Hermeneutical Issues

The issue of how respondees interpret the question may give us pause in trying to analyze their responses. It is tempting to assume that respondees (self-identified as Christians) will understand the term "Christian theology" to be the religious system to which they subscribe. However, some Christians may view their own beliefs as being unorthodox. Evidence in this direction is given by an examination of the responses to the question concerning the compatibility of Christian theology and evolutionary theory and the responses to the question concerning one's belief in the completeness of evolutionary theory in explaining human origins. While there is a high correlation between answers to these two questions (0.41), they do not trace each other. However, even here, we run into hermeneutical issues; a person could accept that the basic evolutionary mechanisms underlie human origins, but may hold that the details of that process are largely unknown and hence that the theory (developed into a historical account) is not complete.

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