Reason is under assault in American grade schools as parents embrace "creationism" and "intelligent design" religious fantasies and reject biological science. Here are the results from a recent Gallup Poll:
Only about a third of Americans believe that Charles Darwin’s theory
of evolution is a scientific theory that has been well supported by the
evidence, while just as many say that it is just one of many theories
and has not been supported by the evidence. The rest say they don’t
know enough to say. Forty-five percent of Americans also believe that
God created human beings pretty much in their present form about 10,000
years ago. A third of Americans are biblical literalists who believe
that the Bible is the actual word of God and is to be taken literally,
word for word.
In Germany about half the respondents in a recent poll accept pure Darwinian science – i.e. that life forms evolve through a process of natural selection without the invervention of a deity:
Die Darstellungen der Bibel, wonach das Universum, die Erde und das
Leben vor 10.000 Jahren von Gott erschaffen wurden, nimmt – nach einer
Umfrage des Schweizer Meinungsforschungsinstituts IHA-Gfk – auch jeder
Fünfte in Deutschland, Österreich und der Schweiz wörtlich. Etwa
genauso viele stimmen der Ansicht zu, dass es zwar die Evolution gebe,
dass sie aber von Gott gesteuert werde. An eine Evolution, wie Darwin
sie beschrieb, bei der Gott keine Rolle spielt, glauben in Deutschland
mit 46 Prozent fast jeder Zweite, in Österreich knapp 41 Prozent, in
der Schweiz aber nur jeder Dritte (33 Prozent).
The Harvard scientist and author Stephen Jay Gould dealt with this attack on Darwin before he died in 2002. The science of evolution is unassailable:
Scientists regard debates on fundamental issues of theory as
a sign of intellectual health and a source of excitement. Science is—and how
else can I say it?—most fun when it plays with interesting ideas, examines
their implications, and recognizes that old information might be explained in
surprisingly new ways. Evolutionary theory is now enjoying this uncommon vigor.
Yet amidst all this turmoil no biologist has been lead to doubt the fact that
evolution occurred; we are debating how it happened. We are all
trying to explain the same thing: the tree of evolutionary descent linking all
organisms by ties of genealogy. Creationists pervert and caricature this debate
by conveniently neglecting the common conviction that underlies it, and by
falsely suggesting that evolutionists now doubt the very phenomenon we are
struggling to understand.
Read Gould’s essay Evolution as Fact and Theory here.
