Okay, I want to know how the hell this happened. Who is responsible for this? How can this happen?
Asked whether human life is a result of God’s creation or evolution over millions of years, a majority of Americans said both are probable explanations, a poll suggested on Friday.
Overall, more Americans expressed a strong belief in creationism, or the theory that God created humans in their present form at a single period in time within the last 10,000 years.
A full 66 percent said they believed in creationism, with 39 percent of those polled saying it was definitely true and 27 percent believing it was probably true.
But 53 percent said they believed in evolution, the scientific theory that humans developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life. Eighteen percent said evolution was definitely true, while 35 percent said it was probably true.
The results were released in a USA Today/Gallup poll of 1,007 adults, taken between June 1-3. The margin of error was three percent.
Is this true? Do 39% of Americans feel absolutely certain that God created humans sometime in the last 10,000 years? Do 66% of Americans think creationism is either definitely or probably true?
How can this be? I’ve never knowingly met one of these people and they are supposed to constitute 2 out of every 3 Americans? Where are they hiding?
Where do these people live? How can these people get their pants on and make it to work in the morning?
Something needs to be done. I’m all for letting people pursue their own religious beliefs without any interference, but this is poison on the brain of our society. We can’t compete in the modern world if we are going to allow our children to be raised as idiots.
it’s not a big deal for me — I’m more concerned with how I live my life on this planet than I am with how I got here (or where I’m going, for that matter)…
You fit the profile. Here’s a link to the survey in USA Today.
given the publicity that this kind of pseudo science engenders, that it really isn’t relevant, in the overwhelming opinion of a super majority of the respondents, to the question of electability of someone running for president:
there’s that BushCo™ base # again, eh.
perhaps we’d all be better off concentrating on the issues as opposed to being distracted by notions regarding the significance of creationism and attempts to obscure meaningful dialog with extraneous issues.
just sayin’
lTMF’sA
clik images for info
“ . . .pseudo science . . “
Now if you’d written junk science, maybe even “balderdash”, you’d have been closer to the mark.
My reply above was just a way to direct readers to the “primary source”, ’cause I prefer the perspective from the front of the mule.
l appreciated the link
but damn! and l thought l had the perfect word…wrong end of the mule, eh.
later
lTMF’sA
clik images for info
that person’s beliefs didn’t affect their actions in either enforcing the law, or setting priorities for scientific research, I’d pretty much agree with the survey…I think we’ve got a lot more stuff to worry about…
How seriously can someone take global warming or Peak Oil who doesn’t believe in geological timescales (and thinks the world may end any minute)?
At least if you read the following:
AP Drops ‘Adam’ Bomb: Star at Creationist Museum Runs Sex Site
Adam also screwed every woman in sight.
How can this be? I’ve never knowingly met one of these people and they are supposed to constitute 2 out of every 3 Americans?
Perhaps, Boo, your mystification is a result of your living in Philadelphia. I’m not saying there aren’t creationists there, but they are aware that their beliefs are not socially accepted there and keep them to themselves.
Come on to my place — Arkansas — some time. Trust me; you’ll find ’em, and they ain’t hiding. When last I heard, one who was recently governor here was running for president.
I’ve lived a lot of places. But I can think of only person I’ve known that would possibly say the world is 10,000 years old.
As I say, c’mon down.
are fucking idiots.
Sorry. That’s true. They believe all sorts of amazing crap.
They believe in horoscopes. They believe in lotteries. They buy tickets to raffles. Anyone who ever buys a state lottery ticket is a total IDIOT.
So, they believe in creationism? OK, I’m not surprised.
I could spend $5 on a lottery ticket, or a bottle of Ripple…and the lottery ticket’s easier on my liver…
“Overall, more Dumbfuckians expressed a strong belief in creationism, or the theory that God created humans in their present form at a single period in time within the last 10,000 years.”
Typo fixed.
are fucking idiots.
Sorry. That’s true. They believe all sorts of amazing crap.
