Jeune Street

Very interesting!
I would like to see a similar survey in European countries.

I think we have to be clear, though, about how Pew was defining acceptance of evolution. Disagreement about evolution being the best explanation for human life doesn't just mean belief in creationism, but also includes those who accept macro-evolution but think a divine force either set it into motion or guided man into his current form. By this standard the typically held Baha'i belief would fall into the 'disagree' category of the chart. This is the position of a lot of the religions above, that evolution occurred but that God was somehow involved. That's a very different view of the evolutionary process that natural selection.

Thanks for your comment, David.

The question was "Evolution is the best explanation for the origins of human life on earth" -- do you completely agree, mostly agree, mostly disagree, completely disagree. They lumped together the first two under agree and the second two responses under disagree.

I think that even with your caveats the official position of virtually every religion listed would fall into the 'agree' category.

Hey Geoff,

You're absolutely right - Pew presented the numbers in the graph differently than how I've seen them do it elsewhere. There is a nice discussion http://www.jeunestreet.com/2009/02/15/religion-needs-evolution-too/" rel="nofollow">here of the data. It's interesting 1) how different the answers they get are depending on how the question is asked and 2) how inconsistent people are in their answers (a significant number of people give seemingly contradictory answers).

I think, though, that if I my make my point in a different way it still stands and that is that belief in an interventionist God makes belief in evolution difficult, even if lots of people say they believe both (and I would count myself as one of those people, though we can mean very, very different things by this).

Deism, where God set the universe in motion and leaves it alone to evolve, or pantheism where God is equivalent to the order of the physical universe, is much easier to fit with evolution than the view of an interventionist God - which is of course the view of virtually all monotheistic religions - who sometimes disrupts, manipulates or even supersedes natural laws.

So I think the tricky part of compatibility is moving past vague affirmations of a belief in some sort of theistic evolution (and there is a huge range of views here about what that even means - Teilhard de Chardin's theistic evolution, for example, is very different Arthur Peacocke's version) and start to work out a systematic ontology consistent with Baha'i Writings that allows for both.

This was really a long-winded way to say that there is a difference between the logical compatibility of God and evolution and a general public perception of that compatibility. Sorting out the first requires continuing philosophical work on the ontological nature of God and the physical universe as well as a recognition of the difficulties reconciling our current conception of God with evolution. The second, the public perception of compatibility, really is a different matter. My stating that I believe in both evolution and in an interventionist God (or in science and religion more generally) might mean they are compatible in my mind, but that does not mean they actually are.

Best,
David

I should point out that the Southern Baptist Convention has no official position on evolution.