Should students who reject evolution be allowed to become doctors?

[slingblade]

Someone suggests that anti-blood transfusion Jehovah´s Witnesses should not serve alone the night shift in the first aid unit of hospitals? That is outright discrimination based on harmful religion.

Your right to your religious beliefs ends where my right to proper treatment begins.

Your religious rights never give you the right to use them in doing me harm.

Can you understand that?

 

[Visual Purple]

But AFAIK "born-again" Christians specifically believe in Biblical literalism.

This is a little late, but understanding the taxonomy of Christian beliefs can be useful in real life. "Born-again" means believing that the only way to be "saved" is to have a particular kind of emotional conversion experience. "Evangelical" means focused on converting others--but, in practice, it implies one particular strain of that approach. "Fundamentalist" means, essentially, Biblical literalist. There's a lot of overlap, but it's not total. As far as I can tell "Evangelical" and "Born-again" are essentially equivalent--all the types who identify as "Evangelical" believe in the necessity of the born-again experience. The biblical literalists are a subset of this. My experience would say something like half; the statistics are out there somewhere, but my Google-fu is weak today.

I did biology graduate work in a university that had several professors in biology-related fields who were Evangelicals (one annoyingly so), but were also old-earth creationists who believed that God worked through evolution and that "macroevolution" has occurred. I have enough experience to suggest that this kind of belief cannot be particularly unusual among the megachurch types.

Sorry about the sidetrack, but I think that people may find it useful to know what kind of crazy they may be dealing with.

 

[Zelenius]

This is a little late, but understanding the taxonomy of Christian beliefs can be useful in real life. "Born-again" means believing that the only way to be "saved" is to have a particular kind of emotional conversion experience. "Evangelical" means focused on converting others--but, in practice, it implies one particular strain of that approach. "Fundamentalist" means, essentially, Biblical literalist. There's a lot of overlap, but it's not total. As far as I can tell "Evangelical" and "Born-again" are essentially equivalent--all the types who identify as "Evangelical" believe in the necessity of the born-again experience. The biblical literalists are a subset of this. My experience would say something like half; the statistics are out there somewhere, but my Google-fu is weak today.

I did biology graduate work in a university that had several professors in biology-related fields who were Evangelicals (one annoyingly so), but were also old-earth creationists who believed that God worked through evolution and that "macroevolution" has occurred. I have enough experience to suggest that this kind of belief cannot be particularly unusual among the megachurch types.

In my experience and based on "research", Born-agains are probably the most "troubled" of the 3 and are more likely to have mental issues. The Born-agains I have known through work or friends very often had drug or alcohol problems. Some recovered, while most relapsed. It seems their intense religious devotion is a desperate attempt to remain clean, and in a few cases it appears to work. Born-agains also have a very high divorce rate compared to just about all other Christians.

Born-agains are often attracted to Pentecostalism, which even many other Christians dismiss as a denomination for the mentally ill.

I am no expert on this issue (I am an electrical engineer by profession), but I have thought about this somewhat. I think that mentally ill people are attracted to Pentecostalism because of its irrationality and also because Pentecostalism condones insane and inappropriate behavior such as screaming, shouting, running, wailing, hopping, and other such things where insane people could fit right in and indulge their theatrics for attention.

Of the 3 groups, it seems to me that evangelicals are probably most likely to accept evolution, since they generally do not take the Bible too literally, unlike the fundamentalists. In my experience, which differs from yours, born-agains seem more like fundamentalists than evangelicals to me. In my personal life, I've found evangelicals to be the easiest to get along with, especially if they are educated, liberal evangelicals. These are just observations, I am not an expert either but I realize there is a lot of overlap between these 3 mostly protestant groups.

Did any students or faculty argue with your evangelical science professors in school? Did their beliefs, especially the "annoying" one, cause any significant problems for anyone?

 

[Gawdzilla Sama]

The number of creationist doctors who recommend and give flu shots every year would tend to discredit your concerns. Again, creationists, even the hardcore ones, do not deny natural selection or adaptation. The thing the anti-evolutionists deny is that one species can evolve into a new, different species. None of the things you've mentioned are things creationists reject. At least not any creationists I know, or whose thoughts on such matters I am aware of. Granted, I don't spend much of my time seeking out creationist views, since I find them to be wholly without merit. But I do know several reasonably intelligent creationists, and none of them reject flu shots or hereditary disease, or the means of studying or combating either the flu or hereditary disease. If anything, they would just have some rationalization of how that doesn't disprove their creationist views. Rationalization is how they deal with any apparent contradictions between their profession and their religious beliefs. They rationalize that what they reject is not also what they assume to be true in their every day work. That may be wrong, but it renders their false beliefs innocuous as far as any potential danger to patients is concerned.

As for your more general point, I think you greatly underestimate both the power and the ubiquity of compartmentalization and cognitive dissonance. Those things are not in themselves indicative of abnormal psychology. If anything, their absence is abnormal, at least if normal is taken as a synonym of "common." In fact, their complete absence in a person is closer to "unheard of" than it is to "normal," and might even be detrimental to a person's well-being. I may develop an opinion on that if I ever meet someone who does not exhibit both to at least some degree.

If I was the only one that thought this way, I'd be concerned about my position, but I'm not. Eugenie Scott thinks like I do on this.

 

[Zelenius]

I don't know how accurate this is, but here are the results of a survey to find how widespread creationism was among doctors of various religious backgrounds, versus creationist beliefs among their co-religionists in the general population. I do not know the exact methodology and it could be total garbage for all I know.

The high percentage among Muslim doctors(43%) is deeply troubling, though is not surprising when you consider the article in the OP.

The very low percentage among Jewish doctors is unsurprisingly low. It's so not surprising when you consider that the most accomplished, most innovative doctors and medical scientists in the world are disproportionately Jewish; even many Christians tend to hold Jewish doctors in high esteem.