According to Gallop, more than four in 10 Americans (42%) continue to believe that God created humans in their present form 10,000 years ago, a view that has changed little over the past three decades. Half of Americans believe humans evolved, with the majority of these saying God guided the evolutionary process. However, the percentage who say God was not involved is rising.
Some irrational religious beliefs are deeply and widely held. This is a staggering level of ignorance of anthropology, palaeontology, geology, for such an 'educated' country. This is about pseudo-science, about religion masquerading as science, intelligent design aka creationism, and the pernicious influence it has obviously had on the American people because it says so in a book put together by humans about 2,500 years ago. And, as we know, the ignorance extends to many of those whose hands are on the levers of power.
This sort of nonsense panders to the worst form of narrow anthropocentrism, seeing one species on one planet in a vast universe as somehow special. Do we want to deny all the discoveries of cosmology, biology and so on? As if the whole world is there just for us and that all will be well if we obey the dictates of the deity we ourselves have created? Science, at its best, has opened up the world and universe to us, helped as to see ourselves as part of something much bigger than ourselves, something wonderful and mysterious.
Some irrational religious beliefs are deeply and widely held. This is a staggering level of ignorance of anthropology, palaeontology, geology, for such an 'educated' country. This is about pseudo-science, about religion masquerading as science, intelligent design aka creationism, and the pernicious influence it has obviously had on the American people because it says so in a book put together by humans about 2,500 years ago. And, as we know, the ignorance extends to many of those whose hands are on the levers of power.
This sort of nonsense panders to the worst form of narrow anthropocentrism, seeing one species on one planet in a vast universe as somehow special. Do we want to deny all the discoveries of cosmology, biology and so on? As if the whole world is there just for us and that all will be well if we obey the dictates of the deity we ourselves have created? Science, at its best, has opened up the world and universe to us, helped as to see ourselves as part of something much bigger than ourselves, something wonderful and mysterious.
It gets worse. More than two-thirds of Americans, according to surveys conducted for the National Science Foundation, are unable to identify DNA as the key to heredity. Nine out of 10 don’t understand radiation and what it can do the human body, while one in five adult Americans believe the sun revolves around the earth. In America, however, one third believe in the literal interpretation of the Bible, while nearly 60 percent believe the Armageddon predictions in the Book of Revelation will come true.A 2008 University of Texas study found that 25 percent of public school biology teachers believe that humans and dinosaurs inhabited the earth simultaneously.
“This level of scientific illiteracy provides fertile soil for political appeals based on sheer ignorance,” writes Susan Jacoby in The Age of American Unreason. A majority of Americans cannot name the first book of the Bible. “How can citizens understand what creationism means, or make an informed decision about whether it belongs in classrooms, if they cannot even locate the source of the creation story,” asks Jacoby.
For generations, the science curriculum in Southern states was “vetted by adults who believed in the innate inferiority of blacks and who also subscribed to fundamentalist creeds at odds with the growing body of secular scientific knowledge.” In other words, the content of education in the most backward states of the country would be determined by the most backward people.
“Suffice to say that in a society based for so long on the supremacy of the planter aristocracy and belief in the innate inferiority of blacks, there was little reason to provide decent public education for poor whites, much less blacks,” writes Jacoby. “Why bother, when just being white—even an illiterate white—made an inhabitant of the South superior to any black?”
However, there is progress albeit at a slow rate of change. The number that believe that humans evolved without the need for a God has increased from 9% to 19% in 32 years.
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