The concept of the “average American” has come up a couple of times on recent threads. On both occasions I have described this concept as “mythical”.[1][2] I suppose it behooves me to explain myself.
Firstly, as less than 5% of the US population lives in New England, and only about 0.2% of Americans appear to be Congregationists, it seems highly unlikely that “the average American child [was/is/will-be] raised in a New England Congregationalist family.”
When we talk about an “average”, we are talking about a summary statistic, most commonly the mean, but potentially the median, and at a stretch the mode.
Geographically, according to recent census data, the population-weighted center of the US is near Hartville, Missouri.[3] Does this fact tell us anything meaningful about Americans more generally? I don’t think so.
Similarly we could, with a lot of work and a ton of assumptions, place all Americans on a religious spectrum (e.g. between liberal and conservative religious views), and discover the ‘median American’ in terms of religious viewpoint. I don’t think this would tell us any more about American religious demographics than Hartville did about geographic demographics.
It would seem to me that Americans are too heterogeneous and multi-modal to be summarised by such summary statistics. The best, I think, that we can do is to identify significant minorities.
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A significant minority of Americans, 28%[4], identify as “Nones” in terms of religions. As that group is growing fairly rapidly, it seems likely that an even larger proportion will become “Nones” in their lifetime.
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A significant minority of Americans are (still) Mainline Protestant. These denominations typically both accept, and do not make an issue about, evolution. It seems likely therefore that a majority of these will have similar experiences to my own and Stephen’s, and not see any real conflict between science (in general and evolution in particular) and Christianity. For such people, “godless evolution” would seem to be no more of a problem than “godless gravity”.
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A significant minority of Americans take the Bible literally. However there are strong signs that, far from wishing to find a way to harmonise these beliefs with the scientific consensus, many of them deeply distrust this consensus, and are more willing to put their trust in Ken Ham (or worse, Kent Hovind) than in Francis Collins.
What can we learn from these, and similar, disparate groups? That it is likely that no single pro-evolution Apologetic (be it GAE, Francis Collins’ version of Theistic Evolution, or whatever) is likely to be a universal panacea.
One problem that I have long noted with Apologists’ arguments, is that they tend to contain all sorts of implicit assumptions that the listener has the same preconceptions as the Apologist. This means that they tend to fall flat when they’re used for anything beyond ‘preaching to the choir’.
I think it is important to keep in mind what each group believes, and which beliefs are most important to them, as well as acknowledging the liklihood of divergence even within these groups, whether you are trying to convince them of evolution, climate change, the safety and effectiveness of vaccines, who won the last election, or whatever.
