Monism, atheism, and the naturalist worldview: Perspectives from evolutionary biology

Evolutionary biology has deep significance for religion, yet no statistical study of evolutionary biologists' beliefs has ever been published. James Leuba conducted the pioneer study on leading scientists' belief in god and immortality in 1921. Edward Larson and Larry Witham repeated Leuba's questionnaire study with scientists from the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 1998. These studies reveal progressively declining belief in god and immortality among American scientists through the 20th century. Their reports had two major shortcomings: (1) they ignore deism, a religious belief held by a minority of scientists; (2) they offer no statistics on evolutionary biologists' beliefs. We are left with no adequate means of determining, from the literature of the 20th century, the degree of compatibilism among evolutionary biologists with respect to evolution and religion. My project uses questionnaire and interview data from a worldwide sample of evolutionary biologists who are members of national academies of science, to illustrate their opinions on the intersection of evolutionary and religious matters.; This study reveals the following statistics about the participants from 22 countries: 83.89% are irreligious; 87.92% reject life after death; and 77.85% affirm philosophical naturalism as their world-view. Only 1.3% of the participants have a traditionally theistic world-view; an additional 3.3% blend theism with naturalism, resulting in the lowest frequency of theistic belief ever reported among a group of scientists, 4.6%.; Only rarely, influential evolutionary biologists allow religious conceptions to enter their naturalistic world-view. They appeal to a unique blend of monism and deism that allows a small, relatively insignificant, role for god as a careless creator. The majority of the respondents see no need to invoke theological concepts in their naturalistic world-views at all, and yet, still maintain a technically compatibilist stance with respect to evolution and religion. Only 10.07% of the participants express a complete incompatibilism between evolution and religion. The majority, 71.88%, believe that religion is a social adaptation, and they find compatibility by expressing religion in evolutionary biological terms. Most participants believe that evolutionary biology is crucial for understanding the many social institutions of the human species, of which religion is only one. According to my study, compatibility of religion and evolutionary biology requires severe debasing of traditional religious beliefs.; Evolutionary biologists such as Ernst Haeckel and Julian Huxley attempted to make evolutionary biology a religion by advocating a monistic, naturalist world-view without supernatural revelation. The participants of this study affirm many of the tenets of Haeckel and Huxley, particularly the monistic, naturalistic aspects. Only a small minority, however, maintain Haeckel's and Huxley's desire to entertain traditional religious notions within the evolutionary biology curriculum. Rather, the respondents reveal a naturalist world-view that accepts traditional religion only on the condition that religion remains mute on the most meaningful matters of human experience.