He argues that America has more science than anywhere else, but is more religious than comparable first world countries.

That seems like an argument to me.

You could counter that America was filled early on with particularly zealous types, and that it's a big enough country that the science and the religion could find their own areas to bloom separately, but that may actually be supporting his argument.

What does it mean for America to have more science? There seems to be a very large portion of the population of America who don't understand even the basic tenets of the scientific process, and can't define science, much less know about specific theories and the math behind experiments.

That's an observation (which is false thus stated ; america produces science but people are not as scientifically literate as western europe. And still, loud religious zealots pose no threat politically like they do in Turkey). his argument is

> science will not destroy it

That's a claim, not an argument.

yep, a claim that's lacking arguments.

USA is an outlier.

http://www.darwinsmoney.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/relig...

Like Kuwait:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/files/uploa...

Interesting that on the evolution vs GDP graph, Turkey is another outlier, with even lower belief in evolution than their GDP would suggest. Turkey, and it's teaching of evolution is brought up in the original article as a failure of science to destroy religion. I wonder if that survey records that the teaching of evolution never worked, or reflects the backlash against that belief.

Evolution is a scientific fact for local adaptation, i.e. developing mechanisms to cope with environmental changes between generations. In a geological timescale it's just a theory, basically extrapolating local changes to creating whole new species (which we obviously can't observe yet). There are various issues with this extrapolation, i.e. from computational complexity point of view the time from the start of the Universe might not be sufficient to come up with precision needed for a new specie. This obviously then puts evolution among other hypotheses like the religious one (there is a God, or there are multiple gods, creating the world), simulation hypothesis (we are a hypercomputer game/reality show/testing ground/miniatures/VM etc.), chaos theory, total determinism a'la Bell equation etc. From these religion is the only one that gives most people some meaning/goal to their lives, especially during hard times when it's easier to off oneself, so no wonder it's going to stay. Evolution also plays against non-religious people as these often produce less children than religious ones, increasing odds of their genotype to survive and keep the same culture. So in fact being religious might be a better evolutionary strategy, which is quite funny.

Turkey isn't an outlier they are literally on the line.

The line is drawn including Turkey, but not including America. Visually, they both look like outliers.

1. Looking at this at a national level, you do not know whether the people earning all the wealth are also the people who have the same belief (although the _probability_ is higher). 2. There are large numbers of important countries excluded from both plots.

Historians often talk about waves of religiousity in the US. The puritans were just want strand of colonists, just the one America loves to enphasized the most. Jamestown was more economic than religious.

> He argues that America has more science than anywhere else, but is more religious than comparable first world countries.

That's making two statements, not arguing that those two things show the points in the title. Maybe those two things are an accident? Maybe they're unrelated to the conclusions. To make an argument they'd have to argue why they support those conclusions.

How exactly does America "have more science"? How do you even quantify such a thing?

By numbers of people who have gone to higher education?

By numbers of Nobel prize winners?

By numbers of practicing researchers?

By numbers of technological and scientific jobs?

By the presence of advanced technological infrastructure?

I mean there are tons of ways to "quantify such a thing", and in most of those America comes close to the top or at the top.

You'd need to bring down those numbers to a per-capita basis for them to be relevant though, I don't think America is anything special.

Well they have a lot of science but they lack proper education.

Except the several pretty crystal clear arguments and statistics it gives?