The latest Newsweek poll included a variety of interesting questions about Americans and religious matters, including the not-surprising fact that 91% of the public say they believe in God and almost as many (87 percent) say they identify with a specific religion. Although one in ten (10%) of Americans identify themselves as having “no religion,” only 6% said they don’t believe in a God at all. (Even fewer still, 3%, are self-identified atheists.)
But perhaps more importantly, Newsweek also asked poll respondents about modern biology.
Nearly half (48 percent) of the public rejects the scientific theory of evolution; one-third (34 percent) of college graduates say they accept the Biblical account of creation as fact. Seventy-three percent of Evangelical Protestants say they believe that God created humans in their present form within the last 10,000 years; 39 percent of non-Evangelical Protestants and 41 percent of Catholics agree with that view.
This is not at all encouraging. These poll results come just a few months after an international study was conducted to measure which countries were the most accepting on evolutionary biology. Of the 34 countries involved, the United States ranked 33rd. Only Turkey ranked lower.
Researchers cited poor science education, the politicization of science in the U.S., and American religiosity for the poor showing. “American Protestantism is more fundamentalist than anybody except perhaps the Islamic fundamentalist, which is why Turkey and we are so close,” said study co-author Jon Miller of Michigan State University.
Whatever the explanation, I continue to wonder about the extent to which Americans understand how much this undermines national progress and competitiveness.
Back when the international report came out, PZ Myers made a compelling case that it’s time to start holding certain parts of society responsible for such wide-spread confusion, if for no other reason because change is so necessary.
Americans are being rolled in large numbers by an ideological ‘elite’ nested in our churches and in the Republican party — the reason we are falling so far behind in our understanding of the biological sciences is that political and religious authority figures are lying to the people and fostering ignorance, and Americans are dumbly falling for it…and the more ignorant they are, the more they depend on those false authorities.
Bruce Chapman, the president of the Discovery Institute, the leading proponents on intelligent-design creationism, argued at the time, “A better explanation for the high percentage of doubters of Darwinism in America may be that this country’s citizens are famously independent and are not given to being rolled by an ideological elite in any field.”
This is absurd. To hear Chapman tell it, “independence” leads people to believe things that are obviously untrue — and that’s a good thing that should be encouraged. Nonsense. People aren’t confused about modernity because of a maverick attitude; they’re confused because they’ve been misled by people like Chapman.
Now, I know what some of you are thinking. Even if most of society embraces bogus science, it doesn’t really matter; most Americans aren’t going to pursue careers in science anyway. A limited elite will understand biology, go into the field professionally, and come up with life-saving breakthroughs for the rest of us. Concerns are alarmist. After all, most Americans have been rejecting modern biology for a long time, and we’ve still been the premier nation for science for decades.
My response to this is two-fold. First, those limited elite will be less and less inclined to pursue science seriously when their teachers are intimidated into ignoring the underpinnings of biology and their school districts won’t purchase textbooks that convey accurate information. It’s a national problem that isn’t going away.
Second, eventually there’s a tipping point. The United States isn’t just trailing potential competitive rivals by a little; the gap is huge and growing. The competitive advantage the U.S. enjoyed is shrinking. At what point does the anti-science push become simply too much of a burden?
Last year, none other than the president used his State of the Union to tell the country that it’s time to take science seriously. “[W]e need to encourage children to take more math and science, and to make sure those courses are rigorous enough to compete with other nations,” Bush said.
On this the president may be an awful messenger, but the message is right — maintaining our position as a world leader in science will be impossible if the nation rejects scientific truths.
And as the Newsweek poll showed, we’re off to a bad start.