And their 27 year executive director, Eugenie Scott is retiring. Here she is speaking on this very issue.

From Dan Kahan's research:

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I'm still not sure what to make of this, but my initial reaction is that science comprehension (according to whatever metric Kahan uses) is of no help in getting the public to accept the problem. It seems to have no measureable effect on the less religious and a negative effect on the more religious.

See "Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies"

Large-scale surveys show dramatic declines in religiosity in favor of secularization in the developed democracies. Popular acceptance of evolutionary science correlates negatively with levels of religiosity, and the United States is the only prosperous nation where the majority absolutely believes in a creator and evolutionary science is unpopular. Abundant data is available on rates of societal dysfunction and health in the first world. Cross-national comparisons of highly differing rates of religiosity and societal conditions form a mass epidemiological experiment that can be used to test whether high rates of belief in and worship of a creator are necessary for high levels of social health. Data correlations show that in almost all regards the highly secular democracies consistently enjoy low rates of societal dysfunction, while pro-religious and anti-evolution America performs poorly.

which is possible - the understanding of evolution, for instance, removes the argument "some entity must have created humans and all the biological diversity we see".

Of course, that possibility can't be spoken too loudly... science education is in a precarious enough position already!

1) They have been "trained" in a wide variety of mechanisms designed specifically to defuse cognitive dissonance without giving up cherished beliefs.

2) The congregation serves to establish a normative value set, and when leaders within these Fundamentalist Christian groups adopt a politically or economically oriented position, #1 enables that position to be accepted by nearly all of the group.

In other words this isn't odd - it is expected.

giving us three roads of analysis: rational-actor, structuralist, and subjectivist
#thesistime