There are two shockers in this NYT piece on the latest Pew survey on the US population.
The lesser shocker is “64 percent said they were open to the idea of teaching creationism in addition to evolution, while 38 percent favored replacing evolution with creationism”. Similar above-majority findings on creationism have been found in earlier polls.
The greatest shock is this news:
President Bush joined the debate on Aug. 2, telling reporters that both evolution and the theory of intelligent design should be taught in schools “so people can understand what the debate is about.”
If G. W. Bush believes in “intelligent design” I’ll eat my hat - dang politics! A theory of what could be motivating people to take such an anti-science position was offered by a Pew official:
John C. Green, a senior fellow at the Pew Forum, said he was surprised to see that teaching both evolution and creationism was favored not only by conservative Christians, but also by majorities of secular respondents, liberal Democrats and those who accept the theory of natural selection. Mr. Green called it a reflection of “American pragmatism.”
“It’s like they’re saying, ‘Some people see it this way, some see it that way, so just teach it all and let the kids figure it out.’ It seems like a nice compromise, but it infuriates both the creationists and the scientists,” said Mr. Green, who is also a professor at the University of Akron in Ohio.
Perhaps - why doesn’t Pew undertake a survey to tease apart where these ideas come from?
Here’s a previous post on Steven den Beste’s wonderful takedown of creationism: The Human Eye: A Design Review.
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