What I believe the surveys I posted show (of about 1,000 people) is that most people have never given these questions serious thought.

Here’s a summary of polls on aliens.

The origin of species is not something that occupies the average American mind when they’ve got other things to think about. Like much of what we learn as kids in school, evolutionary science gets filed away with other subjects that turned out not to have much use in their careers.

I suspect if you broadened the questions a bit (“how old is the Earth? 10,000 years? 100,000? A million? A billion? 4.5 billion?” you’d get answers all across the board. It would have also been interesting to plug “I don’t really know or care” into the mix and see what they got. All polls should have that as a possible answer.

The average moderately-religious person who doesn’t think much about these things usually settles on some very vague concept of God working through millions of years (close to option one in the survey). Then they shove it under their mental bed and leave it to collect dust bunnies. An amazing number of other beliefs in the average person’s life are under there with it.

The unexamined life may not be worth living, but it’s a hell of a lot easier.

One of the things that makes me the skunk at this picnic is that I try to make people examine stuff.

Incidentally, the book in the article has been out of print for years.

I honest to god did not realize it was this blatant.

I stand corrected.

This is nothing new. Its been around since I was old enough to remember. And it is not limited to a few ignorant trailer-trash Yahoos in the Ozarks, this nonsense is part of an enormous fraction of the American population, and an enormous amount of money and effort is expended every year to indoctrinate children with it, to reinforce it in the minds of their elders, and to spread it to the rest of the population.

It is even spreading to other religions, both Catholicism and Islam, which used to be neutral when it came to science, are now developing creationist minorities. I don’t know about the Jews, but I wouldn’t be surprised. As much as I admire and respect the Jewish people, there’s always been a minority of them who are crazier than bedbugs.

And now they are starting to mobilize and organize as a political force. Religious fundamentalism, and its political influences, are not limited to rural North American Protestantism. As we know, it is spreading like wildfire in the Middle East, and not only is religious conflict inevitable, conflict within religions will also play a role as competing faiths struggle for supremacy.

We’ve got a shitpot full of trouble on our hands.