Those nerds over at Marginal Utility have been analyzing some interesting data — the results of the General Social Survey have been released, and you know those guys. Give them a file full of numbers and they go nuts.
Here’s an interesting correlation. They compared general beliefs about scientific issues, in this case on the idea that humans evolved from other animals, with classes of religious belief, from hardcore fundie up to those militant agnostics and wishy-washy nonspecific unbelievers. The results were predictable.
In this graph, the blue bars are good, they mean the respondents in that religious group answered correctly that humans evolved from other animals. The purple bars are bad, that means the group insisted on giving the wrong answer.
Notice the sudden shift: the fundamentalist/moderate protestants have a majority that gets it all wrong, while the liberal protestants/Catholics have a majority that get it right. Then the Jewish/liberal others and nonbelievers do much better, but even the best of the bunch are only up around 60-70%. And overall, less than half the country gets the question right, and the people who reject evolution edge out the people who accept it.
Obviously, the message of this graph is that we’ve got to get everyone to convert to Judaism.
No, wait—there’s another variable to consider: education. Here are the same data, filtered to include only those members of each group who have had some college education. The numbers go up everywhere except for one benighted group.
The axes are scaled differently, so you have to inspect the numbers carefully to compare the two graphs, but look! With a little college education, a Catholic becomes about as smart as your average unbeliever. The liberal Jews and the unbelievers soar up to 80%…OK, 80% still isn’t great. It means the average grade has shifted from a C to a B, but we take any improvement we can get. And also, to my relief, the nonbelievers win! I won’t have to learn Hebrew after all!
Look over on the left, though. The fundamentalists haven’t budged in the slightest—on this subject, they are completely refractory to education. What isn’t in the data is whether that is because that group maintains its beliefs by sending their young off to bible “colleges” which reinforce erroneous ideas, or whether it’s because people who start off as fundies and get a college education then stop being fundies. It’s probably a combination of both.
One thing that isn’t obvious in a percentage chart is the absolute numbers—so I pulled out the n values for each of these groups to get an idea of the numbers we’re dealing with, and to see how likely these various groups were to get a college education (or, in another way of looking at it, how extensively filtered the second graph is relative to the first for each group.) This is rather interesting, too, and has one item that surprised me.
| Religion | n | n (college) | % college |
| Fund prot | 574 | 155 | 27.0% |
| Mod prot | 222 | 86 | 38.7% |
| Lib prot | 236 | 120 | 50.8% |
| Catholic | 403 | 164 | 40.7% |
| Jewish/lib | 89 | 46 | 51.7% |
| None | 325 | 119 | 36.6% |
| Total | 1849 | 690 | 37.3% |
The biggest single religious group in this sample were the fundamentalists, and they are, of course, also the group most likely to get the answer wrong. They are also the group with the smallest percentage of college attendees; they aren’t even trying very hard to get educated, and when they do, as we see in the second chart, it doesn’t matter.
Now the surprise: the non-religious are the third largest category in the sample (it’s a bit artificial, though, since the protestants are split 3 ways), and are almost 18% of the population. They also have the second smallest percentage of college attendees. That’s a bit unexpected. It implies to me that “none” might be kind of a grab-bag category, though—although it also defies the stereotype of the godless as snooty college professors, and instead says there are a lot of ordinary folk who sensibly reject organized religion.
“With a little college education, a Catholic becomes about as smart as your average unbeliever.”
LMAO!
Maybe “none” was actually “none of the above” and includes Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, etc., one of which groups is notorious for their views of evolution.
The fundamentalists haven’t budged in the slightest–on this subject, they are completely refractory to education. What isn’t in the data is whether that is because that group maintains its beliefs by sending their young off to bible “colleges” which reinforce erroneous ideas, or whether it’s because people who start off as fundies and get a college education then stop being fundies. It’s probably a combination of both.
Fundamentalists at my university seem to attract each other and form close-knit fundamentalist groups (ex. Campus Crusade for Christ, Students for Life, Young Americans for Freedom *vomit*, the most involved sectors of MSU College Republicans, etc.). I would imagine that these groups help them reinforce their beliefs with like-minded people, and members help each other rebutt any attempts in science education.
