This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2017, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Time rolls on, but the bad news regarding American scientific illiteracy remains much the same. The overwhelming majority of Americans — roughly 80 percent — still reject the scientific theory of evolution. And the cause for this failure is what it's always been: Religion.
According to the just-released Gallup poll, only 19 percent of Americans accept that human evolution occurred without requiring an interventionist God — unchanged from 2014. In contrast, 38 percent of Americans claim that God created man in present form. That's an all-time low, which is good. But another 38 percent now preach a different kind of supernatural miracle: "God-guided" evolution. That's hardly an improvement.
A scientific theory is an explanation. And the scientific explanation of evolution (changes in the genetic material of a population over time) is that evolution is an unplanned, natural process. For all that the moderate theists mock the fundamentalists' obviously incorrect claims, their own supernatural explanation is comparably absurd.
God-guided evolution is no more a scientific concept than are God-guided earthquakes to punish America for its gay agenda. Simply acknowledging that earthquakes exist, while proposing supernatural causes, doesn't buy you scientific legitimacy.
Stop pretending otherwise. The problem isn't which miracle one preaches. The problem is preaching miracles at all.
Gregory A. Clark
Salt Lake City