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Over at Half Sigma there's some really interesting crunching of the GSS data. Some of it was not surprising to me, you see the same results in national polls on the topic; blacks are more Creationist than whites, who are more Creationist than Asians. Women are more Creationist than men, as are…
A personal experience of mine is that many apostates from religion have...issues. On the other hand, people who were raised, or always were, atheists tend to mostly be almost confused by religion. But I was curious as to possible differences between these two groups, and those believe in God, or…
In chapter 3 of More Guns, Less Crime Lott presents an analysis based on two exit polls of gun ownership (conducted in 1988 and 1996) that purports to show that a 1% increase in a state's gun ownership causes a 4.1% decrease in the violent crime rate and a 3.2% decrease in auto theft.
Lott's two…
I've already posted on GSS results on science knowledge. But what about the international context? Th working paper Civic Scientific Literacy in Europe and the United States has some interesting data which has international comparisons. Here's an interesting fact regarding "scientific literacy…
are the colors making any distinction?
Shouldn't the question really be "is creationism a universal acide against nontheism"? Over 1/3 of respondents who definitely believe in evolution also "know" God exists. Of the respondents who definitely disbelieve in evolution, only 1.5 percent are atheists or agnostics.
read the fine print here for colors.
Shouldn't the question really be "is creationism a universal acide against nontheism"?
sure, but dennett's exposition of the 'universal acid' idea seems to imply that it eats away belief. a) nontheism isn't really a belief, but a lack of b) creationism is not a destroyer by a creator of belief
With Dennett the first question should always be "Is intellectual hyperventillation a universal acid against audience indifference?"
Since the two conditions here (theism/atheism; creationism/evolutionism) develop over time, we ought to establish priority before moving on to the question of causation.
Personally, I was an aetheist LONG before I understood evolution because of the inherent contraditions of religion. And I'd reckon it's still the case that most aetheists don't actually understand evolution. They just believe that science MUST have come up with some expalnation for the origins of life, and evolutuion is it.
Evolution isn't the universal acid because the concept is so very far from being universal--hardly anyone understands it.