The other questions have their own interest. The first one is whether the earth goes around the sun (and, if so, how long it takes). But the second one fascinates me, whether the universe began with a huge explosion. What is the “correct” answer to this one? Huge? Explosion?
The thing is that the category before that is “Jewish/liberal other“, which would include most of the Buddhists I’ve known. It’s a little fuzzy.
I hope they didn’t lump Muslims and Hindus with atheists/agnostics/humanists. That would make that category a completely worthless mish-mash.
“None” may be a response given by people who consider themselves “followers of Jesus” or “I hate religion; I have a ‘relationship with God’.”
I hear these often from fundamentalist Protestants who have come to hate the word/idea “religion” as they feel it reflects on the ceremony and tradition, and love the word/idea “relationship” as they feel it means their invisible magic superfriend is actually real.
For Judaism, Zionism is the equivalent of Creationism.
Any advantage we have in evolution is more than negated by our tendency to embrace Zionism.
WTF?!?! What’s up with this survey having “Jewish/liberal” as a category — no Jewish mod or fund aas well as all Catholoics in one category? Was this done using categories approved by FNC protectors of white male Christians O’Reilly and Gibson to codify their attacks liberals (or their made up Secular Progressives) as actually attacks on the “atheist gay agenda of Hollywood controlled Jews” (as William Donahue likes to say).
Actually, it is worse than “completely refractory”. If you look closely it is apparent that Fundamentalists actually move slightly in the wrong direction with “some college”. (!!!)
I’m inclined to go with PZ’s guess that what happens is that with education you have a selection bias effect as the less ‘hardcore’ Fundamentists move into other category bins leaving the utterly impervious to education behind.
The most scary part is that over 50% of the Fundamentalists agreed with one of the statements that the Sun CURRENTLY goes around the Earth (20%+), it did so previously (also 20%+), or did not know if the Earth went around the Sun or vice versa (about 10%).
It is kind of depressing that even the best group on that question (Jewish/liberal other) did not do better than the mid-60% range for the correct answer. That is such a basic question of science fact that no one old enough to be out of elementary school should miss it.
Regarding fundies and their lack of change with education, it’s worth asking whether the fundamentalists who go to college and start to believe in evolution remain fundamentalists. I have a number of friends at the (liberal protestant) church I attend who grew up in (and are still scarred by) fundamentalist churches.
If your church teaches you as a doctrine of faith that the earth is 6000 years old, and you learn that’s a lie, chances are you give up on a lot of other lies as well. So they could be especially impervious to education, but it could also be that low rate of college attendance reflects significant fall-off from fundamentalism among people who attended college.
Hmmm…sometimes helps to read PZ’s post a bit better before one starts to spout off…somehow I missed it where he raised that point. Oh well…I look dumb, not like it’s the first time :)
The creo reality denying numbers are probably not as bad as they appear. I followed the link and 20-25% of the population believes the sun goes around the earth. This is a noncontroversial issue and it was solved many centuries ago. This is about the same percentage that “believe” in astrology.
Part of the roughly 50% that don’t accept evolution and old earth, probably half of them, don’t know much of anything about anything and are most likely just randomly guessing on these sorts of questions. The median IQ is 100, meaning half the population is below that. There they are.
One of the anthropology professors at my college makes it abundantly clear to her students each semester that their grades depend on their ability to learn the material and respond correctly to exams based on that material. That is, if she were to ask for the approximate dates when Homo erectus flourished, then she wants to hear something like 1.8 mya and 0.4 mya (allowing, of course, for the possibility that H. floresiensis is an erectus survivor) and not “The Bible says man was created in 4004 B.C.” The fundies who pass her classes by grudgingly giving correct answers feel persecuted (without benefit of lions and colosseums, however) and cling smugly to their sense of righteousness. If their minds are closed sufficiently tightly, the experience might very well strengthen their determination to cling to their preconceptions, annealed by the evil flames of actual science.
Without any sense of irony whatsoever, these fundies are also the people who love to cite “Professing themselves to be wise, they made themselves foolish” (Romans 1:22). They are wonderfully skilled at finding the motes in others’ eyes.
If the category was listed as “Jewish/Liberal Other”, I could see the Muslims NOT selecting that one. If, however, all categories were listed and the statisticians lumped them together, that would skew the column a bit and be very bad form.
Of course there is the possibilty that they didn’t even survey people of other religious persuasions.
