The article isn’t very clear, and in addition has a misleading chart, but these are the statements they made:
In the U.S., only 14 percent of adults thought that evolution was “definitely true,” while about a third firmly rejected the idea.
The investigation also showed that the percentage of U.S. adults who are uncertain about evolution has risen from 7 percent to 21 percent in the past 20 years.
From this I infer that there are at least 4, and probably 5 categories: definitely true, probably true, uncertain, probably false, and definitely false. There’s about another third left over from the known categories for the “probably” categories.
Maybe someone has a copy of the original paper and can tell us for certain, but in any case the article was clear about the 21% number.
I think a problem yu two are having is in the use of “Christian”. Where I was from, people were Catholic, or Methodist, or Lutheran, etc. No one would say “I’m a Christian”. Those who do use that term are often Evangelicals. I insulted a very nice person once by complaining about “Christians” opposing Gay rights. I thought of him as Presbyterian, which while it is a Christian religion had a different connotation than someone self identifying as a “Christian” rather than as whatever denomination they were.
From my experience living in both the U.K. and the U.S., I think there’s something more to be said about the people in both countries who are “nominally Christian.” In both the U.S. and the U.K., if you ask people what their religion is on something like a questionaire where there will be no further contact with them, the majority of the respondents will say that they are Christians. A large proportion of such people in both countries are what I would call “nominal Christians.” However, the nature of nominal Christianity in the two countries is different.
In the U.K., these people usually mean nothing more than that they were baptized in a Christian church. They will never have been to a church at any other time. Some of them will have never even been baptized in a Christian church. Their parents or possibly their grandparents will have been baptized in one, but they weren’t themselves. If you ask these people what they believe on religious issues, they will mostly say that they don’t think about the issues. Many will happily state that they are atheists. It appears to me that for these people calling oneself a Christian on a questionaire is a statement about one’s ethnic identity. Having ancestors who once were members of a church makes one also a member of that faith, regardless of one’s own beliefs.
In the U.S., these nominal Christians will have slightly more substantial claims to be Christians, but the difference is as not as big as one might expect. These people will have been baptized in a Christian church. They will at least occasionally go to church. If they are asked to agree or disagree on a questionaire with statements like “I believe that non-Christians will go to Hell,” they will agree with them. However, their faith doesn’t seem to extend to much more than token agreement with a small number of statements about their beliefs. It appears that they were taught these few statements about Christian belief in Sunday School, but they know almost nothing about Christianity outside of these few statements. They will know very little about the Bible. They will apparently not even understand these belief statements that they have memorized. They might simultaneously claim that they don’t even really know if God exists while they also say that Jesus is the Son of God. They will claim that it’s obvious that no Christians believe in evolution, even though they know absolutely nothing about evolution, don’t remotely care about evolution, and have no idea what the Bible says that might be remotely relevant to the issue.
For a lot of these people in the U.S., claiming to be a Christian is more a social statement than a statement about actual beliefs. It’s also a political statement for them. Being a Christian for them means mostly that one spends a certain amount of Sunday mornings in church. One also hangs out with other Christians a certain amount of time. One memorizes a few statements about Christian beliefs. Such people will often believe that it’s absolutely necessary to agree with them on certain political questions. The political questions will often be things that aren’t remotely close to real religious issues. They will say things like, “What, you think that taxes should be increased? Then you’re obviously an atheist.” It will generally be impossible to push these people to explain the connection between any religious beliefs they have and the political beliefs they have. For them, these beliefs will simply be things they memorized long ago and have no interest in understanding any further.
So nominal Christianity is an ethnic matter in the U.K. and a social and political matter in the U.S. If you eliminated the nominal Christians from the U.S. and U.K. populations, the beliefs of the remaining people wouldn’t as different as you might think. This is why I’m very skeptical about people who claim to know about the religious character of a country based on data taken from questionaires. The questions asked on those questionaires are usually too limited to tell what people actually believe, as opposed to a few statements that they have been taught and now don’t think about.
Fair enough; that could lead to misunderstanding. My response would be twofold:
First, I wouldn’t allow to pass unchallenged the exclusive adoption of the term “Christian” by, or in respect of, a relatively small subset of Christians.
Secondly, in the context of this discussion (“Just how religious is the US?”) to use the term in that sense would be to suggest that only the Evangelicals are truly religious.
Given that, I didn’t think that Dr Strangelove was using the term in that sense. And my understanding was reinforced by the fact that he spoke of “mainstream Christian principles”; “mainstream” is more often used to exclude fundamentalists than to identify them exclusively.
The citation contains contradictory data. Zoom in on the bar graph: 2005 Evolution Survey
The bar graph depicts about 40-40-20% True-False-Not sure in the US.
Something is garbled, because that number accepting could not have
dropped to 14% in only a year as the citation reports elsewhere.
This Gallup site has a chart illustrating opinion 1982-2010:
A bare majority accepts evolution, although most interject an ID proviso.
