Why Evolution Is True
Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
Here’s the second part of my interview with Scott Jacobson, published on the Substack site A Further Inquiry (part I is here). I’ll give just two excerpts below:
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: We’re speaking mainly about Christian-majority countries. However, according to recent census data from Statistics Canada, the total number of Christians in Canada is around 53 to 54%. If you track the trend line from the 1971 data through 2001 and 2021, Canada will fall below half-Christian in terms of its total population sometime this year. That’s a significant shift. The United Kingdom is already closer to 40%. While the United States still reports around 67%, that was different from two decades ago. So, there is a general decline. Does this mean that the acceptance of evolution—or at least theistic evolution—is likely to become more prevalent in these cultures?
Jerry Coyne: Yes, that’s what the statistics suggest. If you look at Gallup polls, you’ll see that the only steady increase is in the acceptance of naturalistic evolution. It started at about 9% in 1982 and has risen to around 25% by 2024. That’s a promising trend, but it’s important to note that more than half of Americans—nearly three-quarters—still oppose purely naturalistic evolution.
Keep in mind that 34% of Americans are theistic evolutionists. They accept evolution, but only up to a point. That point usually involves human evolution because they believe God created humans in His image. This belief skews the data, making the acceptance of evolution seem higher than it truly is. Many people struggle with the idea that what they perceive as a random, accidental process could lead to the complexity of human beings and our brains. This is a mischaracterization of natural selection, but it’s a common barrier to accepting evolution.
. . . Jacobsen: It’s quite a story. So, when you’re less active on that particular subject, such as tracking the Discovery Institute’s activities, what do you consider the enduring thread from Mencken’s era to the present regarding attempts to infiltrate school systems and advocate for a divine role in evolution? What common themes have persisted over time?
Coyne: The fact that evolution is inherently offensive to many people. Steve Stewart-Williams wrote a book about this—although I can’t recall the title—that delves into the different ways in which the concepts of evolution and natural selection challenge deeply held beliefs. It’s not just about religion. Evolution strikes the core of human exceptionalism and the belief that we are somehow separate from the rest of the natural world.
You don’t have to be religious to believe in human exceptionalism, but religion certainly reinforces it. The idea that naturalism alone is responsible for everything, including consciousness, is unsettling for many.
Some people propose supernaturalism or extranaturalism because they don’t believe naturalism can account for phenomena like consciousness. I remember talking to Steven Weinberg, the Nobel laureate in physics, at a meeting several years ago. My presentation was on free will and why it doesn’t truly exist—because our will originates in the brain, which is composed of molecules that follow the laws of physics. Therefore, we can’t step outside ourselves to make truly independent choices. At any given moment, the arrangement of molecules in the brain allows for only one possible action.
That idea is offensive to many people, including Weinberg. He asked, “Are you telling me I couldn’t have chosen something else when I choose what to eat at a restaurant?” I said, “Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying.” He objected, saying he didn’t believe it.
That reaction highlights how deeply unsettling naturalism can be, especially when it challenges the notion of free will. Naturalism, which underpins evolution, is inherently challenging. Evolution itself isn’t a philosophical concept, but it embodies methodological naturalism. Darwin’s work epitomized this, especially at the end of On the Origin of Species, where he wrote about the natural laws governing cosmology and biology. He drew a parallel between the laws of physics that dictate planetary motion and the laws that drive evolution, which are based on chemistry and physics.
So, yes, evolution offends people on multiple levels. Even if religion were to disappear—which it won’t, at least not in our lifetimes—people would still find reasons to object to evolution. However, it’s also true that the less people believe in God, the more likely they are to accept evolution. Suppose you graph countries based on religiosity and acceptance of evolution. In that case, you’ll see a clear trend: the more religious a country is, the less likely its population is to accept evolution. This appears to hold globally.
The least accepting countries are typically the most religious ones, such as Muslim-majority countries. Even within Europe, countries like Spain and Italy, which have strong Catholic traditions, are less accepting of evolution compared to more secular countries.
If you analyze the 50 United States similarly, you’ll also see a significant positive correlation between acceptance of evolution and atheism or lack of religiosity. The states most resistant to evolution, such as Tennessee—known for the famous Scopes Trial—are primarily in the American South. These states are also the most religious in the United States. The underlying thread is the tension between materialism and religion, which inherently rejects materialism.
Religion, by its nature, involves the supernatural. This theme has consistently run through the debate over evolution.
Apropos of the negative correlation between religiosity and acceptance of human evolution, below is one figure I gave in my paper in Evolution, “Science, Religion, and Society: The Problem of Evolution in America” (access is free). It was the paper I was allowed to publish in the journal because I was President of the Society of the Study for Evolution.
