The following is a sad report regarding what young people believe concerning God and creation. Perhaps, this is part of the reason why today’s society accepts such things as the murder of the unborn being simply a woman’s right, assisted suicide being called dying with dignity, and so-called gender fluidity!
In part the report states;
‘For the past 32 years, we have polled first-year biology students annually at the University of New South Wales concerning their views about evolution and creationism. The purposes of the research were to identify the level of commitment among incoming students to creationist beliefs that could interfere with their receptivity to evolutionary science and to assess in retrospect whether these creationist beliefs were changing over time.
The results have demonstrated a downward shift over time from 60% of the class in 1986 believing a god had something to do with the origin of humans, to 29% in 2017. Conversely, the percentage of students convinced that a god had nothing to do with the origin of humans rose from 25% in 1986 to 62% in 2017. The creationist belief that a god created the world de novo within the last 10,000 years declined from 10% in 1986 to 3.6% in 2017. The decline in the Australian students’ commitment to religious views about divine creation, especially creationism, considerably exceeded the corresponding beliefs among American students and their general public, where belief in creationism while slowly declining appears to have remained in the 40% range, four times that seen in our Australian survey.
The very low and declining levels of commitment to the creationist view that god created humans de novo suggests this view is unlikely to be a significant obstruction to accepting the scientific evidence for evolution. The results of the survey of UNSW students correlate with changes documented in the census of the general Australian public suggesting that our survey results of first-year biology students reflect overall changes in the Australian community as a whole.’
‘This poll was undertaken to inform science teachers in the University of New South Wales about the level of a priori commitment first year university students had for Creationist beliefs. Assessing the extent of commitment among incoming students was regarded to be important because those students were likely to be relatively unresponsive to conventional teaching about scientific evidence supporting the reality of evolution. The outcome of the poll would then inform lecturers about whether more or less effort should be made to communicate scientific understanding about evolution. As revealed over the years, the percentage of students endorsing creationist beliefs has remained very low and is declining. In contrast, the percentage of students convinced that gods had no part in the evolution of humans has grown steeply over time, representing approximately 62% of students surveyed in 2017. That said, approximately 25% of students surveyed in 2017 endorsed a conviction that a god was somehow involved in or influenced the origin of humans. Although their commitment may be less doctrinaire than that of creationists, it also represents a steadily declining proportion of the student body over the years, dropping by 50% since 1986. In all measures of commitment to a role for a god in the origin of humans, Australian students appear to be more rapidly embracing a non-theistic explanation than students in the USA. This may relate at least in part to a difference in the way the cultures of the two countries have developed over time.‘ https://evolution-outreach.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12052-018-0083-9
which show evolution returning from the dead after an epic holocaust which decimated the entire world. After all, this a time 20 million years after the disastrous global extinction event of 250 million years ago.
