Why is it so hard for Christians to understand evolution?

• I find that many writers on Quora assume that such Christians are stupid or crazy for rejecting the theory of evolution. But a good methodological principle of social science is that if a belief or practice seems bizarre to you, you probably don't understand the context.
  
  It's not that these Christians are incapable of understanding evolution. Some do, and many don't but could if they tried. It's that the costs, to them, of believing it are extremely high.
  
  The divine inspiration and infallibility of the Bible is absolutely central to Christianity, especially Protestantism. And contrary to what others have said, it is impossible to harmonize the Bible with Darwinism. There have been many attempts to line up the evolutionary sequence with the days in Genesis, for example, or to argue that the "days" really represent eras, but they are not convincing. The text says that birds came before land animals, all animals were originally herbivores, no animals died before the Fall, humans were created directly from dust rather than descended from other species, and so on.
  
  Yet the fact that thousands of different ways of reconciling biology and the Bible have been tried shows that most Christians really would like to incorporate as much science into their beliefs as possible. There is nothing in their belief system that is opposed to science per se. They believe that, since the Bible is an inerrant text authored by an omniscient being, science should confirm it. If it doesn't, you must be doing it wrong.
  
  You can be a Christian AND accept evolutionary theory (and there are many who do), but there is a high price to pay. You have to interpret the creation stories as myths or allegories, although they seem to present themselves as facts. Then you have to wonder how to interpret the other passages in the Bible, both Testaments, that refer to them. It becomes hard to formulate a criterion to distinguish myth from history in the rest of the Bible, and scriptural interpretation becomes a complex and uncertain endeavor. You can't take the text at face value anymore. You have to try to explain why God would write his book in such a strange and confusing way. And worse, why a God described as all powerful and perfectly loving would create the world by such a strange process, long and slow and wasteful and full of pain and death. It's hard to still believe that humans are a special creation, made in the "image of God," categorically and ontologically distinct from all other life forms. It's hard to decide what to make of the doctrines of original sin and "fallenness" if we inherited our tendencies from apes rather than Adam.
  
  It gets very complicated and confusing. And perhaps you have to experience it to understand it, but cognitive dissonance at the level of your core beliefs can be agonizing. It's lonely and alienating. It's paralyzing. It can drive you to madness.
  
  In short, if you want to be a Christian, you really want the theory of evolution to be false. And many people really want to be Christians. Being right about science (that is, having beliefs that are consistent with the scientific evidence) is not most people's strongest psychological need. If you can believe it wholeheartedly, without reservation, Christianity offers psychological benefits--identity, belonging, community, value, empowerment, safety, comfort, hope, certainty--that are pretty hard to beat.
     

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