Now the plot below shows a correlation and doesn’t indicate causality. For example, one could posit that acceptance of evolution in a country erodes its acceptance of religion, or, alternatively, the higher the religiosity of a country, the less likely its inhabitants are to accept human evolution. Or both. My own view is that the latter is more credible because people get their religion before they learn anything about evolution—if they ever learn anything about evolution. They may simply, as happens often in Islam and Orthodox Judaism, reject human evolution from the outset because that’s what it says in the scripture they encounter.
Here’s another excerpt from my paper:
There is ample evidence, then, that aversion to evolution stems from religious belief not just in the United States but in the world as a whole, and no evidence that resistance to evolution reflects a lack of outreach on the part of teachers and scientists. A final bit of data (Masci 2007) supports this conclusion:
When asked what they would do if scientists were to disprove a particular religious belief, nearly two-thirds (64%) of [American] people say they would continue to hold to what their religion teaches rather than accept the contrary scientific finding, according to the results of an October 2006 Time magazine poll. Indeed, in a May 2007 Gallup poll, only 14% of those who say they do not believe in evolution cite lack of evidence as the main reason underpinning their views; more people cite their belief in Jesus (19%), God (16%) or religion generally (16%) as their reason for rejecting Darwin’s theory.
That last bit of data is scary!
There is another section of the paper called “Incompatibilities between science and faith,” which made me have to fight a little to get the paper published. For the mere suggestion that religion and science are incompatible (in my view, the incompatibility lies mainly in their different ways of ascertaining “truth”) gets people riled up. That section also inspired my book Faith versus Fact, which I published a few years later.
I often hear “liberal” religionists say that true religion doesn’t need evidence, as faith comes from authority, scripture, and revelation, so religion and science occupy “nonoverlapping magisteria,” as Steve Gould maintained. (See my TLS review of Gould’s book about this, which I’ve reposted on this site.) But of course every bit of evidence supporting religious doctrine, like miracles (two are required for sainthood in Catholicism), evidence of life after death with Jesus (books like Heaven is for Real are invariably best sellers), or bogus evidence of “irreducible complexity” adduced by ID advocates—this “evidence” is eagerly glommed onto by believers, who also often make pilgrimages to holy sites.
Yep, undergirding nearly all faith is acceptance of a set of empirical tenets, tenets without which religion becomes superfluous. (Reread the Nicene Creed if you don’t believe me.)
Sorry, what is “extranaturalism”?
I gather it doesn’t come with a side of materialism.
My question as well.
I thought a refresh on Naturalism in Stanford’s philosophy website might be good for me to start with (after the standard ‘LMGTF’ ) :
“The term “naturalism” has no very precise meaning in contemporary philosophy. Its current usage derives from debates in America in the first half of the last century. The self-proclaimed “naturalists” from that period included John Dewey, Ernest Nagel, Sidney Hook and Roy Wood Sellars. ”
… and then there’s “non-naturalism”…
So yeah – drowning in two inches of water over here, help!
What does extranaturalism mean? Maybe it means supernatural for people who don’t like being identified with the religious:
1) I don’t believe in God and the supernatural. I’m not that silly.
2) I believe in free will.
3) Naturalism (whatever that means) and science are just not good enough.
4) Extranaturalism has within it the thing that makes my machine go.
🙂
Why aren’t extranatural and supernatural phenomena (should they exist) just natural phenomena? I don’t know. There is water. There is superwater. There is extrawater.
In the paragraph above the graph correlating religious belief and acceptance of evolution, you say, “one could posit that acceptance of evolution in a country erodes its acceptance of evolution”. It’s possible that I need another cup of coffee, but it seems that it’s a typo. I think it should be that the second mention of evolution should be its acceptance of religion.
It was a typo and I’ve fixed it (another reader caught it). The second “evolution” should be “religion”.
Refreshing run-down of The Whole Thing.
One thought to add : it’s called “deprogramming” for a reason – that reason is the high strength of religion’s grip on the mind. Not a trivial process. One religion might be excised, yet a plethora stand ready in the shadows to infect the wound.
Religion gives out shiny, attractive, intangible things that the empirical science of evolution does not. This kind of emphasizes the truth of Evolution by means of Natural Selection, expressed in this quote :
“The good thing about science is that it’s true whether or not you believe in it.”
-Neil DeGrasse Tyson
—From Real Time with Bill Maher
“2011-02-04” (probably February)
See this video perhaps : https://youtu.be/yRxx8pen6JY
Good interview! In the (Pinker-ian) long run, I still think that we’re still heading in the right direction, the God-hole crowd notwithstanding. The path isn’t even and smooth but it’s bending the right way.
