Um, Okay

Welp:

In a new national poll [by GfK Public Affairs & Corporate Communications] on America's scientific acumen, more than half of respondents said they were "not too confident" or "not at all confident" that "the universe began 13.8 billion years ago with a big bang."

...Scientists were apparently dismayed by this news, which arrives only a few weeks after astrophysicists located the first hard evidence of cosmic inflation.

...Other polls on America's scientific beliefs have arrived at similar findings. The "Science and Engineering Indicators" survey -- which the National Science Foundation has conducted every year since the early 1980s -- has consistently found only about a third of Americans believe that "the universe began with a huge explosion."

In 2010, the NSF poll rephrased the question, asking whether the following statement was true: "According to astronomers, the universe began with a big explosion." When reworded, more Americans agreed, suggesting more respondents are aware of the science than originally suggested -- they just don't believe the science.

PIX OR IT DIDN'T HAPPEN.

Naturally, the go-to explanation is always religious belief, but there lots of religious people, across religions, who also believe that the universe began 13.8 billion years ago with a big bang (based on what current science can tell us at the moment, with the caveat that new science and technologies may result in adjustments to the theory). There's a lot more going on than that.

There's no single universal answer, either, because individual people have individual (and sometimes overlapping) reasons for disbelieving science of the universe.

And, frankly, I wouldn't even care what people believed, except that disbelief in science of the universe is so inextricably intertwined with the garbage beliefs that are used to legislate oppression.