…except, oddly, Turkey. No surprise about Americans, but what's up with Turkey?
My former colleagues at another university in Middle East have also been moved to online teaching indefinitely, with the students…
7 responses to “Less people believe evolution is true in U.S. than other Western countries…”
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Fewer people … just sayin'
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According to Wikipedia, here's Turkey's demographics by religion:
Religious groups according to estimates:
Muslim – 96.83% (80-85% Sunni, 15-20% Alevi)
Christian – 0.13% (60% Armenian Orthodox, 20% Syrian Orthodox, 10% Protestant, 8% Chaldean Catholic, 2% Greek Orthodox)
Jewish – 0.03% (96% Sephardi, 4% Ashkenazi)
Bahá'í Faith – 0.01%
Atheist – 3%I speculate that that's what's up with Turkey.
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Islam.
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Over the course of 12 years, islamofascist Erdogan government did everything in its power to destroy secular education in Turkey. The enrollment in state-run religious schools has reached almost one million during the course of 12 years (from just 63000 in 2002). Erdogan declared that his mission is "to raise a religious youth". Most biology deparments in state universities (let alone high schools) do not teach evolutionary theory because it is in conflict with religious faith.
The budget allocated to Religious Affairs Directorate in Turkey is about 2.3 billion dollars and exceeds the budget allocation for 11 other ministries combined. The Directorate's only function is to brainwash the population with sunni islamic dogmas, including anti-scientific creationist fables.
What is worse, people with scientific worldviews are at serious risk of persecution since the Turkish government sees them as a direct threat to islamofascist hegemony.
I hope this helps explain what is up with Turkey.
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It might be interesting to correlate this with GDP per capita, or Human Development Index, or some other measure of economic development. That would probably illustrate that Turkey is less far off the trendline than the US seems to be.
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A number of scholars who study the Intelligent Design movement (including Michael Ruse and the historian of science Ronald Numbers) have observed that ID has been making inroads in Turkey for a number of years now. The growth of the ID movement in Turkey alone surely doesn't explain these startling numbers, but it might be a contributing factor.
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Another reason is the Hizmet movement, an Islamic revival movement originating in Turkey that is quite successful and teaches creationism. See http://hizmetmovement.blogspot.com/2012/01/turkish-imam-and-his-global-educational.html for a quick introduction. This movement has been allied to Erdogan's AKP but is presently being targeted by the Erdogan government as a potential threat to Erdogan's power (http://www.theguardian.com/world/turkeypower).
The interesting background here is that under Mustapha Kemal and his successors, mainly the Turkish military, the Turkish state was aggressively secularist and exercised considerable control over religion in Turkey. Being religious, especially in institutions independent of the state supervised mosques, was a way of expressing dissent from a historically rather repressive state.
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