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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
Surprised how?
Almost certainly.
Also, in there most protestants don't consider Catholics to be Christians.
The place is completely bananas.