If the ID faction is subtracted then the total jibes with the 14% reported
in the other citation.
I myself do not believe in ID, and but I am not as offended by it as many
people are. If the ID faction accepts Old-Earth evolution without reservation
then I am not going to charge them with “disdain” for science, although
I would prefer to keep ID out of the classroom.
I do think that the “other/no opinion” respondents should be included with
the disdainful, and I am not happy that the disdainful comprise virtually
half the population.
Thanks again everyone for all the replies, it’s an interesting read.
One of the things that always comes up is the ‘not all Christians are like that’, which is undoubtedly true. However, there are currently two main political parties in the US, and one of them, I’m sure you can work out which one, seems to be full of people who doubt evolutions, are anti-science, homophobic and just generally ignorant. I know this is mostly because the party is in the middle if an implosion and the moderates have been squeezed out, but there must be an appetite for this way of thinking in a fair percentage of the electorate.
Another thing that comes up is the dislike for militant Atheists. This is a tough one for me, as I am pretty militant myself. The way I think is that if no one ever mentions they are atheist then the idea can get lost in society. It’s something that people need to be reminded exists. My friends often say there’s no need to dislike religion, but they don’t realize how much of an effect anti-science, and anti-gay thinking can have on our society.
On top of that it seems to me that America needs militant atheists as the religious, and yes I know not all religious people think this way, seem hell bent on making laws based on religion, banning abortion, blocking pro-gay legislation, teaching bible based science, etc.
I agree that you should start a new thread. The question of just how religious Americans are is quite separate from the question of whether the country needs militant atheists.
See post #81. I believe they actually had 5 options, and for the chart they merged the weak/strong options into one. I think the breakdown, from strong pro to strong con, is roughly 14/26/21/6/33. This is the only way to make the graph and the text consistent, at any rate.
I’m not so happy with the proviso–at least the way it’s phrased. It might as well be “I believe in gravity, but I think there are invisible rubber bands too just in case.”
I won’t address whether ID is nonsense, even in principle. There’s probably some case to be made for it. The problem is that the people who were promoting ID in US schools were, in fact, young-Earth creationists, as they found during the Dover trial.
Correct–I was lumping all Jesus-based religions into “Christian”.
I don’t think this is any less fair than any other labeling process. I understand your frustration at the co-option of the term and its connotations by what you see as a more extreme faction, but these aren’t isolated nuts–there are tens of millions of them.
When I think “mainstream”, the number that pops into my head is 30%. And frankly that’s probably a little higher than it should be–I’d consider Catholicism a mainstream religion and that’s 22%. Judaism, Mormonism… I’ll leave those as “not mainstream” despite being pretty well accepted.
Easily 30% of the adult American population believes evolution is definitely false, opposes abortion rights, and would deny civil rights to homosexuals. By my book, these are very mainstream beliefs.
Didn’t I just answer that in the post you quoted from me? Pete Stark, my own congressman, has said he’s an atheist. Not in your face, but just as a side remark. And he continues to be re-elected.
Ah, CA’s 13th district, representing (among other cities) Hayward, Newark, Fremont, and Oakland. He’s been serving Congress since 1972, and came out as atheist on a questionnaire in 2007.
So, let’s see. Longest serving member of Congress. One of the most liberal districts in the nation. Only recently came out as an atheist, the first and only in Congress.
Sounds indicative of the country as a whole, you bet.
A better analogy would be that God set the value of gravity at
6.673 x 10^-11 Nm^2/kg^2 at 10^-43 seconds after He kicked
everything off with the Big Bang.
Similarly He set the values of all the other constants of Nature,
and of all initial conditions in such as way as to guarantee our
eventual evolution in His cosmos.
Knorf’s reply just under your post pretty much sums up the case for “no”.
Pete Stark is one data point. So I was asking “how many” and whether being an atheist making one unelectable was “generally true”.
For example, if people willing to state that they were atheists made up even the 1.6% of the population – grabbing a number from up thread a bit – then with 535 (?) people in Congress (House + Senate) – and if there was no positive or negative correlation between being a known atheist and getting elected – we’d expect to see about 8-9 public / known atheists.
Maybe that’s what you believe, but I don’t think that’s consistent with the poll.
I could maybe buy that argument if the poll question dealt with the origin of life–ok, fine, maybe God had a hand in lining up some lipid molecules to form the first cell wall, or tweaked the nucleic acid concentrations in a tidal pool. Science doesn’t have good answers for this yet at the moment.
No, the question was specifically whether humans developed from earlier species through the process of evolution. Unless you believe that humans are somehow fundamentally different from other animals, you can’t say that there was some new stopping point requiring a touch of divine intervention. No–the doubters are advocating active meddling, like humans breeding dogs and horses. This belief essentially means they don’t accept the fundamental principle that natural selection leads to large changes over time.
