It was done. A lot of cleaning up did result. Then, after that, World War 1 broke out.

Now, per that article, 11% of churches are creationist, and those tend to be on the smaller side.

It’s been done. A lot. No cleaning up resulted:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acceptance_of_evolution_by_religious_groups

Since ToE presupposes you’ve already accepted an old earth, it goes for that too. You liked the Hindu system but did not become a Hindu. So it goes.

As it happens, I used to think Hinduism had all its markets locked up. So integrated into its culture as to be functionally ineradicable, operating at innumerable degrees of belief and ritual practice with places for many levels of devotion, containing within itself multiple versions of polytheism and monotheism and pantheism, and in a culture so large and varied that it will not demographically extinguish itself, AND with a cosmology that encompasses time and space so large that one almost could map its concepts onto modern physics, astronomy and geology. Alas, it more or less assumes an eternal universe, so one strike. Still impressive though.

They even have a non-base 10 formula for how long a divine year is compared to a human one. So seven days would never have to be interpreted as seven days.

Look. The bottom line is thanks for the advice, but the scenario you are presenting does not ring true with my experience as a missionary, or as a member. I’ve seen people leave the church, almost leave it, people join it, people almost join it. I’ve known members who are creationists, members who were not, members who were PhDs in Agriculture (I live in an ag school town). I’m just not seeing smarter adherents being particularly prone to leave. Geology and Biology have been around since long before I was born – don’t you think any such thing would be well along and obvious by now?

It’s funny that you immediately go to evolution, when I never mentioned it at all. From that, I would presume that you’ve run into that particular issue in the past. Which isn’t surprising, when you can demonstrate the principles of evolution with an abundance of things like antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

The problem with the failure to account isn’t with the subject area–Particle physics is so far removed from the worlds of the prophets that you can’t find a correspondence with their words. However, you sure as hell start to set up cognitive dissonance when you start out insisting that creation was a seven-day affair, and someone who grew up on a farm starts noting the way selective breeding works and how much more credible evolution becomes when placed up against Sunday school, looking at how diseases evolve under our very own eyes.

Note that I am emphatically not questioning or arguing against religion or spirituality itself; what I am pointing out is that modern religion has generally done a really bad job at reconciling itself with the state of modern knowledge of the world around us. You keep insisting on cleaving unto the fantastic and erroneous under observation, well… Don’t be real surprised when you start losing your smarter adherents, who will hare off after spiritual answers.

Our church is pretty ambiguous about ToE and the mechanics of creation. The church university, BYU, teaches it, but the church itself like the catholic church has no official statement or Sunday School lesson on it. Per wikipedia 25% of the members think its true compared to 50% of seculars. And I would venture to say, of those who think it is true, a majority do not understand it. But they manage to lead productive fulfilling lives whether or not visions of saddled dinosaurs dance in their heads. It is irrelevant. Except to a few specialists who are going to get a much better treatment of it at school than they ever could at church.

Let me ask you a question? Why is ToE so relevant for the religious to have the correct view, but not say, the standard model? Why do you think churches are going to fail if they don’t embrace and explain ToE, but are fine not getting involved in particle physics?

What I am getting at isn’t that the various branches of the faith should adopt the latest pop-cultural BS, which is the source of the problem that you are acknowledging, but that they need to deal with the fact that a bunch of their hallowed beliefs are basically untenable in a world where objective science and study makes those beliefs ridiculous on their faces. You want to keep insisting that creation literally took seven days, and happened 6,000 years ago, you are going to create a bunch of problems with reconciling your religion with a modern understanding of the world around us. The Catholics aren’t terrible at this, but some of the other faiths…? Hooh-boy… Some of the Mormon missionaries I have met? It isn’t funny, really, but I’ve accidentally caused a couple of crises of faith, simply by asking them questions after they have insisted on discussing things with me. Wouldn’t have happened, had their religion equipped them with explanations for things past “And, then, a miracle happened…!”.

And worshipers are human. They’re all part of human society with its faddishness and odd parochial attitudes. But to be religious is to want to connect to something more than this.

So ultimately, a religion must justify its existence to man by connecting to God. That’s what religion is for. Anyone who has a spiritual bent understands this. Anyone who hasn’t got a spiritual bent hasn’t got any business messing with religion or the religious.

The trouble with organized religion is it’s flawed humans who organize it. Cut the priesthood out of the loop.

The ones who did what you say are vanishing. They seem to have no defense against creeping ‘suicide of the west’.