Third of Americans Say Evidence Has Supported Darwin's Evolution Theory

Gallup.com ^ | 11/19/04 | Gallup

[jcsmonogram]

GALLUP NEWS SERVICE

PRINCETON, NJ -- Some 145 years after the publication of Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species, controversy about the validity and implications of his theory still rages. Darwin personally encountered much resistance after his book was published in 1859. Seventy-nine years ago, the famous Scopes Monkey Trial in Tennessee brought the issue of exactly where human beings came from into sharp public focus in the United States. Indeed, as recently as this month, a court case in Cobb County, Ga., dealing with the treatment of evolution and creationism in school textbooks received nationwide publicity. November's National Geographic Magazine asked on its cover: "Was Darwin Wrong?" and then proceeded to devote 33 pages to answering that question.

Darwin might be surprised to find such debate still raging nearly a century and a half after he published his book. He might also be surprised to find that even today there is significantly less than majority agreement from the American public that his theory of evolution is supported by the evidence.

Gallup has asked Americans twice in the last three years to respond to the following question about Darwin's theory:

Just your opinion, do you think that Charles Darwin's theory of evolution is –  [ROTATED: a scientific theory that has been well-supported by evidence, (or) just one of many theories and one that has not been well-supported by evidence], or don't you know enough about it to say?

[GarySpFc]

Any scientist that would be so certain about something that is still arguable, is not much of a scientist. True classic scientists, like Einstein, may not "believe" in the classic sense, but had enough wisdom not to make absolute statements about it.

And yet Darwinists say the theory of evolution is fact, and any discussion of other theories should not be allowed.

[Dimensio]

Hmm.. ok, so how the first living organism was created???

The origin of the first living organism has nothing to do with evolution. Evolution deals with life that already exists, it does not address how the first life came to exist.

[Dimensio]

Reading this article I am once again forced to ask when was the last time monkey turned into man?

Such a thing has never happened. Why would you expect such a thing to happen?

[Modernman]

I don't doubt for a second that God left out many details, but to think natural selection had anything to do with creation is atheism...period.

Around 1.3 billion of the world's Christians disagree with you, of course. I guess the Pope is an "atheist" in your book.

Polls show the majority of people believe in God and Creationism, not Darwin.

That just shows that the public schools do a poor job teaching science.

[Socrates1]

I would make exactly the same point about the pointless argument whether Creation or Evolution is the "right" answer.

My belief is that both are partially right but both are incomplete explanations.

Ergo, neither side can "prove" they are right, and it comes down to a simply a matter of competing beliefs.

That is what the polls show. but the writer of the article seemed to conclude that some people were "wrong", and some "right. I leave it to you to determine which side he thought was "right".

My answer is both (paritally), and neither (completely), That "choice" was missing in the poll, which makes it invalid since it artificially forces some answer to make a point.

Notice the large number that "don't have enough information". What conclusions can be drawn from those responses?

The writer apparently didn't think they were significant, or else he attempted to align their answer with one side or another.

[Long Cut]

"Now I know how Bill Murray felt in Groundhog Day."

Ain't it da trut'.

Evolution requires MORE faith blah blah blah...

There's NO evidence for evolution...

Second Law of Thermodynamics blah blah blah...

Evolution IS a religion...

No transitionals blah blah blah...

Quote salads

Arguments from incredulity

Refusal to even consider mountains of evidence

Ignoring lab tests and experiments

Equating evolution with atheism, Communism, Naziism, etc...

It's like a broken record. EVERY thread starts from zero as if NONE of these "points" has ever been refuted, and quite conclusively. Oh, I left out "It's just a THEORY!"

I agree, it does make these threads rather tiresome. It also makes one wonder if there isn't some ulterior motive behind some posters. Evidently the half-truths, outright lies, and misinformation are being repeated so often that they are being blindly regurgitated in place of evidence.

[Modernman]

And yet Darwinists say the theory of evolution is fact

No, they don't.

and any discussion of other theories should not be allowed.

