SO THREE OUT OF FIVE AMERICANS...

...think that the entire world was once flooded, and that a guy put two of every animal on a boat and sailed around for 40 days until the waters receded?* (link to #s, link to story)

An ABC News poll released Sunday found that 61 percent of Americans believe the account of creation in the Bible's book of Genesis is "literally true" rather than a story meant as a "lesson."

Sixty percent believe in the story of Noah's ark and a global flood, while 64 percent agree that Moses parted the Red Sea to save fleeing Jews from their Egyptian captors.

The poll, with a margin of error of 3 percentage points, was conducted Feb. 6 to 10 among 1,011 adults.

Jeebus! I know virtually none of the 61% of America that thinks the Earth was created in six days, save for the loons I met during my brief stint in 2000 with UCSB's chapter of Campus Jihad Crusade for Christ. (The highlight: Going on a "prayer-walk" and listening to some nut-bar pray that the biology department turn away from teaching evolution and realize "god's true vision". Oh boy.)

So this must mean that there's a huge chunk of America (the middle, the south, etc) where there must be a near-100% infection rate with this allegorical drivel?

(You might notice that I'm not a very big fan of young-earth creationism, by the way.)

How to explain these results? They could be a product of how the question itself was asked. The alternate choice aside from literal interpretation in the survey was, according to the Washington Times (hmm), as a "lesson" (or maybe as a "symbolic lesson", the article isn't very clear). To a person with strong religious convictions, perhaps this language could be seen as either condescending or ambiguous, or both even. A person could conceivably be strongly Christian and believe the creation story to be very important to their beliefs, yet not necessarily a literal recounting of actual events. The respondent thinks that calling the stories "lessons" shortchanges their importance, yet the only other non-literal-interpretation response allowed by the survey question is "no opinion". Since the deeply religious respondent doesn't want to be seen as not having an opinion on the matter, they gravitate towards the "literal" answer, as it is less condescending to the stories.

In other words, whether ABC (the network of "In Search of Jesus", if you remember) meant to or not, the question was framed in a way where strongly-religious people who don't necessarily believe in literal interpretations of Genesis and Exodus might respond to a survey that they do.

Lastly, for those 61% who believe the creation is literal, what are they to make of this?

The farthest object in the Universe yet detected has been seen by scientists using the Hubble and Keck telescopes.

It is so distant its light must have set out when the Universe was just 750m years old to reach the Earth now.

Details of the discovery were revealed by a team of astrophysicists from the California Institute of Technology.

They said the work underlined again the remarkable capabilities of Hubble and called on Nasa to reverse its decision to stop servicing the telescope.

The US space agency has confirmed it will not send another shuttle to upgrade the space telescope, which probably means Hubble has no more than three years of full observations ahead of it.

750m years means 750 million years, in case you weren't sure. So is this a crock of shit then, fundies? And is this why y'all might have an interest in discarding the space shuttle program, and thus the Hubble, to instead sent mission(aries) to Mars?


* - and Noah wasn't even on a speedboat! ("you could shoot across the water much faster. there'd be great photos for the bible")

Oh, and do these people believe that Noah put every one of the hundreds of thousands of species of insects on that boat, keeping track of each? They're animals too, right?