Also, the large number of people in the “no religion + no college” category could be an indication of complete apathy about everything ;-)
“The other questions have their own interest. The first one is whether the earth goes around the sun (and, if so, how long it takes). But the second one fascinates me, whether the universe began with a huge explosion. What is the “correct” answer to this one? Huge? Explosion?”
Unfortunately yes, though I would have hesitated to answer it this way. I have no expertise in these things but as I understand it the big bang was not really an explosion. For one thing an explosion has to explode into something, There was no universe for it to explode into before the big bang, I understand it to be more like a very rapid expansion. I am sure there are many more qualified people than me on this blog who could give a btter explanation.
If your church teaches you as a doctrine of faith that the earth is 6000 years old, and you learn that’s a lie, chances are you give up on a lot of other lies as well.
Well, they might be fundamentalists but the one thing that they have in common with many other religions and sects is that they have heroes who fly up into they sky as though they have magic birdie wings!!
I think DM above has it right. You can’t assume that “none” actually means “none”. It very likely includes a percentage (I would imagine not very much off from the purple bar) whose beliefs are not only religious but indistinguishable from members of the other named religious groups. It would be better if, when doing these sorts of polls, instead of just “none” they had “none/believe in God” and “none/don’t believe in/agnostic towards God” options to weed out the people in a personal relationship with Jesus.
An anecdote about the fundamentalists going to college and remaining unchanged:
I took a physical anthropology 101 course in college, which covered mostly human evolution. There was this guy in the class who sat in the front row all the time. Never said a word. Completely unremarkable. Last day of class when we had a final test, he was the first to finish. Got up, left the classroom, but stood outside the door. As people finished and left, he handed each a thick packet of photocopied creationist text. Embarrassingly bad Kent Hovind type stuff. Again, never said a word.
I’ve always wondered about that guy… Did he take the course just so he could do that the last day? Did he see himself as some sort of missionary? Did anything in the class leave any impression on him or was he just humming Onward Christian Soldier to himself in his head the whole time?
I’ve also always wondered what the reaction would be if I did something like that at a church.
The original essay notes that the religious categories are self-reported, so I’d agree with those who say that egregious cross-pollination of opinions isn’t likely.
On the one hand, you might say that the biggest pool of differing beliefs might show up in the ‘none’ category – my own guess is that a group of folks who all claim to be irreligous would have as eclectic a batch of opinions as any group who claim to have the same or similar religious beliefs, if nor more so.
On the other hand, based on the results, the irreligious (and the Jewish/liberal group) likely responded as though they were answering factual questions, rather than responding to an opinion survey.
It would be interesting to know how this graph has changed over the years. From say, 50 years ago.
And I wonder if there has been some backsliding in the past decade or so due to the ‘militant’ attacks on science from the fundies.
The core question used by the survey to determine religious preference is: What is your religious preference? Is it Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, some other religion or no religion?
The answer options for it are: Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, none, other (specify), Buddhism, Hinduism, other eastern, Moslem/Islam, Orthodox Christian, Christian, Native American, Inter-Denominational, DK, and NA – don’t know, and not applicable.
The problem with none is that I’ve known a number of considerably whacked fundies who would scream “none none” all day long when you asked them what religion they were — they didn’t have religion, they had a “relationship with Jesus”.
I think we need to hear more from Mr. Bozzo on how he combined the various respondent groups to get his categories . Perhaps PZ could ask him to give us a bit of summary on how he did it?
I do wish the GSS offered a better way of sorting out which respondents are genuinely atheist/agnostic from the “oh I never go to church, I’ll mark none” respondents. I think that probably quite a number of atheist folks can be found in none, other (specify), and NA.
Ouch – I messed up. That post was by Kim, not Tom Bozzo. My bad.
The only nit I had to pick was the question about the Big Bang. It described the event as an “explosion,” and was thus poorly formed. It was actually an expansion of space itself, dragging everything with it.
Very small nit. VERY interesting survey.
RE: fundamentalists — Figures.
There are a lot of groups like Campus Crusade that provide support for fundamentalists who attend college – even public colleges – to maintain their beliefs. So it is not surprising that evolution denial would flourish even among the college-educated fundamentalists. Even if the college does require every student to take a biology course, three hours a week for one semester is probably not enough to break that shell.
