Year: 1987
Type: article
Abstract: As recently as 1979 a public opinion poll in the United States found that half of the adults questioned continued to believe that God had created Adam and Eve to start the human race.'Throughout America and especially in the southern Bible belt fundamentalist Christians are campaigning for laws requiring schools to teach that evolution is a theory not a fact and to acknowledge that alternative theories to evolution exist.Similar campaigns are being mounted in Australia.2At the other end of the spectrum theoretical physicists such as Stephen Hawking are "reasonably confident that we know the history of the universe up to one second after the Big Bang.What happens before that is much more speculative, but I think that after one second we're fairly confident."'How can it be that Hawking and his colleagues are teasing away at the events ofthat intellectually challenging first second while in the same world millions of Americans continue to believe that all the geological strata were laid down in one year after the flood described in the Bible?Faith and works
Source: BMJ
Author: T. Smith
Language: English
Subfield: History and Philosophy of Science
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2078630050