by Unknown

The latest General Social Survey has been released, and it contains a new module on Americans' beliefs about science. Other sociobloggers have offered glimpses at these data, and in particular the two questions on heliocentrism. Omar gives simple frequencies, Jeremy breaks them down by gender, race, political identification, and education.I was curious about how the numbers stack up by that other hot-button issue, religion, so I did a bit of Friday-afternoon playing myself. (Gee, I know how to have fun...)In each graph, the wording of the question is at the top. The religious categories are based on self-reported religion, combined with a NORC-coded variable on the degree of fundamentalism of the respondent's denomination. For each of the "outcome" questions, I've combined the "don't know" and "no answer" respondents, but there are very few of the latter (i.e., <5). Click on each picture for a bigger view, I hope.Without further ado (and with relatively little commentary), here are the responses to the two questions on heliocentrism, in concatenated form:Here are responses to a question on the Big Bang:And here are responses to a question on the origin of man:Fundamentalists' beliefs about evolution don't seem to vary all much by education. Here are data from the same question, but limited to respondents with at least some college. (Caution: Ns get quite small for the smaller religious categories.)I know one can't make causal claims from these data about the college "effect" or lack thereof. Nonetheless, I still find all this rather depressing, in a professorial angst, "it's all selection effects and we have no impact" sort of way.: After I posted this, it occurred to me that I should look at a less religiously charged scientific knowledge question, e.g., on the experimental method. The question asks how best to test a new drug: with or without a control group. (This is explained in the question.) Ns are the same as in the other graphs.Total: 79% w/control, 16% without, 4% DKFund prot: 76% w/controlMod prot: 81%Lib prot: 84%Catholics: 75%Jews/lib others: 82%None: 85%So, Fundamental Protestants are a bit below the other groups on this form of scientific knowledge, too, but the difference is less extreme.

Labels: public opinion research, Religion, Science