Australia is Abandoning Creationism.

Data source: Archer, M, et al.

Thirty two years of continuous assessment reveal first year university biology students in Australia are rapidly abandoning beliefs in theistic involvement in human origins | Evolution: Education and Outreach.

In 1987, Ken Ham moved from Australia to the USA having realised there was a more lucrative market for creationist anti-science disinformation there than in Australia. America's loss was Australia's gain as this heartwarming survey shows.

Evidence comes from a study by researchers from the University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW, Australia, published a few days ago in Evolution: Education and Outreach.

It shows that in the 32 years since Ham left Australia, belief in Young Earth Creationism (YECism) amongst Australian first-year university biology student has fallen from 10.0% to 3.6% (peaking at a high of 17.3% in 1988). Over the same time, belief in non-theistic evolution has risen from 25.1% to 62.2% and in theistic evolution has halved from 50.0% to 25.2%. In other words there has been a massive move away from the belief that somehow a god was involved in 'creating' humans towards acceptance of the scientific, evolutionary explanation.

The trends themselves are changing unfavourably for religion; increasing for belief in non-theistic evolution and decreasing rapidly for belief in YECism. These trends have been changing more quickly since the early 2000s.

The combined average change in support for theistic evolution of both sorts was -1.0 percentage points per year while the average annual increase for non-theistic evolution was +1.2%. In the last ten years these average annual change became -1.65% and +1.76% respectively. Over the period there was no evidence of a significant change in the proportions of 'Undecided', averaging 8.6%.

Abstract

Background
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.

Results
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.

Conclusions
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.

Archer, M., Poore, A.G.B., Horn, A.M., Bates, H., Bonser, S., Hunt, M., Russell, J., Archer, N.P., Bye, D.J., and Kehoe, E.J.
Thirty two years of continuous assessment reveal first year university biology students in Australia are rapidly abandoning beliefs in theistic involvement in human origins. Evolution: Education and Outreach 11(1), p. 12. DOI: 10.1186/s12052-018-0083-9

Copyright: © 2018 The authors.
Published Open Access.
Reprinted under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0)

Of course it would be wrong to conclude that there is a causal relationship between Ham leaving Australia and the education of Australians improving so drastically. There is also a plausible relationship between access to information via the Internet and exposure to the dishonesty, disinformation and ignorant arrogance that underpins much of creationism and features so strongly in creation vs evolution 'debates' in Internet groups. And Ham would have been almost as instrumental in providing the lies and disinformation that creationists deploy had he remained in Australia although he might not have had the resources.

The evidence of Australian census data shows that this increased and increasing rejection of religion and religious explanations shows that this is part of a larger and accelerating trend in rejection of religion in Australia. Over a similar period, those responding 'no religion' increased from about 13% to about 28%.

There are undoubted cultural differences between Australia and the USA which could account or this accelerating rejection of religion in Australia while in America, although rejection of religion is increasing, belief in theistic evolution remains astonishingly high for a technologically advanced country and belief in YECism runs at some four times the rate in Australia. The authors cite the beliefs and motives of the original settlers as one possible difference. American colonists are traditionally believed to have been deeply religious fundamentalists while many early settlers in Australia were transported there largely against their will. They relate how 40% of convicts had no religious affiliation and that compulsory attendance at church on Sunday was seen as part of the punishment. On the first attempt to build a church:

...[T]he first Christian cleric in Australia (Rev. Richard Johnson) who sailed with the First Fleet had an incredibly hard time trying to raise funds to build any form of a church. So much was this the case that he ended up paying for the building out of his own wages. The church was finally built in 1794 and shortly after completion, was deliberately burnt down. After losing his church and much of his own income Rev. Johnson filed for a leave of absence to visit England. He never returned to Australia. In 1805 Johnson appears on a list of officers as “On leave in England, no successor or second clergyman appointed.”

So, although these cultural differences undoubtedly contribute to the collapse of creationist superstition in Australia compared to the USA, as undoubtedly does the better science education, it would be very unfair to deprive Ken Ham of his fair share of the credit.

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