Creationism isn't just a problem for the United States. In South Korea, The Society for Textbook Revise (STR) is trying to eliminate the "error" of evolution from school texts -- and has succeeded in getting the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (MEST) to ask publishers to remove examples of evolution from textbooks.
Why is creationism so strong in South Korean? Well, it's implausible that it's just a coincidence that South Korean also happens to have a large number of conservative Christians.
Even the nation's leading science institute -- the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology -- has a creation science display on campus. "The exhibition was set up by scientists who believed in creation science back in 1993," says Gab-duk Jang, a pastor of the campus church. The institute also has a thriving Research Association for Creation Science, run by professors and students, he adds.
In a 2009 survey conducted for the South Korean documentary The Era of God and Darwin, almost one-third of the respondents didn't believe in evolution. Of those, 41% said that there was insufficient scientific evidence to support it; 39% said that it contradicted their religious beliefs; and 17% did not understand the theory.
The numbers approach those in the United States, where a survey by the research firm Gallup has shown that around 40% of Americans do not believe that humans evolved from less advanced forms of life.
The roots of the South Korean antipathy to evolution are unclear, although Jeon suggests that they are partly "due to strong Christianity in the country". About half of South Korea's citizens practice a religion, mostly split between Christianity and Buddhism.
Source: Nature
The United States has a trade deficit, but I wonder if we have a trade surplus when it comes to pseudoscientific nonsense. We do seem to export a lot of it and then harm a lot of other countries in the process. It's bad enough that we're damaging our own futures this way, but why we do have to drag down other nations with us?
Can't Christians just leave well enough alone?
I smell Moonies behind this fiasco.