Several websites have already posted about this, so I’ll be brief. The Associated Press, in collaboration with GfK, conducted a poll on the state of American science knowledge, and the results were truly dispiriting. You can get the pdf of the results here.

1,012 adults were interviewed about their degree of confidence in what scientists regard as “truths”, as well as about issues like their religious and political affiliations, income, demographic information, health care, and so on.

The survey of science knowledge can be summarized in this chart prepared by CBS News:

That’s really depressing, especially, to me, the fact that 72% of Americans are very or somewhat confident that there is a “supreme being” behind evolution. That’s “theistic evolution,” the form of evolution most commonly endorsed by Americans, and the one that’s basically okay with organizations like the National Center for Science Education, who can’t be bothered too much about whether evolution is naturalistic or guided by a deity.

And that makes me worry a a bit about the 55% who appear to agree that life on earth evolved through natural selection (Larry Moran will no doubt kvetch about genetic drift!), for most of those probably feel that God was behind that process! What is most upsetting is that only 60% of Americans are confident that the earth is 4.5 billion years old (with more than half of those being “somewhat” rather than “very” confident), and only 46% agree that the universe is 13.8 billion years old and was formed after the Big Bang.

What’s going on here? Well, some of it is surely plain ignorance (i.e., lack of knowledge), but other stuff, like the widespread rejection of global warming, is wish-thinking derived from capitalism, and, of course, the rejection of cosmology and evolution is largely based on religion. That’s not my take, but comes from statistical analysis of the poll itself, which isn’t given in the pdf. As CBS News reports:

Political and religious values play an important role in a person’s belief in science, the AP noted. Democrats were more likely than Republicans to express confidence in evolution, the Big Bang, the age of the Earth and climate change. As faith in a supreme being rises, confidence in the Big Bang, climate change and the age of the Earth decline, according to the poll. “When you are putting up facts against faith, facts can’t argue against faith,” said 2012 Nobel Prize winning biochemistry professor Robert Lefkowitz of Duke University. “It makes sense now that science would have made no headway because faith is untestable.” . . . The results of the poll are troubling to some scientists, who say it highlights “the iron triangle of science, religion and politics,” according to Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication.

Indeed. As I always say, the best way to get Americans to accept an old earth and the fact of evolution is not through education, but through weakening the grip of religion on the public mind. If you’re not religious, you have no reason to reject evolution and an ancient Earth and universe. And I suspect, though the pollsters didn’t give some kind of multivariate analysis, that the reasons Republicans have less confidence in evolution and the age of the earth is that Republicans are more likely to be religious than are Democrats.

Finally, we have the accommodationists coming out of the woodwork, trying to deny the palpable fact that these figures, at least for cosmology and evolution, reflect religious opposition to science. After all, when properly conceived, Scripture and science are compatible!

People who take the word of the Bible literally are even less likely to believe in evolution, the age of the Earth or Big Bang. But Francisco Ayala, a former priest and professor of biology, philosophy and logic at the University of California, Irvine, noted that these three scientific concepts can be compatible with the belief in God. “The story of the cosmos and the Big Bang of creation is not inconsistent with the message of Genesis 1, and there is much profound biblical scholarship to demonstrate this,” said Darrel Falk, a biology professor at Point Loma Nazarene University and an evangelical Christian.

If science is so obviously compatible with religion in these ways, why does the conflict persist? It’s because Falk (former director of BioLogos) and Ayala simply refuse to recognize the truth: evolution and cosmology don’t sit well with the religious beliefs of many Americans, and they’re not going to accept the scientific facts so long as they feel that those facts contradict scripture. Many of them see the “message of Genesis I” as what that chapter explicitly says. And, as BioLogos has discovered to its horror, telling evangelical Christians that their faith can be compatible with evolution simply doesn’t work. There are a number of aspects of evolution, for instance, that simply discomfit the religious—among other things, the pure naturalism of natural selection, the loss of human status as “special creatures,” the horrible possibility that our morality may be partly evolved rather than bestowed by God, and so on.

Physicist Brian Greene, co-director of the World Science Festival, also expresses his dismay at the figures:

“It is enormously distressing that science, which is our most powerful means for gaining insight into the world, insight into truth, is so mistrusted by so many people,” Brian Greene, a professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia University, told CBS News. Greene, who co-founded the World Science Festival and World Science U. to help educate and excite the public about science, says understanding scientific ideas is not just academic — it’s essential to a vital democracy. “Issues like climate change or nanoscience or genetically modified foods — I mean all of these issues, and a thousand others, are scientific at their core,” he said.

Perhaps Greene, then, might reassess his policy of accepting large amounts of funding from the John Templeton Foundation for the World Science Festival. After all, Templeton’s mission is to blur the boundaries between science and religion, boundaries whose violation is amply evidenced by the data above.