NEW YORK: A new study has exposed that religious Americans are increasingly fitting science into their personal beliefs by accepting some aspects of scientific discoveries and just outright rejecting others.
According to Shiri Noy from the University of Wyoming and Timothy O’Brien from the University of Evansville, the new study’s primary authors, a new “post-secular” American has emerged that combines science and religion together in sometimes perplexing ways. As many as 20 percent of Americans could fall into this group according to the researchers, which consists of people who have an appreciation and knowledge of science and technology but reject certain scientific theories on religious grounds.
To put it bluntly, these individuals are cherry-picking scientific and technological theories in order to fit into their own “personally compelling” view of the world. O’Brien and Noy say that these individuals are in essence creating the reality they prefer best by picking and choosing the secular scientific concepts that coincide with their own world view, hence the “post-secular” title.
The other two types of Americans the authors identified in the survey, Moderns that are purely secular in their scientific thinking and Traditionals that are deeply religious and reject science. There were a trio of scientific concepts that help to differentiate the three groups of Americans – the age of the Earth, the Big Bang theory, and the idea of human evolution – and each of these three core groups believes in – or doesn’t believe in – these concepts to different degrees.
