Interesting Links for 19-01-2017
Eerie Photos Take You Down China’s Neon-Lit Alleyways
(tags: china lighting photos )
When IMAX meets VR
(tags: VirtualReality movies games Technology )
Link cash machines may start charging because of row about network fees
(tags: money banking uk )
0.0% of Icelanders 25 years or younger believe God created the world
(tags: iceland atheism
( Read more... )
The question was "Hvernig heldur þú að heimurinn hafi orðið til?", and the options were "Heimurinn varð til í Miklahvelli (Big bang)", "Guð skapaði heiminn", "Veit ekki / Hef ekki skoðun", and "Annað".
My Icelandic isn't great, but with a bit of Google Translate help, I think that's "How do you think the world came to be?", and the options were "The world was created in the Big Bang", "God created the world", "Don't know / No opinion" and "Other".
Your option is omitted. I'm not sure the first option entirely captures my own (entirely atheist and fairly mainstream scientist) view either: the instant of creation itself is the tricky bit scientifically. And also, if I'm being picky, on our current best theories, the world wasn't created until many billion years after the Big Bang, although that could be a nicety of translation and "heiumurinn" might mean more like "universe" in this context.
Another important thing to note is that the numbers are very small. There were 746 valid responses to this question, and only 102 of those were under 25s. Now, as a proportion of the eligible population (Icelanders) that's surprisingly large compared to other surveys I look at. But it's still very small as an absolute number. Only percentages are given, and for under-25s it's 93.9% Big Bang, 0.0% God, 3.0% Don't know/No opinion, and 3.1% Other. Frustratingly, I can't reproduce how they got those percentages. It looks a bit like 96/0/3/3 people, but that would be 94.1%/0.0%/2.9%/2.9%. But anyway - on this sort of data, a difference of less than 10% is no difference at all.
As a finding, this is so not worthy of headlining a news article.
The boring finding - that commitment to Christianity shows a decline by age in Iceland and by rural/city divide, and an majority of Icelanders favour a separation of church and state - seems pretty robust across the data. But that's not clickbaity (I'm not sure it even counts as news) so it loses.
One useful and less contentious thing I took from the linked article is that Hallgrímskirkja is an astonishingly wonderful building.
Reply
Leave a comment