(CNN)–Famed TV scientist Bill Nye is slamming creationism in a new online videofor Big Think titled “Creationism Is Not Appropriate For Children.”
“Denial of evolution is unique to the United States,” Nye begins in a YouTube video posted on Thursday. The video quickly picked up steam over the weekend and as of Monday morning had been viewed more than 1,100,000 times.
Nye – a mechanical engineer and television personality best known for his program, “Bill Nye the Science Guy” – said the United States has great capital in scientific knowledge and “when you have a portion of the population that doesn’t believe in it, it holds everyone back.”
“Your world becomes fantastically complicated if you don’t believe in evolution,” Nye said in the Web video.
Creationists are a vast and varied group in the United States. Most creationists believe in the account of the origins of the world as told in the Book of Genesis, the first book of the Bible.
In the creation account, God creates Adam and Eve, the world, and everything in it in six days.
For Christians who read the Genesis account literally, or authoritatively as they would say, the six days in the account are literal 24-hour periods and leave no room for evolution. Young Earth creationists use this construct and biblical genealogies to determine the age of the Earth, and typically come up with 6,000 to 10,000 years.
The Gallup Poll has been tracking Americans’ views on creation and evolution for the past 30 years. In June it released its latest findings, which showed 46% of Americans believed in creationism, 32% believed in evolution guided by God, and 15% believed in atheistic evolution.
During the 30 years Gallup has conducted the survey, creationism has remained far and away the most popular answer, with 40% to 47% of Americans surveyed saying they believed that God created humans in their present form at one point within the past 10,000 years.
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