They believe in horoscopes. They believe in lotteries. They buy tickets to raffles. Anyone who ever buys a state lottery ticket is a total IDIOT.
So, they believe in creationism? OK, I’m not surprised.
& I got this from a fairly devout Christian relative:
“God designed evolution. It is His hand that has directed the growth of all life on this planet, and, to Him, a day is a million years.”
Neat, huh?
Not all Christians are literalists and not all think that science is anti Christian. In fact, some believe that science discovers the power of God.
I was hoping someone would point out the logic flow in both statements, finding the divine wherever mysteries are unfolded.
Both statements are inclusive, not polarizing.
At any rate, most posters here think of Christians as if they were all deluded nut cases. They are not. And the more people that post here push this misbegotten stereotype, the more Christians of all types will distrust Democrats.
Obviously, Booman, you’re not hanging with the right crowd.
I hate to admit that I’ve got these throwbacks in my gene pool. What really blows my mind is finding people with degrees, legitimate ones and not from Christianist U, who believe this kind of stuff too.
It isn’t really too hard to find them either. Obviously the pollsters do. Try wearing an “I believe Darwin” shirt sometime, maybe, and see how many dirty looks you get, much less people coming up and asking you if you’ve been saved.
Try Canada. It is only a few hundred miles away for most people.
Stockwell “Doris” Day is a minister of Public Safety. He is also a creationist. (He was once the leader of the Aliance Party that became the Conservative party after a hostile take over.)
I think that he may be our biggest threat to public safety, so why not make him a minister.
The Doris comes from his failed attempt to introduce citizenship refrendum into Canada. When he announced it as part of his platform a program “This hour has 22 minutes” immediately did an internet drive in an attempt to force him to change his first name to Doris. After sucessfully meeting the required 3% of eligable voters for the proposed citizenship referendum, Day uped the percentage that would be required to put forward a citizenship referendum. This higher figure (5%) was then met in short order prompting the end of the attempt to bring citizenship referendums to Canada.
Given the choice between being named Doris and killing citizenship referendums, he chose the coward’s way out.
county??? You only live in Philly so take a quick 90 minute drive sometime and bingo, you will find yourself back in the dark ages.
I think the numbers you posted are correct, but the rational is much more challenging to figure. The end results will and have been very insidiously bad for America, and will someday likely be one of the main causes for our downfall from the top of nations as the rest of the world overtakes us with realty based actions and policies!
“There’s a sucker born every minute, but
none of them ever die”
attributed to Joseph Bessimer, a notorious confidence
trickster of the early 1880s known to the police as “Paper Collar
Joe”
the Earth is barely 6,000 years old, dinosaurs were created on the sixth day, and Jesus is the savior who will one day repair the trauma of man’s fall…
makes no sense, poll or no poll. how does one argue with a belief system totally based on faith and compelling uncompromising acquiescence to that belief?…it’s not possible, in my experience. they just shut you out.
frankly, l have to question the validity of polls such as this one, and question their methodology, because if l were to be on the receiving end of one of these surveys, l’d laugh in their ear and hang up.
lTMF’sA
lTMF’sA
clik images for info
Americans, the same people who bought pet rocks, worship the Hummer and elected Bush president.
It’s odd. Out of those three, the pet rock seems to make the most sense.
Since the amazing Reagan Eighties, there’s been a concerted effort to take the logical reasoning out of science classes, culminating in the dumbed-down testing programs of NCLB. Can you be surprised?
It’s not clear whether people can even understand the question well enough to answer it. They learn some science in school but don’t apply it–or any other logical process–to their daily lives. How else could someone listen to the head of NASA and not laugh: “Who’s to say that another two meters of sea level wouldn’t be good for the world?”
Fundamentalists (and I believe that might describe the majority of citizens in rural America) like things black and white, like control and order, like to have their lives mapped out without having to think too hard. So if you ask them about science and religion, the socially acceptable answer is probably “both.”
