Introduction A survey was conducted to explore some of the reasons why Christians have
particular attitudes toward evolutionary theory and Christian theology. The
following report is based on 359 responses collected during 2000. Solicitation
for respondees, was done in three ways: Personal email that was forwarded
widely, and email to the ‘Meta’ list on science and religion (192
responses), elicitation from the Counterbalance web-site (91 responses), and
participation of students from Seattle Pacific University (40 responses). As
there was no formal sampling strategy, inferences of results can not be made
to various demographic groups. Indeed, we saw that the methods of elicitation
had significant filtering effects on people relative to their opinions. As a
further indication of the selection bias in the sampling process relative to
the general population, only 71 people indicated that they were women compared
to 235 who indicated that they were men.
The focal question of the survey asks for people's opinions regarding the
compatibility of evolutionary theory and Christian theology. A series of
related questions are used to examine possible underlying causes of people's
attitudes. While additional studies aimed at examining the progression of
people's beliefs over time may be needed to more fully understand causative
relationships, we find evidence for a couple general hypotheses concerning
these mechanisms: people's needs influence their stated beliefs; people grant
different levels of credibility to various sources of information and when
faced with incoherence, are likely to either reinterpret information from the
less credible sources so as to resolve the conflicts or else to dismiss the
lesser source if resolution is not available.
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| Contributed by: David Caccia
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