Why doesn't America believe in evolution?

Arrogance, ignorance, apathy and power.

Arrogance: People don’t want to believe they are anything but special and unique. They refuse to believe they are related to what they would call animals.

Ignorance: They don’t know any better. Science education is alarmingly bad in the US.

Apathy: They don’t care enough to think about it. Whatever Mommy told them is true and who cares if it isn’t?

Power: The powerful in this country have a vested interest in keeping their electorates stupid and ignorant. Stupid, ignorant people don’t look too closely at transgressions. Stupid, ignorant people will rise up in unison against whatever common foe is declared for the day, and will forget they ever did so the next day.

I believe in evolution and also don’t believe we evolved from apes. Just because someone has faith doesn’t make them an idiot. The reason I rarely come into this forum is that I’m not a big fan of broad generalizations. It must be difficult being so bohemian.

Actually, I don’t even remember if he was talking about Greek or Hebrew, I just wrote Greek in my post because it popped into my head first. Like I said, I’m not even close to doing the argument justice, I need to go find a transcript.

I’m surprised that France is so high.

Racism looks plausible, but plenty of other countries were/are racist and it doesn’t seem to stop them. I’m betting on the combination of the uniquely American anti-intellectualism, anti-elitism, and religious fundamentalism.

I believe in evolution and also don’t believe we evolved from apes. Just because someone has faith doesn’t make them an idiot. The reason I rarely come into this forum is that I’m not a big fan of broad generalizations. It must be difficult being so bohemian.

Are you saying you do not believe humans evolved, or are you saying (correctly) that we are not descended of apes but ARE apes?

Because, well, you can’t say “I believe in evolution” and then discount human evolution. We’re as much a product of evolution as anything.

I didn’t say that we didn’t evolve, I’m sure we did. That’s why people in different parts of the world have adapted to their climates.

The very different collection criteria for these statistics in the different country suggest that this poll comparison is pretty worthless. Without more information, all it suggests is that the conventional wisdom about America is optimizing data to support its preconceived notions. Not that they aren’t possible, but this is no way to argue it.

So…

from what?

ninjas

Not racism per se, but rather as a justification for slavery, which goes back to Rob B’s post earlier:

One oft-unspoken reason is because, particularly in the South, evolution implies that Black and White people are of the same basic stock. In the post-reconstruction era, evolution and the south must have been a magically dangerous combination.

You got a lot of angry Southerners who were feeling guilty about slavery anyway before the war. The cognitive dissonance must have been overwhelming.

Cause they are so DAMN COOL!

No man, you got it backwards, ninjas are MORE evolved.

And what about the ninja apes???

I wouldn’t describe the life of Simon Peter “cushy” and yet he too confessed “Lord to whom shall we go, you have the words of eternal life.”

Thousands of years before Peter, Job said the same thing:

“I know that my Redeemer lives, and that in the end he will stand upon the earth. And after my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh I will see God;
I myself will see him with my own eyes—I, and not another. How my heart yearns within me!”

The hope that our existence does not end is trans-cultural and as old as we are. It doesn’t have anything to do with iPods and Big Macs.

This is a contradictory statement. You cannot accept evolution as true and yet not accept that we evolved from primates, unless you have strong evidence to support a different evolutionary tree, which I would love to hear about. I think what you are saying is that you believe in “microevolution” but not “macroevolution”. These are simply two intrinsically linked parts of the same singular process, but falsely classed as separate by creationists in order to explain how evolution can be seen to take place in spite of their beliefs.

Ninjas is my final word since I should have known better to discuss Politics and Religion in the Politics and Religion board. People get too excitable in here.

What does that have to do with America 2,000 years later?

Oh, and for clarification, I’m aware of micro and macro. Another note for clarification, who cares what people believe?

The Bible accounting of the origins of the earth is actually pretty cool with how scientists view the beginnings: first the heavens, then the earth and moon and sun, the entire world starting out covered with water, then land masses cropping up, first life coming from the water, man being very late in the whole process. The people writing it didn’t have terminology such as DNA, etc. Most Christians I know aren’t real hung up on whether it was an actual 7 days X 24 hours.

One thing that has always struck me as pretty miraculous and wrongly interpreted by many to whom religion is more important than Christianity is how instructions were given to the Jewish nation, the laws. The 10 commandments were given as the moral law: don’t cheat, lie, steal, respect your parents, don’t worship other gods. But many of the “laws” that many religious people selectively cling to were, in my opinion as a scientist and a believer, ways that God kept the Jewish nation alive as they wandered through the desert, etc. For example, while we as scientists didn’t appreciate the concept of germs that passed from one body to another (read histories of surgery and the resistance the medical community gave, not all that long ago, to the concept that you should wash your hands before surgery and between operating on one person and then another, etc.) the Jews were told they had to wash their hands before eating and let the sun dry them. They would not have understood the concept of germs and other contamination, so it was given as a “law.” The same for staying away from a dead body and the concept of being unclean if you handled a dead body - while we didn’t understand such things until relatively recent times, the risk of contamination from someone who had recently died was real. There are laws on rotating your crops (another relatively recent concept.) There’s just all kinds of cool “laws” in there that make a lot of sense in a modern perspective, yet there’s no way the people back then would have understood. That said, I look at the creation account in light of what was the core message intended to be.

FWIW.

The history of how and why Creationism ended up taking hold in the USA is a long and detailed one, involving several different movements, the general makeup of religion in this country, but most importantly…

…lots of religious nuts.

Speaking as a Christian, please allow me to apologize on their behalf.