Could monkeys type the 23rd Psalm?

by Russell Grigg

Images Wikipedia.org

Thomas Huxley (left) and Bishop Samuel Wilberforce, the protagonists at the famous debate on the subject of evolution at the Oxford meeting of the British Association, June 30, 1860

On 30 June 1860, there occurred an event which, in the minds of many people, was the turning point for the public acceptance of the theory of evolution in its confrontation with Christianity. This event was the debate between the agnostic Thomas Huxley, who came to be known as ‘Darwin’s bulldog’, and the Anglican Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, son of the famous anti-slavery politician, William Wilberforce. The debate was held at a meeting of the British Association, Oxford, of which Bishop Wilberforce was a vice-president, and was sparked by the publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species seven months earlier, in November 1859.

Survey finds record 19 percent of religiously unaffiliated Americans

Posted on 21 July 2012

(RNS) Unbelief is on the uptick. People who check “None” for their religious affiliation are now nearly one in five Americans (19 percent), the highest ever documented, according to the Pew Center for the People and the Press.

The rapid rise of Nones — including atheists, agnostics and those who say they believe “nothing in particular” — defies the usually glacial rate of change in spiritual identity.

Barry Kosmin, co-author of three American Religious Identification Surveys, theorizes why None has become the “default category.” He says, ”Young people are resistant to the authority of institutional religion, older people are turned off by the politicization of religion, and people are simply less into theology than ever before.”

Kosmin’s surveys were the first to brand the Nones in 1990 when they were 6 percent of U.S. adults. By the 2008 survey, Nones were up to 15 percent. By 2010, another survey, the biannual General Social Survey, bumped the number to 18 percent.