Unintelligence By Design

Steve Benen at the Carpetbagger Report this morning has a post up examining a recent Newsweek poll. The poll shows that America is still an overwhelmingly religious nation which is still deeply influenced by hardline Christian polemics. Half of those polled, and a stunning third of all college graduates say they accept the Biblical account of creation as fact.

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 the extent to which Americans understand how much this undermines national progress and competitiveness.

...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?

I'm a religious person myself and I take the view that God or Goddess (your preference) did all the "laws of the universe" stuff first then let it do its stuff - since She is Divine, She got it right and so doesn't have to fiddle with Her creation later. Evolution, like gravity and time, is ticking away just as She planned it. The vast majority of religious folk I know in the UK, of whatever religion, take roughly the same stance.

But here in the US, the die-hard Bible literalists have a stranglehold on the debate by virtue of, exactly as Steve phrases it, intimidation.

Yesterday the London Sunday Times ran an article on a debate held at a Baptist place of worship with the topic 'We'd be better off without religion'. The debate itself saw six major public figures debate the pro and cons of the motion - the "pros" being Richard Dawkins, Professor AC Grayling and Christopher Hitchens and the "cons" Baroness Julia Neuberger, Professor Roger Scruton and Nigel Spivey. The event was under-attended and hardly even made a ripple in the national media...the Times article is an op-ed buried in the religious correspondent's blog.

Can you imagine such an event being held anywhere in the US, let alone a Baptist place of worship, without rightwing Christianist faux-outrage in the media, protests outside the venue and possibly even legal steps to prevent it?

The difference between US and UK attitudes to fundementalist religion is best captured by comparing the vote at the debate with Newsweek's poll numbers. At the debate, the first vote was 826 votes for the motion, 681 against and 364 don't knows. By the end, the voting was 1,205 for the motion, 778 against and 100 don't knows. Remember, the debate wasn't about the existence of God. It was about religion. On the strength of the evidence, we sure don't need the kind of religion that American Christianists would like to impose upon us all.

Postcript I have to mention one particular paragraph from the Time's reporters account of the debate, although all of it is fascinatingly worth reading:

It is strange how Dawkins, in his book The God Delusion and Channel 4's Root of All Evil programme, came over as an angry man. Because he is not at all like that in the flesh. Especially when seated next to someone like Hitchens.

Heh.