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.
The Catholic Church happens to believe in evolution, so most Catholics accept evolution as well.
It’s a nutty evangelical thing, not a mainstream Christian thing
Surprised how?
Yes, but no. It's still quite common in other places as well (take a guess), but none you are as likely to hear of as the US. The US may also be the developed nation in which such belief is most common and - more importantly - openly discussed.
Disclosure: Went to Catholic university
Our subjective experience of reality constantly eludes our ability to explain in terms of any physical or informational processes, so every time a system becomes explicable, it leaves the domain of "things which might be self-aware".
Some people take this in the other direction and attribute a soul to everything, others go further and say that even our self awareness is an illusion.
What the paper doesn't really go into is to how religion influences that "sociocultural environment"--it's just measuring effects for individuals. It's clear to me that "teach the controversy" movements, attacks on evolutionary science like the Scopes trial, attempts to remove evolution from biology texts and the actual removal in some schools are in large part motivated by religion, and comprise a lot of that "sociocultural environment" the paper refers to. Catholics have a choice whether to believe in a literal six-day creation and the creation of all life in its current form, so in a place like the U.S., where it's simply more socially acceptable to be an anti-evolutionist, they'll do so in more frequent numbers than where it's not.
There's a contrarian part of me that sees this as somewhat negative. It suggests that perhaps some students may actually have hidden beliefs that they're simply unwilling to expose due to the lack of space for unconventional ideas in the environment. Are students being educated or merely bullied into a particular point of view?
That's another question from this study. They say students "given instruction on the nature of science" accept evolution more readily. What is the "nature of science?" And, what does that instruction entail, exactly?
Almost certainly.
Also, in there most protestants don't consider Catholics to be Christians.
The place is completely bananas.
However, I don't think the Church has historically had an official position on how long creation took. I know some early Church fathers figured Creation took 6000 years: "a day is to the Lord as 1000 years". I also assume that "1000 years" had a similar feeling as "a million years" to us: you can do math with it, but a million years is pretty much an unimaginably long time.
It is also well-known that it is a hermeneutical error to interpret poetry literally, but there is little recognition, at least among evangelicals/fundamentalists that Genesis 1 is actually poetry, and hence interpreting it literally is what I would call a hermeneutical gaffe.
“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.” “
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.
It's depressing and my cousin's son who is being home schooled by the same sort of religious mother is just criminally under-educated for his age. We don't live in a small city, one of the larger ones in America. It's just sad to see that this is often the status quo around here.
If you grow up as a catholic in the south, you’re in the minority. Sunday mass is just a small part of someone’s week, and you’ll spend most of your time around Protestants.
Most people are heavily influenced by their peers, and it can be pretty jarring for someone to accept that an ideology they’ve surrounded themselves with is wrong.
That's why home schooling is just a terrible thing to allow to happen to kids. They can't choose what bullshit they're fed at home, mandatory free public education to some level is the main thing that can help them have a decent start at life.
My partner and I, not at all religious, are home-schooling our eleven-year-old because the public school was completely failing him. Pandemic-era zoom classes were especially worthless. By contrast, a few hours of parental attention each day has him thriving. We have the freedom to work with his natural curiosity, and the normal variations in the pace of skill development, instead of boxing him into a fixed curriculum.
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.
Her parents did not even feel this way, but the home school co-ops they sent her to had taught her this
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.
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
I wouldn't be surprised if this was the result of tribalism, or deliberately not teaching certain things to keep parents happy. At the time, parents were sending kids to private schools so they wouldn't be "indoctrinated" into an atheist/scientific agenda with evolution in the curriculum.
The catholic church explicitly admits evolution.
Let me guess, this was in the USA?