Believe in the literal word of the Bible is strongest among those whose schooling stopped with high school and declines steadily with educational level, with only 20% of college graduates holding that view and 11% of those with an advanced degree.

So, people who believe the literal word of the Bible:

31% total. 20% if you have a basic degree. 11% if you have an advanced degree.

Once again, Occam’s Razor:

Option 1: Education is secular in nature and leads people astray. It teaches people to question the origins of the Bible, the apparent (but untrue) contradictions within it, and its similarities with previous stories — all of which is wrong because the Bible warns against trying to gain too much worldly knowledge. The true way to gather knowledge is to stop worrying about what all this human (and therefore flawed) education says and read the scriptures as God intended.

Option 2: The Bible is a collection of stories written by numerous authors, edited numerous times, over roughly 900 years. The only people who believe it to be the literal work of God are people who have been indoctrinated to believe so. As such, those who are exposed to education gain the benefit of perspective and are able to see what it truly is. The more education one has the more likely they 1) came from a family that didn’t harshly indoctrinate them as children, and 2) get more exposure to alternative ways of interpreting the world. Both of these lead to less chance of believing the Bible is the literal work of God.

Which seems more logical?

In science, one of the most elusive issues is that of causation vs. corelation. In other words, how do we know if a actually caused b, or if a and b just happened to be going on at the same time in a seemingly related fashion?

An interesting article at National Geographic is claiming this is what’s going on with global warming. In short, the argument is that increased solar output is to blame for the recent heatup — and not greenhouse gasses.

So while they agree that greenhouse gasses do increase heat, they’re saying it can’t account for near as much as what the sun could do with just a marginal increase in output. Makes sense to me. But the really compelling part is the fact that the ice cap on Mars has seen increased melting for three summers in a row — just like ours — a fact that’s obviously not related to our stupidity.

On one hand I’d be happy to find out we aren’t causing this problem, but on the other I’m afraid we still are, and that this will cause many people who were considering solid environmental programs to abandon them. They’ll basically just say…”Eh…turns out it wasn’t us afterall…crank up the coal plant, Bob!”

I look forward to seeing more debate given this new information.

(Thanks to Ken for bookmarking the article)

This is a very interesting piece by the New York Times on the demographics and relationships between suspect and victim in New York homicides. They even have a Google Maps overlay.

[ Link: New York Crime Statistics ]

Thanks to Tim Stevens for the link