Hey comp, I was thinking the same thing! How do you have an explosion when there was no ‘Out There’ to explode into?
When the more refined cosmological theories start to emerge, I can hear the fundies already saying: “First they said it was an EXPLOSION, and now they’re saying it’s something else?”
Meanwhile, science marches on…
I’m the guilty party that originally created these graphs. Don’t blame Tom Bozzo, he’s just a nice guy who lets me blog on Marginal Utility every once in a while.
The religious categories I used are based on two questions (RELIG and FUND, for those of you who are at universities with ICPSR subscriptions & want to download the GSS for yourself). RELIG asks people for their religious preferences; respondents are prompted, “Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, some other religion, or no religion.” Rs who answer “other religion” are asked to specify. Codes on “other” are Buddhism, Hinduism, Other Eastern, Moslem/Islam, Orthodox-Christian, “Christian”, Native American, and Inter-Nondenominational. In the sample of respondents who were asked the evolution question, 4 people (0.25%) refused to answer RELIG.
Respondents who specify a religion are also asked to give their denomination, in an open-ended question. These are coded up by the good folks at NORC/University of Chicago into FUND, which gives the Fundamentalism/Liberalism of the respondent’s denomination. People who answer “no religion” aren’t asked their denomination, and hence have a missing value on FUND.
In constructing my categories, I used a reasonably straightforward combination of FUND and RELIG. However, I assumed that “Christians” (by far the largest of the original “other religion” categories on RELIG) and the very few “Orthodox-Christians” are Protestants, and coded them into the appropriate Protestant category based on FUND.
My “other” group thus contains the Eastern religions, plus Native Americans and Inter-Nondenominational. All of these are coded as liberal on FUND. I then combined these with Jewish (also liberal on FUND), partly because of small sample sizes and partly because I appreciated the irony. The “Jewish/liberal other” category is roughly 1/3 Jewish, 2/3 “liberal other.”
In case anyone cares, here are the percentages on the evolution question if I separate Jews from “liberal others.” Note the sample sizes are *really* small.
Jewish (39): 59% true, 26% false, 15% DK
Lib other (50): 72% true, 16% false, 12% DK
Jewish with some college (23): 74%, 13%, 13%
Lib other some college (23): 83%, 13%, 4%
PennyBright and others are correct in pointing out that “none” does not exclusively mean atheists. There is no easy way to identify atheists in the GSS. (They are not, however, in “other” religion, and the “no answer” category is tiny.) One could, I suppose, separate “nones” who never attend church from “nones” who attend church, but this would obviously be very crude. Some atheists will go to church to attend a wedding or what-not, and you can never tell how literally those atheist types are going to interpret a survey question.
Hope this clarifies. As you were.
Now, just why is it that the Catholics appear to be most willing to admit “I don’t know” in such a survey?
That’s an answer even the most cynical are likely to accept as both honest and accurate, chosen neither to try to please the survey-taker nor to boost the self-esteem of the respondent.
Other sects in this study arguably have comparably heavy-handed authoritarianism &/or convoluted doctrines, either of which might produce the sense of humility appropriate to this answer. My very tentative speculation is that this response supports the widely-reported claim that Catholic schools tend to have better-than-average science classes.
Correction: The “Jewish/liberal other” category is roughly 40% Jewish, 60% “liberal other.” Duh.
On the effect of education, there was this recent result from researchers at the University of Texas at Austin that U.S. college graduates are more likely to maintain religious beliefs and practices, to continue church attendance, to continue to say religion is important in their lives and to continue to associate with religion than those who never attend college.
Raven – Of all the questions, the sun vs earth one reflects worst on the fundies. Fewer than 45% don’t know that the earth goes around the sun in a year? To my knowledge, it’s not part of their mythology, so what’s their excuse this time?
Thank you, Kim!
I blame Fred Hoyle. He devised the phrase ‘Big Bang’ to mock the theory, which he opposed.
It’s an interesting lesson on the effectiveness of mockery. I know ‘Big Bang’ encourages common misunderstandings of the theory, which antiscience folk leverage to confuse the unwary. But the term ‘Big Bang’ is so deeply embedded in our language that I’ve no idea how else I might refer to the theory.
It’s as if zombie Fred Hoyle continues to attack the Big Bang theory (I can’t help myself) from beyond the grave.
