All your points are fair. I don’t really disagree with you, although I think that the idea that 40% of the UK population believes the nonsense is just a reflection of either people having no idea what they were being asked about or of a very skewed sample.
I certainly agree that evolution teaching must be pretty rubbish if people think it’s in dispute and that the ideas of creationism must be challenged,
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t seem to be showing?</blockquote>
No, I've tried to fix it now anyway.
It is just a weird thing about posts with website addresses in. Something (I used to think it was Akismet) seems to block the content of posts with links. We are looking into this but its been going on for ages and we are no closer to a solution]]>Should I be worried my big ol’ comment up there doesn’t seem to be showing?
No, I’ve tried to fix it now anyway.
It is just a weird thing about posts with website addresses in. Something (I used to think it was Akismet) seems to block the content of posts with links. We are looking into this but its been going on for ages and we are no closer to a solution
]]>However I have to disagree with some of your other points. I do agree that the choice between God and evolution is a false dichotomy; religious people can by all means still believe in evolution by natural selection. However, I would put it to you that many religious, and indeed many non-religious, do not actually believe or fully understand evolution. For example, in theistic evolution it is assumed that evolution is the means by which god created life and humanity. As an extension of this it is assumed that human or human-like life was guaranteed from the get go. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of evolution, as natural selection totally removes any idea of purpose to evolution. It just is. So the evolution which most scientists talk about is still far removed from that envisioned by theistic evolution.
Concerning the polls, I have actually heard those numbers before and seen the polls (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4648598.stm). They weren’t simply made up by Dawkins so he could make his point. Of course you can still say there are ‘lies, damned lies and statistics’, but Dawkins still made a valid point based on that evidence.
Onto Islam. I can find the figures, but I do remember reading somewhere that 97% or so of Muslims believe in Creationism, or some blend of Intelligent Design. I’m not sure if it really is that high, but it would not surprise me in the least. Islamic countries tend to be far more fundamentally religious than western countries and thus I would expect to see a high percentage believe in a religious explanation to life over a scientific one.
Lastly (I promise!), the problem of debate. I agree that debating with creationists does seem to give their ideas legitimacy, especially to those that do not understand how science works. However, not taking on the challenges of creationists also shows poorly on supporters of real science, because to the ignorant masses it seems that evolution is a poorly supported theory with many gaps. I personally blame this on bad teaching of evolution in schools. I do believe more has to be done to introduce evolution in far greater detail than most schools do at the moment. The current way it is taught does not enable students to get a full understanding of the scope of evolution, or the scope of the evidence. It is merely taught as fact, with little discussion of why it is fact. This must be changed.
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