Being completely baffled by some of the current posts on the site, and while listening to Carl Sagan's Demon Haunted World for the 100th time, I wondered if a statistic he gave was true. Carl asserted "95% of Americans are scientifically illiterate." Wow! Really? No wonder we get utter and ignorance from people at times. Of course I can't just believe what Carl says. He is, after all, trying to sell a book and may be a bit hyperbolic. So I did a bit of research.
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/407346/216-million-americans-are-scie...
The good news: America’s science literacy rate is up from a pathetic 10 percent in 1988. The bad news: it’s still only 28 percent.
What do you think? Could religion be linked to the cause? Could religion be linked to the result?
" This level of science illiteracy may explain why over 40 percent of Americans do not believe in evolution and about 20 percent, when asked if the earth orbits the sun or vice versa, say it’s the sun that does the orbiting–placing these people in the same camp as the Inquisition that punished Galileo almost 400 years ago."
"One of Miller’s findings that may surprise many Americans is that Europeans and Japanese actually rate slightly lower in science literacy. To be sure, these same populations also have a much higher percentage of people who accept evolution and other basic scientific theories. America’s large population of conservative religious believers may be one reason for this discrepancy,..."
HOW MUCH IS RELIGION HOLDING US BACK? OPINIONS?
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