Molly, NYC:
As Raven correctly points out—“Part of the roughly 50% that don’t accept evolution and old earth, probably half of them, don’t know much of anything about anything and are most likely just randomly guessing on these sorts of questions. The median IQ is 100, meaning half the population is below that. There they are.”
Also, a lot of them are simply uneducated and poor. Many of these are the same people who buy ‘Miracle Spring Water’ from Peter Popoff.
It’s weird, but this actually doesn’t worry me as much as I was expecting it to. You know why? Disney World.
…okay, this takes some explaining. Um. The thing is, you can get on a ride at Disney World that shows you the Big Bang, explains it in layman’s terms, and makes it very clear how old the universe is. When you get off that ride, you can go next door and get on another ride that simulates spaceflight, and of course presents a heliocentric solar system. In the Animal Kingdom, there’s a dinosaur-themed ride that explains evolution in the queue.
Science *is* mainstream. There’s no place in America more middle-of-the road than Disney World, and Disney World doesn’t treat evolution or the age of the universe as remotely controversial subjects. I suppose it’s pretty telling, then, that there are a number of fundamentalist Christian groups boycotting Disney World. Fortunately, that just makes them look even more nuts.
On a minor note, the nature of the data suggests that it would have been more appropriately represented using a percentage-based bar chart rather than the standard one used here.
Okay, I admit it; I’m nitpicking.
Regarding the wording of the “huge explosion” question, over in our comments, Kim said:
It may be a poorly worded question, which could explain why there are so many “don’t know” answers. (In a nationally representative survey like this, questions have to be both short and simple, and there are often tradeoffs with “technical accuracy”.)
However, unless you can tell a plausible story about why the wording is more misleading for some religious groups than others, it doesn’t obviate the comparisons that I’m making here.
I’d just add that the population that would be inclined to argue from knowledge of the latest in cosmology whether the Big Bang was big, or a bang, probably is small enough that the effects on the results would likewise be small. So the error of interest is whether respondents expecting to hear “Big Bang” think “huge explosion” is a trick, or something. As Kim suggests, there isn’t any obvious mechanism whereby confusion on this score should be confounded with denomination.
i.e 55% don’t know that the earth goes around the sun once a year.
Bit of a mystery isn’t it, LOL.
I wonder if they ever wonder why there are 12 months. or
Why are there 365 days in a year. or
Why does New Years day, January 1, always fall in the coldest time of the year in the Northern hemisphere.
Life must just be one big mystery for these people. Some of these are probably just not too bright. A friend of mine is a guardian for a kid, now 20 something who was abandoned by his parents for no real malevolent reason. They were just too spaced out and confused to focus enough to raise him. He can barely read, has trouble planning for the future, and doesn’t understand how the world works and doesn’t have the skills to figure it out. Not a bad person and probably trying real hard, but just mentally slow.
These frequencies are interesting. Could some sort of regression analysis of these data be performed to see how these factors influence each other in relation to the responses given for each question?
My multivariate analysis know-how needs brushing up.
Nona: I like your comment—“Science *is* mainstream. There’s no place in America more middle-of-the road than Disney World, and Disney World doesn’t treat evolution or the age of the universe as remotely controversial subjects.”
Sometimes I can’t help but feel optimistic about the average person’s grasp on reality.
That’s why I wonder if, in fact, the chart shows a rather big improvement in public education over the past decades. I suspect that scientific findings are filtering into the public’s perception at a rate more gratifying than it sometimes appears.
I wonder just how much of a lockhold the creepy evangelists actually do have on people.
Well, Disney World doesn’t treat fairies, ghosts, and giant talking mice as controversial either, so I’m not so sure it’s a good metric.
?Raven – Of all the questions, the sun vs earth one reflects worst on the fundies. Fewer than 45% don’t know that the earth goes around the sun in a year? To my knowledge, it’s not part of their mythology, so what’s their excuse this time?”
Yes it is. They often quote the passage where the sun stood still in the sky. Also Genesis tradition accumulated a cosmology that included the earth at the center surrounded by a firm opaque shell that “separated the waters of the earth from the waters of the heavens.” Its called the firmament and is mentioned in Genesis. It came to be believed that holes in the firmament let the light of heaven through which explained the stars.