In my contacts I know almost no creationists, in the strict sense. But I know if a (land line) survey were held, there would be a lot who claimed that belief.
I agree. I think that lots of people in the country would say (given that the majority are some type of Christian) they believe the creation story while not being a crazy creationists.
Sounds crazy, but true: like commented earlier on the thread, you can believe that God created the world in 7 days, but His “days” aren’t a human construct–not “our” days. Or you find comfort in the story but learn evolution.
I honestly believe this to be a busy-body issue: most folks don’t care about the issue, but about what others may say about them. But there are crazy folks out there who are literalists, which isn’t even right: they literally believe the portions of the Bible they want to believe.
The literalists–the 7 real days folks–are insecure. They are hanging on with their fingernails to those little Bibles, because if they doubt one word their whole world will come apart. Because they have not been raised to have their own, authentic, ethical system they wouldn’t know where to go if they admitted any doubt at all.
But the vast majority of folks think they have to say something “religious” to a pollster, even though they know science has it right…and live their daily lives by their own conscience.
Since the amazing Reagan Eighties, there’s been a concerted effort to take the logical reasoning out of science classes
With varying success, that effort goes on for a lot longer, at least since the Scopes trial, which, contrary to popular perceptions, was a failure for rationalists. I suggest you read the Stephen Jay Gould essay titled Moon, Man, and Otto (you’ll find it in the 1983 book Hen’s Teeth And Horse’s Shoes). In it, he demonstrates the success of the anti-evolution movement through market pressure on textbook publishers by describing the parts on evolution in successive editions of the same highschool textbook.
Personally, I don’t have any problem believing that God created man, or that he used evolution over millions of years to do so. I don’t see what the contradiction is — but then, I don’t believe that the Bible is the unchangeable, immutable, literal word of God, written by God Himself.
Personally, I believe you might as easily believe in last Thursdayism as believe that God has nothing better to do than play tricks on a bunch of people to make them think the earth is a lot older than it is.
Science requires critical thinking to find the truth, religion requires accepting what you’re told as truth. Which is easier?
Kurt Vonnegut says I was put on earth to fart around, I can’t prove it, but I believe him.
Ok, I’ll bite.
Define religion please.
Well, I’m comfortable thinking of it as a social phenomenon characterized by faith in a set of beliefs concerning the cause, nature, and purpose of the universe, especially when considered as the creation of a superhuman agency or agencies, usually involving devotional and ritual observances, and often containing a moral code governing the conduct of human affairs.
(But then, I’m also comfortable with plagiarizing and lightly editing a sentence from dictionary.com — or does this statement make it no longer plagiarism?)
There are, of course, other social phenomena that are enough like this to be considered a kind of religion, at least for some purposes.
🙂 I’m still biting.
Faith in a set of beliefs is quite nebulous. For example, one might say I have faith in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
I don’t think Unitarians are going to fit. I know that 20 years ago when I left the Unitarians the group I was with was perhaps more anti-god than, say, multi-faith. I don’t think that Buddhism necessarily fits either.
Indeed, there seem to be a growing number of religions that are attracting atheists – a group that explicitly reject the super human agencies.
Ritual observances seems to be spot on. The moral code is also spot on for some religions. As I am not an expert in religion, I could be wrong about ritual observances.
When looking at why atheists join religions, I would guess that the moral code/philosophy espoused would be a large drawing card.
So far, I see nothing in the definition that requires
.
And if you reverse your statement, you will fully understand the difficulty in making any universal claims about religions.
Here is a non-atheist counter example:
http://www.exlibris.org/nonconform/engdis/seekers.html
Now I have a bone or two that I could pick with that, in particular I suspect that they did have rituals – namely sitting in silence, but I am in no way an expert on the topic.
Re. a series of points in your comment:
————
————
In any event, if someone claimed to have a definition that cleanly divided religious from non-religious social patterns, I would immediately assume that their thinking was crippled by hardening of the categories. Dawn and dusk do not speak against day and night.
religion-like philosophy
That would be Unitarians and the decendants of the seekers. Ammusingly enough there are similarities between them.