Come up with another scientific theory and we can discuss it.

[Dimensio]

And yet Darwinists say the theory of evolution is fact, and any discussion of other theories should not be allowed.

No one says that the discussion of any other theories should be disallowed. The problem is that a lot of people are pushing crackpot notions that are not theories (ie, they do not conform to the scientific method), claiming that they are theories, and demanding equal time for their non-scientific viewpoint in scientific discussions.

[Modernman]

Second Law of Thermodynamics blah blah blah...

I don't think we've seen that one on this thread yet, so maybe we're making progress.

[Doctor Stochastic]

There are no other theories. Not every claim is a theory.

[Socrates1]

Wrong! In the scientific field, theories are antecedents of laws.

All scientific "laws" began as "theories", which were later proved, discarded, or remain as theories awaiting "proof"

[WildTurkey]

001:001 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

001:002 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

And so on with the whales and the fishes and then the animals and finally man. Sounds like evolution to me!

[Avenger]

"He's a lover of life but a player of pawns
yes, the King on His sunset lies waiting for dawn
to light up His Jungle as play is resumed.
The monkeys seem willing to strike up the tune."

-Jethro Tull

[Buggman]

How about "Why do those with a belief in God find the theory incompatible with that belief?"

Well, insofar as people do, it's mostly a backlash against evolutionists who have used Darwinism to attack Christians for the last century. Heck, even here on FR you can find vestiges of that.

But here's my thing: Since I believe in a God who can create by fiat but who may choose to exercise His power as He wills, Darwinism (that is, strictly as a scientific theory) isn't a problem for my faith in Jesus Christ--but I'm not married to the theory the way some people are either. I can therefore look at it skeptically and demand that those scientists promoting it prove it rather than assume it without undermining my worldview. A non-theist (and I'll include Deists in that category for this discussion) tends to assume the truth of evolution and accept its claims by faith, having no other "creation myth" to fall back on.

I'm principally a proponent of Intellegent Design, which as a theory is not contrary to the theory of evolution itself (in fact, many IDers are also evolutionists). However, I get greatly annoyed by the presumption of many of the evos here and elsewhere that, "Well, evolution is so manifestly correct that anyone who challenges it must be an idiot, a charlatan, a fundie, or all three at once!"

I can't help but notice the parallelism between that kind of attack and the rantings coming out of the blue counties about the rest of the country right now.

Quite aside from abiogenesis, which is such an absurdedly insoluable problem for abiogenesis that many of the best evo proponents try to simply avoid the subject, claiming that it has nothing to do with the core of Darwinism, there are other problems with the evidence for the theory insofar as the fossil record and such are concerned. These problems are pretty much expunged or glossed over in textbooks, while manifest frauds are still taught as evidences. I have a real problem with that.

In any case, the fact is that despite billions of dollars of both government and private funding and well over a century of having a lock on the educational institutions and media, and all the fraudulent "evidences" (Nebraska man, the peppered moth photos, etc.), fewer people firmly believe in evolution than believe in the Virgin Birth. Perhaps if the evos stopped acting like a bunch of Michael Moore democrats scalded by the election results, they would take the time to find out exactly why that's the case. Go read some of the literature on our side, guys: It's not ignorance of the facts, its another perspective on what those facts add up to.

[Dimensio]

Wrong! In the scientific field, theories are antecedents of laws.

All scientific "laws" began as "theories", which were later proved, discarded, or remain as theories awaiting "proof"

Er, No.

The law of gravity is a mathematical formula that describes the force resulting from the attraction of two masses.

The theory of gravity attempts to explain why that attraction exists in the first place.

They are two different concepts. One explains what happens, the other attempts to explain why it happens.

A scientific explanation starts out as a hypothesis. If that hypothesis is not falsified in subsequent testing, and evidence for its validity is uncovered, it becomes regarded as a theory. Laws may be derived from the theory or a law may lead to formulation of a theory (starting with a hypothesis) to explain it, but the theory itself will never become a law, nor will it ever be "proven". Theories and laws serve two different functions within science.

