A new poll shows that the number of creationists has declined to a new low. Hooray! Party time!
Except that the new low is 38% of the American population.
Oh, sure, it’s better, and the trend is going in the right direction, for now, but that’s the kind of percentage that can get a bad president elected. It’s not a majority, but it’s not a fringe group, either. It’s shocking that our citizens can reach adulthood and still be that ignorant.
We’re also supposed to be consoled by the fact that a university education helps some. “Only” a quarter of college graduates are creationists! You go through 4 years of solid advanced education in a first world technological nation, and still a fourth of them come out thinking there might be some merit to the idea that the Earth winked into existence sometime at the start of the Naqada culture in Egypt, or the Uruk era in Mesopotamia. Oh, and hey, the Assyrians must have been shocked that everyone went extinct (except for 8 people) right at the start of their empire. Must have been a small empire.
I don’t know if I want to know how many of our UMM seniors believe in this bullshit. I especially don’t want to know how many of our science majors leave here confident that they didn’t come from no monkey. It can only break my heart.
The US is such a shithole.
And it seems that the creationist view is losing out to the guided evolution view–basically, Catholic dogma–rather than evolution.
If a college education won’t do, perhaps The Onion can help.
Technically that 38% includes old earth creationists, as does the 25% figure. While said figures are still terrible it’s at least less bad (particularly for those in that 25% figure that have ever taken a history, anthropology, or other non-biology class that thoroughly refutes YEC incidentally).
PZM:
Simple: they don’t reach adulthood. Perhaps they do in years but not in maturity.
I’m sort of fine with “evolution was guided by God” because it translates to me as “evolution was guided by nothing”. Which of course is true.
Don’t be silly. Many of them are broad-minded enough to admit that the Earth might have winked into existence as early as 10,000 years ago, safely before the cultures you name.
Nice trend on the correct line though. I noticed that the change only really starts at the year 1999. The the change is twice as rapid as I initially thought (when I started at the year 1981), likely because that’s when the internet became a thing.
So we went up 10% in 18 years. That’s pretty good, especially considering this is the USA we’re talking about. Hopefully the trend continues, it does look very steady.
That percentage is about 120+ million Americans of whom some 90 million can vote. Yep, that’s a presidential election. And let’s not forget that these folks also vote to save unborn fetuses no matter how many born people that might kill.
How does the US compare to the world…here’s the first googly: a report in National Center for Science Education of a survey from 2011:
At that time and in that report, the US had 40% creationists or 6th of the 24 countries in the survey. Not so great America.
Let’s see…that’s over 2 billion folks. That’s a lot of people. They and their ignorance could cause a lot of damage. Actually, already has and does more every day. (So do other kinds of ignorance.)
38 %? That’s only the OECs. Far as I can tell that poll shows 76 % to be creationists.
And of course with only a thousand respondents the sampling error is 4 points, so there may be no trend at all.
If 3/8 of the US population believes in creationism, and 1/4 (2/8) of the higher-educated do, then higher-ed cures about 1/3 of those afflicted.
Since some of those degrees come from the likes of Liberty U, Pensacola Bible College, et alia, secular schools may actually (partially) educate as many as half of their graduates.
Also keep in mind a couple of other things;
– The distribution across the country probably isn’t even. Some parts of the country are probably less immersed in creationist bullshit than others.
– Most college graduates aren’t science majors, so most of them don’t take that many biology, geology, archaeology, or astronomy classes. The general education in science that students receive probably helps somewhat, though.
Sili @8
My standard for acceptability at this point is whether or not anything the person believes about theistic evolution would make them dispute the scientific literature on actual evolution. If you can show the person any given evolutionary biology paper and they don’t deny anything, then whether or not the person believes that a god was pulling strings in some abstract way becomes far less of a threat to science.
@ #1:
That is an insult to shitholes worldwide.
@emergence #10: That’s comparing Jim Crow laws to sundown towns, yay, I’m not ostracized here if I manage to leave the town before…sundown.
I want to turn this thing on its head and make an attempt on why Billy Graham was such a massive success in the Soviet Bloc. It wasn’t only because faith was oppressed, he spoke in a manner most understood. I don’t like it either, but the American South is a lot like countries with little to no roots in democracy. The high and mighty American ideals did never carry over fully past the 13 colonies, hence why the Louisiana Purchase was such a ripe territory for English puritans turned Evangelicals and Mormons.
Creationism is as American as apple pie, and once the idea settled in that only the “cultured English” are the “true whites”, the voice of reason could only choose between bigoted and ignorant. 3/4 of home schooled kids are Evangelicals, what else would be the result, but a penchant for creationism?
The funniest thing is, Enlightenment ideas are to America like Buddhism to Asia, nice concept but executed better elsewhere. The judicial system (when it works properly) is based on precedent, making it more adaptable to real life than the Roman law. Yet, after already witnessing that states go to court over evolution being a fiction, the correlation between willful ignorance and biased home grown education is still not addressed. These guys have nukes now and to them an obliteration would look like a rupture.
If one looks for a short definition for certain factions within American Christianity: self righteousness.
More? Not less?
And aren’t you concerned about the judicative legislating? I keep being amazed how many changes to daily life in the US have been made not by amendments to the constitution (which are extremely difficult, but that ought to be another story), but by the Supreme Court suddenly discovering that the status quo had been unconstitutional for 200 years.