Although you are right that it is never explicitly stated in the Bible, fundamentalists who claim to interpret the Bible literally, actually have their own hugely ornate interpreted tradition through which they read the text. So do other denominations, but the other ones believe its a necessity whereas the fundamentalists deny it.
Being Jewish does not necessarily means being religious. I am Jewish/atheist, which means that, ethnically, I am Jewish whose brain was not contaminated with religious crap. However, my Zionism (in response to Mooser, comment #7), although has not nagated my stand on evolution, does assure a better place than Auschwitz for people of my ethnic group, at least until the lesson of the Holocaust is learned by all haters, religious and others.
BTW, one of the reasons that more Jewish people than other groups tend to pursue higher education is due to the discrimination they had suffered for years, including in the US, when applying for jobs. Seeking higher education thus has become a “Jewish tradition” that continues today. The overwhelmingly large proportion of Jews among Nobel laureates is one of the outcomes of that discrimination.
Also a valid point. Heh. But most of the fantasy stuff is in the Magic Kingdom, which, considering the name, is pretty upfront about its content. The rides I’m talking about are in Epcot, the park that’s largely geared towards real-world stuff and has a heavy focus on science. The Health pavilion, now closed, even had a pretty controversial attraction called “The Making of Me” that explained sex and reproduction; the Living Seas and the Land pavilions have strong messages about biology, evolution, and conservation.
I actually thought the first part of that question (“Now, does the Earth go around the Sun, or does the Sun go around the Earth?”) had even more disturbing results. About one in five Americans haven’t caught up to Copernicus.
Brownian: one could certainly run a little logit model predicting responses to these questions, and I thought about it. But, the coefficients would be a bit more difficult for a “lay” audience to interpret — most people don’t think in log odds or probabilities — and of course these models make a bunch of assumptions about the data that may or may not hold. Plus, it’s a blog post!
BTW, there are pretty substantial gender differences, even within religious and education groups. My gut reaction is that this is a science education effect, coupled with women’s greater religiosity (even within religious categories).
hmmm… education helps? Not according to those graphs, at least not for the fundamentalists. You’ll notice that the population that was college educated didn’t improve at all over the overall population.
and just think, they’re a rapidly growing number: people who just IGNORE what they’re being taught in college because they think they already know better.
Wait, so 20% of fundamentalist protestants actually DO believe in evolution? How can they be fundamentalist then? And on the other side, who are these non-religious types who don’t believe in evolution? If they truly are “none” (aka atheists) where do they think species come from? A black monolith or something?
[Quote]”With a little college education, a Catholic becomes about as smart as your average unbeliever.”
LMAO!
Posted by: Marcus Ranum | June 9, 2007 10:11 AM[/quote]
It could have something to do with the Pope saying that “Evolution is Okay.”
Just a couple of things about the Jewish category. As has been noted, I think, Jews cover a wide spectrum, from atheist to fundamentalist, but the starkest leap is from the “black hat orthodox” (known is hebrew as haredim) to everyone else, including “modern orthodox.” This probably corresponds pretty closely to the difference between the Jews with some college and the Jews with none. You would be hard pressed to find many Jews outside of the haredim who don’t accept evolution in some form, or to find many or any haredim who do.
Regarding fundies and their lack of change with education, it’s worth asking whether the fundamentalists who go to college and start to believe in evolution remain fundamentalists.
I’ll give you one anecdotal data point — in my case, increasing knowledge about evolution (gleaned initially from reading library books, not from school, because I’m from Ohio) correlated almost perfectly with decreasing belief in a fundamentalist religious system, culminating with my current status as a biology grad student and atheist.
And for those who don’t know, creationists are just as stupid and inane and annoying even to someone who used to be one.
and, while Disney has a tradition of doing some science- and social-supportive things (“Gay Family Day” was officially endorsed and held this year), it also is subject to the slings and arrows of popular opinion. Helen and i stopped going in December because their Christmas celebration was becomingly offensively religious, including having a creche at Disney-MGM.
For those interested in the current understanding of the Big Bang, a couple of astronomers published an explanatory article in Scientific American, with lots of diagrams and big pictures of balloons:
http://www.mso.anu.edu.au/~charley/papers/LineweaverDavisSciAm.pdf
But the basics that they give can be easily summed up: