enforcing literal creationism. It's a issue predominantly common among some of the Protestant denominations in the US.

While attending school in Poland, I met only two people my age who believed evolution was a hoax and could be considered to be young Earth creationists. One of them was a Jehovah Witness, and the other was a member of an American-style Pentecostal and evangelical church.

I had a weird experience in high school as well. A friend was completely surprised by the age of the earth and everything else that comes with it (dinosaurs, evolution, etc.)

Her parents did not even feel this way, but the home school co-ops they sent her to had taught her this

That has nothing to do with actual Catholic theology, which doctrinally has no problem with genetics, evolution, dinosaurs, etc. This is also true of most European Protestant religious groups.

They see the bible story as allegorical and so not expected to be taken literally. Evolution is seen as simply the mechanism through which god chose to act. Creationism is largely an American thing, in Europe most Christians consider such people fringe nut jobs.

Is this for real? I have never heard of a catholic school teaching fundamentalism like this. Not saying it doesn't exist, but would have to be pretty fridge.
I went to Catholic schools and there I learned that evolution/big-bang were church doctrine, the Bible is not the literal word of God but divinely inspired, and that God probably wouldn’t hold it against a just non-believer when it came to determining their fate.

So I’m not sure when your friend went to this school or if they were in a weird sect (mine was Jesuit) but it does not match my experience

That's preposterous.

The catholic church explicitly admits evolution.

Let me guess, this was in the USA?

This is obviously a fake story.
I don't see how it couldn't be the key factor.

At my undergrad, there would be after hours "talks" by religious leaders about the foolishness of plate tectonics, the fallacy of radiocarbon dating, etc etc. At least for hardcore Bible literalists, believing that the world is older than X generations (with the lineage spelled out in the old testament) is to believe that the Bible is false, and therefore their whole religion is disproved. My family was raised this way too.

The very fact life is billions of years old and all these religous texts don't even mention about it even once or the fact that dinousaurs existed for hundreds of millions of years really makes a lot of organized religions look like fools. Anyone who reads about evolution will realize that we are not special, our species is not special and god's son being a human is just a narcisstic idea ignorant people came up with 2000 years ago.
Catholics believe in evolution.
I guess it depends how you define religion. From the abstract:

> We carried out two nationwide data collections that allowed us to compare differences in the acceptance of evolution in Italy and Brazil by high school students who declare to belong to the same religion in the two countries. Roman Catholic students showed significant differences between the two countries, and the gap between them was wider than between Catholics and non-Catholic Christians within Brazil. Our conclusions support those who argue that religious affiliation is not the main factor in predicting the level of evolution acceptance.

My hunch is that being Catholic doesn't really mean the same thing in different countries, so the conclusion doesn't make much sense to me. Of course it's not the "religious affiliation" that matters but how the religion is practiced. I don't like the mismatch between the title and the abstract and actual study (the title mentioning religion rather than religious affiliation).

Agreed. They studied something quite narrow, and I don't think the results are particularly applicable to broader circumstances.
> Some factors may act as obstacles to the acceptance of evolution, such as religion, a lack of openness to experience, and not understanding the nature of science

Maybe this is just by bias but so often I see "listen to us, not them" as some kind of argument for why to believe in something, and I think the tone of this study feels similar. What about the idea that we should question stuff and not go down the "science tells us" faith based path.

What if the same underlying factors that might cause someone to believe unquestioningly in biblical creation are the same that could lead to someone believing unquestioningly in evolution. And likewise, what if being more of a skeptic causes people to reject, or at least moderate their opinion, on both.

I don't go in for "teaching the controversy" per se, but I do support a less faith based approach to education, which includes encouraging people not to blindly accept "science". My read is there has been a massive religious shift in that direction

I agree, scientific literacy is the problem. Too many people see Science as a replacement for religion and just say things like "trust the science" or act as if "science" is a noun that means things it doesn't. "We used science to prove our point" doesn't man a damn thing to me unless I've read the study.

The thing about the scientific method, is that it replaces faith, and people don't know what to do with that. Most people, even on the science side (myself included) just trust that "the science checks out" in the same way people just trust that "the Bible was written using divine influence outside the corruption of mortal man".

TL;dr- Teach critical thinking, which is the backbone of the scientific method, so above all else and hope for the best. Critical thinking is very hard, especially when you're not an expert on a matter, and that's the problem we can't ever solve: Nobody can be interested in everything enough to actually investigate it, even tough many of the things they're not investigating are extremely important to their lives.

It looks like the title of the paper is misleading, because they chose two Catholic countries to study and Catholicism is broadly accepting of evolution. As such, this was a study specifically on Catholicism, and not religion in general.

This study would be far more informative in countries where common religious doctrine is more oppositional to evolution.

The summary states:

> Roman Catholic students showed significant differences between the two countries, and the gap between them was wider than between Catholics and non-Catholic Christians within Brazil.

If we're talking about Christianity in particular, there's a divide between believing in the literal or figurative interpretations of the Bible.

The literal interpretation of the Bible is that the Earth is ~7000 years old and everything stated in the Bible is fact as written. The figurative interpretation isn't necessary inconsistent with things like evolution. The belief system simply switches to God triggering that process.

