Sadly, I know plenty of Catholics who are against abortion but pro-war, pro-death penalty, calous about poverty, and reckless with the ecosystem. Oh, and they are shocked when I tell them the pope agrees with evolutionary theory and that the Big Bang was proposed by a Catholic priest.
The Catholic Church endorsed evolution early in the 20th century, around 1911 as I recall. Arthur C. Clarke discussed this in an essay. I know little about theology, but it seems to me that opposing evolution based on it makes about as much sense as opposing the germ theory, Newton's laws, or the value of pi, which is reportedly 3.0 according some readings of the Bible. My sense is that the opposition has little to do with religion. It is politics disguised as religion. I am pretty sure the "No Tomorrow" crowd represented by James Watt are mainly using this as a cover to wreak havoc on the environment for profit. If they really thought there will be no tomorrow, they would not go to the trouble to gut environmental laws, cutting trees and make obscene profits. What is the point of making a pile of money if the world is coming to an end?
Often opposition is triggered by conflicts with premodern folk beliefs and superstitions. In Japan I think ~95% of people believe in evolution, whereas in the US it is roughly 50%. You might think this indicates the Japanese are better educated, more rational, or less superstitious than Americans. I doubt that. It just happens that evolution does not conflict with their folk beliefs. In other cases, where modern discoveries do conflict with traditional beliefs or values, I expect about half the Japanese population refuses to go along.
The situation was complicated by 20th-century wars. Religion and superstition in Japan and Western Europe were knocked flat by WWI and WWII. Large numbers of people stopped believing, and the temples and churches never recovered. People who claim "there are no atheists in foxholes" don't know what they are talking about! I would not know about battlefields but I know what happens to civilian populations subjected to bombing. As the Japanese anthropologist Robert Smith put it, the Japanese leaders and high priests promised that the Ancestral Gods and Kamikaze would defend them, but it didn't work, so people stopped believing in Gods. The Kamikaze pilots never believed in them in the first place. At least the one I knew did not.
- Jed
