OMG! Blogger horrified to learn most Americans don’t ‘believe’ in evolution

Earlier this week, my friend and fellow YogaBrains contributor Derek Beres shared a shocking statistic on my Facebook wall: Over half of Americans do not believe in evolution. According to a recent Gallup Poll, approximately 46 percent of Americans believe in creationism, 32 percent in “theistic evolution” and only 15 percent acknowledge the reality of evolutionary processes as described by Charles Darwin. …

Ben Stein starred in the documentary film about Darwinists' crusade to exclude Intelligent Design theory from curricula on the origins of human life.

Now that may not seem like a problem — after all, everyone is entitled to their own beliefs, right? Who are these arrogant scientists to be claiming that their theory is more true than someone else’s? I mean, it is just a theory, after all. There were no human beings there to witness the earth’s magnificent beginning. So it’s all speculation anyway… It’s all just mystery. Right?  Hogwash.

The espousal of this pseduo-middle-path-mentality — this idea that all views are equal, and that creationist and evolutionary perspectives should be taught side by side — is one factor contributing to the epidemic of anti-intellectualism and anti-scientific backlash that Americans are now known for. Susan Jacoby, in an op-ed for the Washington Post, described this trend as “the dumbing of America,” and warned that the increasing influence of the religious right on public policy makes for a “toxic brew of anti-rationalism and ignorance [that] hurts U.S. public policy on topics from health care to taxation.” …

Creationism also propagates a cartoonish version of reality that places human beings and their creator at the center of everything — and usually it’s impossible for people to see this implicit narcissism, because it’s hidden under the guise of faith. The belief that humans were placed on earth by a transcendent and supernatural intelligence is not so unlike a belief that the sun and all its planets revolve around the Earth. Creationism presupposes that the Earth, the universe, and even life itself was created with the sole purpose of serving the human species. …

I have always been a passionate advocate of science, which is not often a popular stance to take when you’re writing to an audience that mostly identifies as spiritual, if not outright religious. But in my view, science – by disrupting the hegemonic power structures of corrupt religious authorities and requiring that all claims be subjected to the test of real-world, replicable observation – does in fact hold the key to a “real” middle path. Any worldview that requires belief in an unseeable supernatural power to explain the presence of everything from life to love is, in my view, radical departure to the left or right of reality.

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