[ExI] Bill Moyers: Susan Jacoby and "The Age of AmericanUnreason"

[spike]

> Bryan Bishop
> Subject: Re: [ExI] Bill Moyers: Susan Jacoby and "The Age of 
> AmericanUnreason"
> 
> On Friday 22 February 2008, PJ Manney wrote:
> > We, who frequent lists like these, are often astounded when we see 
> > statistics about the number of people who believe in the 
> literalness 
> > of biblical texts...
> 
> My bet is that these people are using cached thoughts when 
> answering the statistic questionaires. After all, how hard is 
> it to just recognize which opinion you most side with?... - Bryan


Ron Numbers in his book The Creationists goes into detail on this.  He shows
how large is the percentage of people taking these kinds of questionaires
who give answers that are clearly self contradictory.  He goes on to suggest
that if you throw out all questionaires that contain contradictory answers,
then the consistent evolution believers outnumber the consistent creation
believers by a healthy factor.  Of course you end up throwing out a very
large majority of the questionaires.

spike