Designs on the University

The prestigious science journal Nature has a feature in its 28 April 2005 issue titled "Who Has Designs on Your Students' Minds?" This article points out the increasing prevalence with which ID is given attention at our colleges and universities, and the alarmingly receptive audience found among incoming students.

But despite researchers' apparent lack of interest, or perhaps because of it, the movement is catching on among students on US university campuses. Much of the interest can be traced to US teenagers, more than three-quarters of whom believe, before they reach university, that God played some part in the origin of humans. But others are drawn to the idea out of sheer curiosity.

As the article points out, only 20% of adults with a high school education or less believe that the theory of evolution is well supported by the scientific evidence, and only 18% of US teenagers accept human evolution as an unguided process occurring over millions of years. Fully 38% of teens believe that God created human beings in their present form within the last 10,000 or so years.

That's a lot of children being left behind.