In other countries, at least in my experience, the figurative interpretation is more dominant, particularly in developed nations. Religion isn't a militant political force and there are no serious attempts to equate creationism (aka "intelligent design") as science or otherwise equivalent to evolution.

The US has a particularly problematic mix of factors that have become a problem for everyone:

1. The US has a problem with anti-intellectualism. I mean this came up in Kanye's recent meltdown. There was a clip from his interview tour that went something like "I don't see why I should have to understand or know anything". And that about sums it up. This isn't about being dumb or even ignorant. It's about being wilfully ignorant. This is a key driver for attacking public education;

2. The evangelicals are a particular militant and politically active sect that wish to dominate secular society. In many ways, they would like to hold the political power and position that the clerics of Iran hold in government. The history of this movement is interesting by itself. It evolved in the 19th century as the US expanded westward with homegrown preachers who really had no teaching or understanding of accepted Christian teachings, understanding and philosophy. Instead this was actively rejected. This led to other sects being formed, most notably the LDS Church (ie Mormons). These sects also have significant influence from American exceptionalism and white supremacy.

3. These sects teach a kind of theocracy where all authority is to be mistrusted and ignored except for the Church leaders.

All of this is the perfect storm for political manipulation.

I've known plenty of people who "accept" evolution but don't understand the concepts of emergence or how they apply to evolutionary biology. When any idea, no matter how right and true, decides that it needs to engage in ideological branding to promote itself, it invariably becomes a religion. Treating "belief in evolution" as a litmus test for being educated or knowing the truth just replaces internalizing and comprehending concepts with some tribal shibboleth. Everyone is obsessed with the what and the why, but the meat is almost always found in the how.

EDITTED FOR TYPOS

Catholic doctrine states that evolution is accepted by The Church. Not 100% related, but I dislike seeing everyone lumping Catholics with... Protestants.
Incentive structures are as old as the hills. You can’t sell me evolution just to be correct.
Dr. Francis Collins, director of Human Genome Project under President Bill Clinton and director of NIH under Presidents Barak Obama and Joe Biden, wrote a book in which he argues that the Theory of Evolution and Religion do not contradict each other [1].

[1] Francis S. Collins "The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief", 2006

I'm no longer religious, but my parents—both PhDs—are.

Their take on this has always been along the lines of "The Bible says God created the world, and all the creatures in it. Evolution is the tool He used in that creation process."

So long as you're not dogmatic and don't insist on treating the Bible—particularly any one particular edition—as absolute, ironclad Truth, religion and science are absolutely not incompatible. Many of the professors—both sciences and humanities—at the college they both work at also go to their church (American Episcopal, fwiw).

IIRC from my evolutionary biology seminar back from 2012, I believe this is mostly true for most? Christian groups and they support evolution and teach religion along side it.

https://www.uua.org/worship/words/sermon/179417.shtml https://www.umc.org/en/content/ask-the-umc-what-is-the-unite...

Like politics, it's the highly vocal christian groups that eschews evolution for creationism that make it an issue in the first place.

I am an atheist who went to a methodist university (but might as well be secular at this point) and I personally don't see conflicts between evolution and religion.

My best friend since college once sent me the book "Uncommon Dissent: Intellectuals Who Find Darwinism Unconvincing". Lots of positive reviews on Amaz*. I remember getting sent an essay, too, that argued that most eminent scientists gravitated towards a belief in g8d later in life.
Richard Dawkins, enter even more impressive credentials here, also wrote a book "The God Delusion" in which he - as part of the overal story that there is no god - spends some pages completely debunking the claim of Collins.
I spent a lot of time as a young teenager on various message boards, particularly TalkOrigins, arguing against creationism and its various nonsensical offshoots. It taught me a lot about biology, but it also taught me a lot about the nature of truth, and how people believe things emotionally more often than they believe things rationally. The quantity and persuasiveness of evidence doesn't matter if a person has an emotional investment in their own version of the truth.

So when Trumpism came around, with all of it's big lies and little lies and conspiratorial thinking, I wasn't too shocked. It almost seems natural that as one set of emotionally-driven mythologies fades away (biblical literalism) some other version would have to fill the void.

Interesting, I also feel like I've been fighting this fight (in person, in debates that were a side project of our academic decathlon club) since I was a teenager, and learned some of the same lessons. Though I don't know that it's zero-sum: I don't think flat eartherism, evolution denial, anti-vaxxism or the like "made way" for Trumpism in the sense that they became less popular and Trumpism became more popular; it might be the other way around, that these tend to reinforce each other and have a large overlap. There seems to be an undercurrent in all of them that you can simply deny and disbelieve the facts you don't like and make them go away.
Is non-acceptance of evolution any different from believing in a flat Earth?
There are no reproducible scientific experiments proving evolution. Evolution is as much a religion as all the others.
Evolution is a theory and is not observable at all. It is all based on a huge assumption (we THINK that is how things happened).

The wide-spread acceptance of evolution in the west is because of lack of another explanation of how life must have come into existence when you cannot bring yourself to give any possibility to a supernatural creator. The same people who would fume when you mention a god will very happily accept an assumption when the word "science" is attached to it.

Just because we can observe mutations doesn't in any way prove evolution in a macro level that results in speciation. Yet it's treated as fact by so many without even knowing enough about it. An average person's acceptance of evolution is no different to a religious person's acceptance of a creator, no matter how much you'd like to think otherwise.