Religion, Superstition, and Evolution: An Overview of Recent Studies in Austria and Germany

• In Event: 32.028 - Relations Between Religious Belief and Learning About Evolution: A Cross-Cultural Perspective

Abstract

We investigated the relationships between students’ religious and paranormal beliefs and their acceptance of evolution, creationism, and intelligent design, respectively. Our sample comprised 2,129 secondary school students from Vienna (Austria), aged from 10 to 18. We used the rPBS questionnaire of Tobacyk (2004) and the evolution questionnaire of FOWID (2005). The mean paranormal belief score of our sample (82) was lower than in Austrian psychology students (Hergovich, 2005) and university students in southern USA (Tobacyk, 2004). Paranormal belief is associated with gender: females showed a significantly higher rPBS score than males. More than 50% of the pupils agreed with naturalistic evolution, 28% with creationism, and more than a third agreed with ID. These data are similar to a previous study on adult Austrians (GfK, 2009), which did not include a statement on ID, however. In Germany, FOWID (2005) reported a much higher fraction of people between 14 and 29 (70.8%) to agree with evolution.

The agreement with naturalistic evolution correlated negatively with religious belief, but not with other paranormal beliefs, whereas the two non-scientific alternatives to evolution significantly correlated with both traditional and paranormal beliefs. Religious belief showed a significant positive correlation with other paranormal beliefs. Acceptance of creationism and ID decreased significantly during the eight grades of secondary school, but acceptance of naturalistic evolution did not correlate with grade.

Significant and partly surprising differences between different religious confessions, including religiously unaffiliated, were found regarding belief in God, paranormal belief and evolution. 50% of Christian confession, but 90% of Muslim students stated to believe in God. Islamic students also showed the lowest acceptance of evolution. All confessions except Muslims show a decrease in religious belief from grade 5 to grade 12. Recent migrations from Islamic countries to Europe increase the importance of educational strategies to avoid further social division.

We compare our results with studies on paranormal belief, religion and evolution in Germany and other European countries (Thalbourne and Houtkooper, 2002; Miller et al., 2006; Graf, 2010; Graf & Soran, 2010), and discuss desirable consequences on teaching strategies in Biology and Religion at secondary schools as well as at Universities where future teachers are educated. We urge a change in the syllabus of biology towards an immanent evolutionary understanding in all grades instead of the common “natural history” approach. Extra-occupational courses combining evolution theory, nature of science, and science didactics (cf. Rudolph and Stewart, 1998) should be an obligatory standard in postgraduate science teacher education.

Author

• Erich Eder, Sigmund Freud University