Essay talk:What Creationist Science Fairs Tell Us About Creationism

Agreed on everything you said. FallenMorgan 14:17, 18 February 2008 (EST)

Add if you want; I like your posts.-αmεσ (soldier) 14:51, 18 February 2008 (EST)

I forget where I heard it, but someone referred to these people as "the scholarly equivalent of NAMBLA". Things like this make it hard to disagree....--SockOfGulik

Sock, that's an AWESOME comment. Same to AKJ for your addition.-αmεσ (soldier) 10:04, 20 February 2008 (EST)

*cough* It's AJKG. Ajkgordon 11:32, 20 February 2008 (EST)

I may add something later but right now I want to compare AJK and EMC's answers. I think they show the gulf that exists between most of Europe and the US. Until recently the vast majority of religious Europeans have not had any problem with the secular science conflicting with religious views and its only a minority of YEC's influenced by US evangelism that have felt that secular science has to be overturned. Genghis ^Marauding 12:53, 20 February 2008 (EST)

Until recently? I'm pretty sure the vast majority of religious Europeans still don't have a problem with science. Indeed, "secular science" isn't a phrase that's often heard. They (we) see no conflict between their theology and their science. Even the mention of any conflict gets blank looks. I imagine that's also true of most religious Americans too, just that the literalists are very vocal and very well funded. Ajkgordon 15:53, 20 February 2008 (EST)

I'd say that in general, very few people in Europe question evolution, but there are some pockets where creationism is fairly strong. I don't know if there have been any actual studies made of this question, but I'expect that it probably has the strongest foothold in places like Poland, which is overall very conservative in terms of religion. A member of the previous Kaczynski government did oppose teaching evolution in schools, but to be honest, that government was mostly made up of clowns, so I'm not sure how indicative that is. There was a similar incident in Serbia a few years, but as I recall, that was squashed pretty quickly. --AKjeldsen^Godspeed! 16:11, 20 February 2008 (EST)

ADD: There has actually been a recent study - article and further comments. --AKjeldsen^Godspeed! 16:43, 20 February 2008 (EST)

Well, that kind of backs up my feeling that it's to do with Biblical innerancy. Protestants and Catholics are metaphoricalists(?) whereas fundies are literalists. So an American Catholic is as likely to accept evolution as a French Catholic. But there are many more fundamentalists in the US and they are much more political than their Catholic and protestant cousins, hence the differing levels of acceptance of evolution. There is also the effect of differing levels of atheism, or rather the admission of it. There are some oddities in Europe but they are reasonably easy to explain. The aforementioned Poland, for example, along with other eastern European countries such as Lithuania have possibly been influenced by their sudden freedom from Soviet oppression of religious expression - the pendulum of Biblical literalism has swung to the credulous end of its arc and will likely stabilise on a par with other western European countries as the influence of EU education standards, pragmatism and culture filters through. Turkey is obviously different because of both its low atheism rate and the predominant religion, massively predominant, being Islam and again very politicised. So for me, the pockets of fundamentalism in Europe are not of particular concern if they are there due to external influences on mainstream Catholicism and protestantism or if they are anomalies such as the North London Jewish enclaves or Turkish Muslims. What is much more worrying are the pockets of fundamentalism caused by largely American-influenced evangelicals, such as the Reg Vardy faith schools in the UK. They are different because they are new rather than an old religion finding itself again after a period of oppression or simply a traditional non-evangelical sect. This ranks alongside diminishing freedoms as part of Tony Blair's legacy. Ajkgordon 04:47, 21 February 2008 (EST)