My old advisor and friend Steve Gould was wrong about his non-overlapping magisteria. Religion is what people believe it is, and that means that there is plenty of overlap. A great many believers do make empirical claims that are at variance with science—that God enabled me to hit that home run, for example. (You could see if for yourself in the World Series.) And religionists hold to methodological positions that are completely at variance with science—that belief without evidence is sufficient. Lots of overlap there if you asked me.
Finally, I loved Steven Weinberg’s The First Three Minutes, but your story about Weinberg is interesting. Even Weinberg was wrong on occasion.
“I still think that we’re still heading in the right direction, the God-hole crowd notwithstanding. The path isn’t even and smooth but it’s bending the right way.”
Heading where?
Away from religiosity and toward naturalistic explanations.
Is the current state of truth in empirical science not enough?
How does one know if that points the opposite direction from any religion?
I want to see more people adhering to the current state of truth in empirical science. The “direction” I’m referring to is toward more people adhering to the current state of truth.
“Evolution strikes the core of human exceptionalism and the belief that we are somehow separate from the rest of the natural world.”
Indeed. I’ve met people who aren’t religious in a traditional sense but who believe in the exceptionality of humans so strongly that they vehemently deny the reality of humans being animals.
(To which I usually reply “Well, we’re certainly not plants, fungi, protists or bacteria!”)
Religion is one of the factors that leads people to reject scientific results, and quite likely the main one in many cases, but sadly not the only one.
The similarity of human and chimp DNA is 98.9% or 96% or roughly 86% depending on how and what you measure. These three numbers are about the same as the genetic similarity of mice and rats, two animals even young earth creationists accept as being of the same kind. And thus related.
Human exceptionalism is an appalling idea. It allows people to think they have the right to exploit Nature – “…they were put there for us to eat…” !!
To deny evolution is to miss out on “The greatest show on earth.” (R.Dawkins)
You don’t need to disbelieve that humans are animals evolved under natural selection to subscribe to human exceptionalism. We are exceptional because we obviously are. Climate change, extinction, and environmental degradation can be regarded as just the stream of entropy we leave in our wake as we live the type of lives we have evolved the ability to do. In this regard we are no different from other chemo-organotrophs competing for niches. (I suppose if we deploy solar panels in sufficiently large numbers to make kerosene from carbon dioxide we will become a partially photo-lithotrophic species. Now that would be truly exceptional!) One thing globalization, made possible by our exceptionalism, allows us to do is to off-shore much of our locally-acting industrial pollution by using poor countries as our workshops. No other species can do that. (This doesn’t work with CO2 emissions, though, except on paper, but it still gives us a much cleaner local environment than when every town in Pennsylvania’s coal country had an integrated steel mill and every town in Canada’s boreal forest had a pulp-and-paper mill.)
Who will enforce the counterfactual: that we don’t have a right to exploit Nature? If I say I had the Lockean right to drive existing inhabitants off the land so that I could exploit it more productively, which I do say, at least the natives can contest it by rallying and trying to drive me out. But if the natives join me in exploiting Nature cooperatively, which they did, because my technology is superior at the task of exploitation, which it was, who is to stop us? If we did, somehow, collectively decide to stop exploiting Nature, that would be just another example of our exceptionalism, because we are the only species who could decide to do that sort of thing and make it stick. (As we did with the Atmospheric Nuclear Test Ban and the agreement to end chlorinated fluorocarbons to protect the ozone layer.)
That something is an appalling idea can be an actionable position to take only if there is someone who can take it up and defeat the people who believe it. I don’t see anyone seriously contesting the idea of human exceptionalism with voluntary self-inclusive actions. It’s just hand-wringing.
But more to the point, human exceptionalism is not at all incompatible with the theory of evolution by natural selection. Rather, it flows from it.
Free will and the choice of entree. I have to admit Weinberg boiled the philosophy down to a nice example.
The notion that “you” lack free will because your brain makes decisions for you is based on a false Cartesian dualism between “you” and “your” physical brain. According to the brain-mind identity position you ARE your brain, so there is no conflict between your sense of free will and your brain making the decisions – it’s ultimately YOU making those decisions as a complex nervous system interacting with the rest of the universe. Perhaps that was where Weinberg was coming from.
I think you’re right about dualism as false.
If you’re/I’m hungry, your/my brain relays that info from the gut. There are two things – body and mind – that then can separate to three things – brain, gut, mind – and so on.
Just struck me as an interesting example because of some stuff I heard about brain—gut axis, and how it relates to how you feel/mood… and nobody can control it, though they might guide it or deal with it somehow.
Might be interesting to know how much creationism remains if you subtract the followers of specific religions from the population. The suspicion is that general rejection of evolution would be non-existent, but there might be spiritual people who insist on a distinction between humans and animals without following a particular creed.
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My interview with Scott Jacobsen, part 2 (and a note on faith versus fact) – Why Evolution Is True
ByEric Djirackor
Nov 9, 2025