But – but you just HAVE TO believe what you are told!
You are a religion and it’s the law.
The big problem is when you have a religious-like philosophy that opposes accepting what one is told, and refuses to accept religious leaders (or even worse, makes the claim that everyone is a religious leader) like the decendants of the seekers. (Damn anarchists of the religious world! Nothing but problems.)
Many people believe in evolution, but they believe god did it. This poll isn’t all that disturbing really, it means that only 1/3 of the population are biblical literalists. Why the pollsters don’t offer a theistic evolution option is beyond me.
When they do, your optimistic interpretation of equating “certain” creationists with the young-Earth creationists doesn’t hold. See my top-level comment below.
On the other hand, Young-Earth creationism isn’t necessarily total literalism, either. Check the May 8-11, 2006 Gallup poll in PollingReport.com’s Religion section, where about three in ten regard the Bible as the actual Word of God, half regard it the inspired Word of God, and 19% regard it a collection of fables.
“this is poison on the brain of our society.” You are starting to sound like Charlie Marx :0)
They show virtually identical answers about familiarity.
I’ll bet 90% of those that believe in creationism said they are totally familiar with the explanation of evolution. And I’ll bet that less that 5% of those people could actually define evolution correctly — more than half would have a monkey in their definition somewhere.
The split is almost identical to those who say the subject is irrelevant in a presidential campaign (75%). But that doesn’t mean it isn’t a criterion they will use in deciding how to vote.
I don’t think they are lying, they just go by what the “trusted other” (i.e., preacher) tells them, just like when they go to vote. It never occurs to them that he may be wrong (or lying) because they are true believers. I have to agree with boran2 and no3reed — there are lots of them, and they ALL vote.
I concur with no3reed and NG: you have probably lived in places where creationism was absent or invisible.
There are countless polls from the last two decades showing similar numbers, check a collection of them at PollingReport.com.
Regarding God-guided evolution, the latest poll giving that option was Newsweek’s in March this year, where 30% chose this view, while 13% saw no part for God and 48% chose the hardcore creationist version. But the trend is nothing new: Gallup has a long series of of creationism polls from 1982 to 2006, the Young-Earth creationist faction oscillated between 44% and 47%, the God-guided-it people between 35% and 40%, there is somewhat of a trend only among those fully accepting Darwin’s view, growing from 9% to 13%. You will also find polls showing majority support for teaching creationism at school.
So creationism is not a consequence of the Reagan era as some suggested upthread, we can only say that the ratios were sustained by the conservative movement (e.g., unlike in Europe, the ‘virus’ also infected newer generations, thus older generations dying out didn’t reduce the ratio).
I myself have encountered the phenomenon of creationism soon after I got onto the internet over a decade ago, and then spent a good part of my free time for 3-4 years debating creationists on-line. I heard of the (earlier) Gallup poll numbers back then, ut already from the numbers and self-confidence of my adversaries I got the impression of a mass phenomenon. I emphasize the self-confidence part: in contrast to you, many wrote with the assumption that normal people are like them, e.g. they were used to live in communities where non-creationists are nonexistent or invisible. I note those on my side of the ‘debate’ included formerly creationist atheists, who on one hand (1) knew the creatonist mentality from the inside, (2) often said that they don’t know any other like-minded people where they live.
The invisible lines that segregate America would be an interesting subject for a study.
In a jam in grad school, I had to take a course in historical methods, so did a study of 100 years of biology textbooks as “primary sources.” It was pretty amazing. You are correct that society took a step back in the Scopes trial, and again in the 50s, and late 70s…you can actually trace social conservatism, correlate it to the economy, and plot out the references to evolution in the textbooks.
Now, it’s obvious science doesn’t work that way. So any historian (or sociologist) must realize that something much deeper is going on here. It’s an effort to scour logic out of American society…and now it’s actually spread to other countries.
As a scientist and an educator, it frightens me.