ASA Origins Survey
Recently the ASA sent a poll to its members concerning origins. Roughly half responded. The ASA is a fellowship of professional scientists and technologists who are Christians. The American Geophysical Union did a similar poll concerning global warming and found a huge difference of opinion between climatologists and petroleum engineers with 97% of climatologists affirming anthropogenic global warming and only 47% of the petroleum engineers. This got me thinking. Is there a similar kind of effect in our poll?
First here is how the results came in for the membership as a whole:
With 2/3 of our members accepting evolution of humans it’s probably pretty surprising to your average church goer. Is it the evil secular universities that Expelled railed against? We can look and see how the answers differed for those who attended secular or Christian universities.
Tags: Christianity, Science & Medical
July 11th, 2010 at 4:28 pm
@ webmaster: You say that 2/3 accepting evolution is probably pretty surprising to your average church goer. This is a UK site so actually I’d say that wasn’t very surprising. I’ve never come across a British creationist and the CofE supports mainstream science.
What’s reassuring is the last finding on the original article:
“100% of the physicists/astronomers affirm an ancient Universe and 100% of full-time geologists affirm an ancient Earth. 80% of full-time biologists affirm natural evolution and human evolution and 88% of them affirm generic evolution. The difference from engineers is 30% for natural evolution, 18% for generic evolution, and 24% for human evolution. The degree to which there is a difference of opinions on origins is not related to whether Christian scientists went to a Christian or secular school. Rather, it is related to the degree of familiarity with the scientific evidence. The greater the familiarity, the greater the degree of acceptance of mainstream science on origins.”
Given that we’re talking about Americans, I find this cheering. The idea that one of the most powerful nations on Earth has one of the most scientifically ignorant populations is something that makes me quail to think of it.