5 facts about evolution and religion David Masci ("Pew Research Center," October 30, 2014)

Are faith and belief in evolution necessarily at odds? According to Pope Francis, the answer is

no. Indeed, the pope recently reaffirmed the Roman Catholic Church’s view that “evolution in

nature is not inconsistent” with church teaching on creation, pushing the debate on humanorigins back into the news.

Although most U.S. Catholics accept the idea of evolution in some form, a substantial percentageof American adults reject the scientific explanation for the origins of human life, and a number

of religious groups in the U.S. maintain that Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution through

natural selection is not correct because it conflicts with their views of creation.

Here are five facts about evolution and faith:

1 The Roman Catholic Church has long accepted –  or at least not objected to –  evolutionary

theory. Pope Francis is not the first pontiff to publicly affirm that evolution is compatible with

church teachings. In 1950, in the encyclical “Humani Generis,” Pope Pius XII said that Catholicteachings on creation could coexist with evolutionary theory. Pope John Paul II went a bit further

in 1996, calling evolution “more than a hypothesis.” 

2 A minority of Americans fully accept the scientific explanation for the origins of human life.

According to a 2013 Pew Research Center survey, 60% of Americans say humans have evolved

over time, but only about half of that group (32% of U.S. adults overall) believes that humansand other living things evolved solely due to natural processes, the explanation accepted by the

vast majority of scientists. About a quarter of U.S. adults (24%) say that humans and other life

evolved, but that this evolution was guided by a supreme being. The same survey found that a

third of Americans (33%) reject evolution entirely, saying humans and other living things haveexisted in their present form since the beginning of time.

3 Of all the major religious groups in the U.S., white evangelical Protestants are the most likely

to reject evolution. Nearly two-thirds (64%) of white evangelicals say that humans and other

living things have always existed in their present form, while roughly one-in-ten white

evangelicals (8%) say that humans evolved through natural processes. On the other end of thespectrum are the unaffiliated, a majority of whom (57%) said they believe that life evolved

through natural processes.

The rejection of evolution by most evangelicals is largely mirrored by their churches, such as the

Southern Baptist Convention and the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, which explicitly reject

evolutionary theory as being in conflict with what they see as biblical truth.

4 About a quarter of white American Catholics (26%) say that they do not believe in evolution of

any kind, despite the church’s acceptance of it. The share of Hispanic Catholics in the U.S. whoreject evolution and say that humans have always existed in their present form is even higher

(31%).

 

5 A series of court decisions prohibit the teaching of creationism or intelligent design in public

schools. In spite of efforts in many American states and localities to ban the teaching of

evolution in public schools or to teach alternatives to evolution, courts in recent decades have

consistently rejected public school curricula that veer away from evolutionary theory. In

Edwards v. Aguillard (1987), for instance, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a Louisiana law

requiring public school students to learn both evolution and creation science violated the U.S.

Constitution’s prohibition on the establishment of religion.