Way too many. About 35% of the American population is that naive. Stupidity is contagious.
Religions are cults. Like all cults, there are leaders who are seen as infallible or are on “the inside” and therefore know the truth. They are looked at in a position of power and you can’t question it. They’ve drilled into the cultists heads that notion that they know everything. You can’t think for yourself.
I was raised Catholic but still at a very young age, I had doubts. I think my 8th grade teacher, who was super religious and his whole life revolving around it, I found over the top and questioned what he was saying. It didn’t make sense to me. Maybe if he wasn’t such a fanatic, I would believe but I’ll never know although I’ve always been even at a young age my own guy.
I think it’s mainly fear that is drilled into your head. When you are young, it’s easy to impress someone. It still happens to adults. Think about what a six-year-old for example is told that if you’re bad, you’ll burn up in hell after you die. As said above by some, it’s conditioning as well as social reinforcement. My parents were not big fanatics but believed so it’s a wonder my brother and I are atheist, although my sister still clings, and she’s the youngest.
The stats show that less people believe but it will take a long time until only a very small percentage believe. I think of it this way: 2000+ years ago, people believe in many gods. I think few believe in multiple gods today and one day most people won’t believe. The trend is going from multiple to one to none.
I forget all the characteristics of a cult as defined by my old sociology book. Doesn’t matter. By any reasonable definition, not all religions are cults. Many religions started as cults. There are still many cults today. But not all religions are cults. OTTOMH Scientology is a cult. Jews For Jesus, while an evil organization filled with lying liars, is not a cult.
I now want to hear “all things bright and beautiful” in the style of Black Sabbath.
The apparent implication here that Christianity and evolution are incompatible is part of the explanation. For my own part, telling me not to believe in God because fossils! seems rather like trying to shock me with the revelation that Frank Lloyd Wright never did ANY of the actual hammering and sawing necessary to create his buildings; but if you lack the sophistication to separate the conclusion from the science (and, yeah, 50% of believers are below average), then you attack the science.
Another (and I think more significant) reason why Christians dislike evolution is that popular culture strongly associates evolution with social Darwinism; social media are rife with calls to decrease the surplus population (of which the speaker never seems to be a part). That whole cull-the-herd mentality is diametrically opposed to the Christian ideal of the Good Shepherd. (And it seems to me that simple empathy ought to preclude sacrificing real individuals for some vague and uncertain “good of the species.”)
Here again, though, the conclusion (social Darwinism) doesn’t necessarily follow from the premise (evolution). Group living requires the stronger members of a group to give resources to the weaker members, and plenty of successful species live in groups. (Probably the majority of species you could name in a minute live in groups.) One could even argue that the climate problems threatening to make the planet uninhabitable for the human species are largely the result of the First World’s callous disregard for the “less fit” Third; in other words, natural selection punishes rather than supports social Darwinism.
Usually I find it to be religionists that tie evolution to social Darwinism, trying to use the latter to discredit the former, and as far as the second part of your statement is concerned I really wouldn’t use the word “rife”, but I guess if you make an effort you can find folks with that philosophy.
I don’t know what social media you’re looking at, but I haven’t seen this at all - at least for media less than 100 years old. Any remnants of support for eugenics has been pretty much expunged after the Nazis, except for maybe a few fanatics.
Christian creationist attacks on evolution don’t even bring this up very much. It’s a lot more accusing anyone who accepts evolution of being an atheist. And it is far more the fear of evolution (or cosmology) proving a part of the Bible incorrect than anything else.
They do seem to think biologists have this cabal where they do science just to attack the church. In fact, fundamentalist Christians attack science far more than the opposite. Dawkins’ books on evolution were not inspired by a desire to attach Christians but in response to him getting hate mail from creationists when he wrote about the facts, no mention of God at all.
Richard Dawkins:
Your one cite contradicts this. It’s not even on the closest Sunday to a given date in the Jewis
h calendar.
Ok, Ok. Easter is the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox. UNLESS that day is a Sunday, in which case it’s a week later.
So sometimes Easter is on the same day according to the Western and Orthodox calendars, sometimes it’s a week apart, like 2022, and sometimes two weeks apart.
As time goes on the dates will get further and further apart. I think it’s sometimes in the 27th century,(if the calendars stay the same), that Orthodox and Western Easter will never be on the same day.
Just remembered something- 95% of the time I ask for something in prayer, I ask for the strength to go on. But, sometimes I ask for more. One night, I was feeling really low. I was walking to the local convenience store to buy a lot of chocolate. I prayed to the Lord for a sign. At that precise moment, a passing truck driver rolled down his window and shouted at me “Hey! F*ck you, buddy!”
True story.
Now the question is: what did God want to tell you by proxy of the trucker? Did you skip the chocolate and have a healthy salad instead? Or did you say “screw it” and buy a bottle of booze? 
I think he said it quite directly! 
It reflects a rather silly misunderstanding of how science works to think that someday there will be no gaps in our knowledge. In fact, every answer opens up a bunch of new questions for exploration.
The “God of the gaps” argument is intellectually silly, but no more so than the claim that scientific advances make it any sillier.
I don’t think so. I know and understand Gödel’s incompleteness, but still every time a new scientific discovery or insight has been made, our knowledge of the world has increased. Knowledge is quantifiable, or wouldn’t you agree that our knowledge is vastly greater than 2000 years ago?
It’d be a rather silly misunderstanding of the argument to think that that’s the argument being made.
Not every answer, just the interesting ones.
People used to think that lightning was caused by god. Science showed that this was silly. While science may not answer every question and fill every gap, God is getting thinner and more irrelevant every time science does answer yet another answer that used to be “God did it!”
[bolding mine]
This provides considerable support for my long-standing belief that organized religion is but empty calories.
Our knowledge has certainly grown, but the gaps in our knowledge have arguably also grown. Or, to use another metaphor, as the territory of What We Know has grown, so has the border between the Known and the Unknown.
In other words, just because our knowledge is increasing, it does not follow that the amount we do not yet know is finite, let alone that it is approaching zero.
That’s certainly true, I already alluded to Gödel. But we fill gaps every day, and that’s a fact.
The God of the Gaps argument is not that we don’t know something, therefore God, but it is a prediction of sorts that since we’ll never know something important about the universe, therefore god. And then the goalposts get moved when we find out that thing.
One of the current ones is abiogenesis. It started as an argument that life is somehow special, and since we’ll never create a living thing out of nothing, therefore God. But we’ll soon create a living thing from basic components - 2 - 4 years, I’ve heard. And we engineer cells all the time. So the goalposts have been already moved to “you can’t prove how it happened a billion or two billion years ago” or “if people are involved it doesn’t count.”
So scientific advances do make it sillier.