The fine folk at DefCon (shorthand for the imprecisely named Campaign to Defend the Constitution) have released a poll showing that intelligent design hasn't made much headway into the evangelic right wing. The polls also suggests that the new Creation Museum does not exhibit a vision of the past shared by most anyone. If true, that's good news. But as you might expect, there's bad news in the poll (a pdf), too.
According to the poll, 95% of Evangelicals reject the Creation Musuem's strange, dino-friendly version of Creationism. In addition, only 10% of self-identified Evangelicals support Intelligent Design. While religious right leaders like James Dobson lump all forms of anti-evolution together, the new Creation Museum is showing us just how deeply divided the religious right really is.
Let's take a look a the numbers, which were generated by Lake Research Partners. It would seem that only 21 % of the Americans surveyed consider the kind of hard-core creationism as depicted at the Creation Museum (Noah's Ark was real, the world is only 6,000 years old, and so forth) valid. I am not sure what the difference is between "Biblically accurate" and "Literal word of God," as the Bible is supposed by the literal word of the big guy, but fine.
Most welcome is the finding that a full 54 % consider such silliness to be "bizarre," "Biblically inaccurate" or "scientifically unsound." I am not sure that that the 17 % who think the museum is Biblically inaccurate are really thinking this through, though. So they think the Bible tells a different story? That would reduce our free thinkers to just 37 %. Not quite a trumpet-worthy result, but not at least is makes some of kind of sense. Other results are not so simple.
So 53 per cent believe in hard-core creationism, but only 21 % like the Creation Museum's version of the story? How to explain the discrepancy? Beats me. But it is interesting to note the poll's finding that only 11 % believe in biological evolution, a figure that pretty much matches most surveys of religious sentiment in America, most of which put the percentage of atheists/agnostics/non-religious at between 9 and 14 %.
So can we conclude that the fundamentalists are just plain confused? Or has the Creation Museum's outreach staff failed miserably to explain their product? According to the Cincinnati Inquirer, though:
Attendance at the new museum has been stellar. Museum officials said Thursday more than 40,000 visited in its first month.
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Consider the possibility that there is something wrong with the poll, or with its interpretation. I don't like the idea of offering such a charged word as "bizarre" as an option, and what are Adam and Eve doing on the Ark?
I'd be interested to know the percentage of those that came to point and laugh.
As for the results of the survey, I guess it just goes to show that as a whole, we the people of these United States are just pig-ignorant about science, and have no desire to change that fact.
While I'm not surprised at the results in general, I am surprised that the percentage of scientifically nonmoronic is as low as 11%.
Sorry, but there is just no excuse for 89% of the population to be so completely and utterly ignorant.
Truly depressing, shameful, and embarrassing.
I find the third category in the second poll dubious at best. What is described there is theistic evolution, not intelligent design. Intelligent design involves a mindless evolution with periodic interference by God, I mean the designer, to attach bacterial flagellum, put in the eye, etc. I'm not sure how a theistic evolution supporter like Ken Miller would answer the survey as written.
I think what the survey shows is that Americans in general dont know much about science and even less about evolutionary science. This is not suprising when you realise that the rightwing has been working for decades to dumb down science and especially to dumb down or remove evolution from biology classes. The result is ignorance, which is why you see such confused and contradictory answers to surveys on the subject.
Ken Ham is the real deal. The bible is just a crass imitation, accurate only in so far as it is translated correctly.
The bible never mentions dinosaurs. The Creation museum mentions dinosaurs a lot. Note the difference between the first two categories in the second poll, 53% vs 6% . It says to me that a great many creationists either have not thought about dinosaurs enough to have any beliefs, or believe 'scientists just made up all those dinosaurs' (my own mother has said that), or 'those fossils were put in the ground to test mankind' .
Remember, the state of Biblical literacy in this nation is a dim mirror-image of the state of science literacy. Hector Avalos (The End of Biblical Studies) quotes survey results that in the 1990s, eight out of ten Americans called themselves "Christians", but "only four in ten know that Jesus, according to the Bible, delivered the Sermon on the Mount." In 2005, the "Bible Literacy Project" surveyed teenagers and found that most "either responded that they did not know (27%) or incorrectly (36%) believed some other quotation presented to them was from the Sermon on the Mount." That same year, Gallup did a poll showing that not even half of the American population "can name the first book of the Bible."
Robert Altemeyer found similarly dismal results when surveying Canadian college students and their families. To pick only a few of his results, nineteen percent of Fundamentalist parents had not read any book of the Bible from beginning to end. On average, those Fundamentalists polled had read about twenty books of their holy scripture — not quite a third of the total.
I realized I left something out of my previous post. Gish, Ham, Hovind, and their ilk have (all together) spent decades trying to paste dinosaurs into a creation tradition which mentions no such creatures. These polls indicate that they have failed.
Dammit, Blake Stacey,
You're right, of course. Maybe it's the "cram course" style of education to get "correct answers" for state approval of the school. Or a competition for orthodoxy in some guise that even the teachers don't understand. The poor victims of the system don't get to chew what they are fed or even have an opinion about the flavor. They are "units" on a production line or a "syllabus of elements". I went for geology more than a half century ago. I'm 'at home' with probabilities and a quick change of hypotheses. Some people need more 'certainty' than others and all can be selective about the 'vetting' process. The Constitution guarantees the sanctity of metaphysical opinion to the metaphysicians whilst our general naturalist process of analysis and tentative proof remains free from ecclesiastic interference.
There are enthusiastic evangelists (Dominionists) who would make the state their agency. There are enthusiastic Atheists who would not make the state their agency. The secular state is quite enough. They have the right to speak and advocate in the public square. Rights not exercised atrophy under the burden of complacency.
BRY