Influence of Evolution Discourse on Religious Belief: Israeli Public Schools as a Natural Experiment

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

Abstract

Studies of how learning about evolution relates to the religious beliefs of students tend to treat religious belief as an independent variable and acceptance or understanding of evolution as a dependent variable (see, e.g., Sinatra, Southerland, McConaughy, & Demastes, 2003). Few studies, however, examine how students’ approaches to evolution affect their religious beliefs. Moreover, because religious believers tend to come from religious families, affiliate with religious groups, and study in institutions hospitable to their religious commitments, existing studies struggle to differentiate between belief effects and the effects of other cultural factors (see Gottlieb, 2008).
The Israeli public school system is a natural “laboratory” in which to study the effects of education on religious and scientific thinking. It includes a Hebrew sector serving the majority Jewish population and an Arabic sector serving the minority Moslem, Christian, and Druze populations. The Hebrew (Jewish-Zionist) sector comprises two subsystems: General and Religious. However, despite targeting, respectively, secular and religious populations, General schools and Religious schools follow the same mandatory national curriculum. This includes a unit in the biology curriculum on evolution (Asher, 2016).

This study examines the different ways in which pupils from General and Religious discussed evolution, unprompted, while being interviewed about their religious beliefs. In individual interviews, 200 fifth, eighth, and twelfth graders from General and Religious schools were asked to justify their beliefs about whether or not God exists. Then they were asked what they would say to persuade someone holding the opposing view; and what such a person might say to refute their arguments (see Gottlieb, 2007; 2008).

One of the most popular arguments in both school systems was creation arguments, i.e., that related explicitly to creation or evolution. To illustrate, consider for the following justification and refutation:

“There has to be someone who created everything and that’s the Holy One Blessed Be He.” (Yossi, fifth grade)”

“She’s bring up Darwin and all that. I’d bring up the Book of Genesis.” (Deborah, twelfth grade)

Qualitative and quantitative analyses of the variations and distribution of such justifications and refutations by school and age revealed a number of intriguing findings with implications for the teaching of evolution in different cultural settings. Here, I note just the most striking of the quantitative findings.

Pupils at Religious Schools employed creationist justifications to support of their belief in God twice as frequently (71%) as did their peers at General schools (33%), χ² (1,163 = 23.62, p < 0.001, Φ = 0.38). On the other hand, while pupils from both Religious and General schools cited evolutionary refutations as possible counterarguments to their belief in God, these such refutations were more frequent (!) among pupils in Religious schools (see Fig. 1, attached).

These findings, combined with qualitative findings presented in the paper, suggest that Religious schools and General schools frame discussions of evolution so differently that, despite officially covering the same curricular material, pupils at each type of school adopt quite different orientations towards the material. Implications for future practice and research are explored.

Author

• Eli Gottlieb, Mandel Leadership Institute