Here’s a frightening statistic

According to a May, 2006 Gallup poll, something like 46% of Americans reject totally the evidence of modern science and reason and believe instead, on the basis of literal interpretation of scripture, that the entire world was created at one time within the last 10,000 years. If this were a measure of the beliefs in some country where there was no education, it might just be believable. That this is a measure of beliefs in American society, one of the most advanced in the world, just boggles the mind.

Here are well over a 100 million Americans who owe to rational science and engineering their plentiful food, their good health and access to modern medicine, their cars and TVs and iPods and cell phones and computers and electric lights and appliances and almost everything else that has raised their lives from brute survival to modern comfort. And yet, if the evidence of science doesn’t agree with their literal reading of scripture, they choose to believe scripture instead.

Those who hold these sorts of beliefs see nothing odd about it. Indeed, they may even believe that their literal religious convictions in some way help explain America’s success in the world. It’s hard to have any effective dialogue with people who have abandoned reason for faith.

But for the rest of us who have not subscribed to a literal interpretation of scripture, this is a frightening statistic, the more so since this group apparently includes highly-placed government officials who control our national destiny and foreign policy. It’s frightening, for example, to think that our nuclear weapons may at times be under the control of people who believe, on the basis of scripture, that initiating a nuclear Armageddon might be a good thing, bringing on the End Times and the Second Coming that they passionately await.

We are understandably dismayed by the irrational religious fervor of Islamic fundamentalists. We ought to be far more dismayed by the irrational fervor of our own Christian fundamentalists, who in the end, because of the vast power America wields, pose a far greater danger to the world’s safety than a few Islamic suicide bombers or even the 9/11 terrorists.

If we are losing the hard-won advances of the Enlightenment, when reason and logic and an open mind began to replace superstition and religious certainty, we are in deep trouble. History has shown us what the world looks like when it is ruled by religious conviction, and it is inevitably a brutal, bloody, intolerant, self-destructive picture, replete with crusades, pogroms, holocausts, inquisitions, ethnic cleansings and jihads. If the statistic quoted above is even remotely correct, we are in danger of repeating this bloody history, perhaps for the last time.