Pat Robertson recently attempted to explain why more miracles seem to happen for "simple, humble" foreigners than for Americans, and he said it has to do with evolution.
On Monday's episode of the Christian Broadcasting Network's "700 Club," a viewer wrote in and asked why miracles -- "like people being raised from the dead, blind eyes opened, lame people walking" -- often happen overseas and not in the United States, RawStory notes. Robertson was quick to respond that the teaching of evolution in America might be partly to blame.
"Those people overseas didn't go to Ivy League schools," he said. "We're so sophisticated. We think we've got everything figured out. We know about evolution, we know about Darwin, we know about all these things that says God isn’t real. We know about all this stuff."
He continued, adding that "in the more advanced schools, we've been inundated with skepticism and secularism. And overseas they're simple, humble. You tell them God loves them, and they say, 'Okay, he loves me.' You say, 'God'll do miracles' and they say, 'Okay, we believe him.' That's what God's looking for. That's why they have miracles."
However, evolution is taught in schools around the globe, according to Scientific American's Katherine Harmon.
Students between the ages of 14 and 16 learn about evolution in the United Kingdom, Harmon writes. In 2007, the European Union's Parliamentary Assembly issued a report asking member states to "promote scientific knowledge and the teaching of evolution and to oppose firmly any attempts at teaching creationism as a scientific discipline." Mention of evolution also appears in the textbooks of most high school students in Muslim countries, written within a religious framework.
The 83-year-old televangelist has long been an opponent of the "liberal" education system in the U.S. In March, he said leftists are using public schools to "indoctrinate" America's youth and "force them into a mindset that is contrary to what their parents believe."