[GarySpFc]

Galileo was persecuted unto death, and today the flat earth society is still around. Slow, but still progress.

--------------- The Myth of the Flat Earth
Summary by Jeffrey Burton Russell

for the American Scientific Affiliation Conference

August 4, 1997 at Westmont College
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

How does investigating the myth of the flat earth help teachers of the history of science?

First, as a historian, I have to admit that it tells us something about the precariousness of history. History is precarious for three reasons: the good reason that it is extraordinarily difficult to determine "what really happened" in any series of events; the bad reason that historical scholarship is often sloppy; and the appalling reason that far too much historical scholarship consists of contorting the evidence to fit ideological models. The worst examples of such contortions are the Nazi and Communist histories of the early- and mid-twentieth century.

Contortions that are common today, if not widely recognized, are produced by the incessant attacks on Christianity and religion in general by secular writers during the past century and a half, attacks that are largely responsible for the academic and journalistic sneers at Christianity today.

A curious example of this mistreatment of the past for the purpose of slandering Christians is a widespread historical error, an error that the Historical Society of Britain some years back listed as number one in its short compendium of the ten most common historical illusions. It is the notion that people used to believe that the earth was flat--especially medieval Christians.

It must first be reiterated that with extraordinary few exceptions no educated person in the history of Western Civilization from the third century B.C. onward believed that the earth was flat.

A round earth appears at least as early as the sixth century BC with Pythagoras, who was followed by Aristotle, Euclid, and Aristarchus, among others in observing that the earth was a sphere. Although there were a few dissenters--Leukippos and Demokritos for example--by the time of Eratosthenes (3 c. BC), followed by Crates(2 c. BC), Strabo (3 c. BC), and Ptolemy (first c. AD), the sphericity of the earth was accepted by all educated Greeks and Romans.

Nor did this situation change with the advent of Christianity. A few--at least two and at most five--early Christian fathers denied the sphericity of earth by mistakenly taking passages such as Ps. 104:2-3 as geographical rather than metaphorical statements. On the other side tens of thousands of Christian theologians, poets, artists, and scientists took the spherical view throughout the early, medieval, and modern church. The point is that no educated person believed otherwise.

Historians of science have been proving this point for at least 70 years (most recently Edward Grant, David Lindberg, Daniel Woodward, and Robert S. Westman), without making notable headway against the error. Schoolchildren in the US, Europe, and Japan are for the most part being taught the same old nonsense. How and why did this nonsense emerge?

In my research, I looked to see how old the idea was that medieval Christians believed the earth was flat. I obviously did not find it among medieval Christians. Nor among anti-Catholic Protestant reformers. Nor in Copernicus or Galileo or their followers, who had to demonstrate the superiority of a heliocentric system, but not of a spherical earth. I was sure I would find it among the eighteenth-century philosophes, among all their vitriolic sneers at Christianity, but not a word. I am still amazed at where it first appears.

No one before the 1830s believed that medieval people thought that the earth was flat.

The idea was established, almost contemporaneously, by a Frenchman and an American, between whom I have not been able to establish a connection, though they were both in Paris at the same time. One was Antoine-Jean Letronne (1787-1848), an academic of strong antireligious prejudices who had studied both geography and patristics and who cleverly drew upon both to misrepresent the church fathers and their medieval successors as believing in a flat earth, in his On the Cosmographical Ideas of the Church Fathers (1834). The American was no other than our beloved storyteller Washington Irving (1783-1859), who loved to write historical fiction under the guise of history. His misrepresentations of the history of early New York City and of the life of Washington were topped by his history of Christopher Columbus (1828). It was he who invented the indelible picture of the young Columbus, a "simple mariner," appearing before a dark crowd of benighted inquisitors and hooded theologians at a council of Salamanca, all of whom believed, according to Irving, that the earth was flat like a plate. Well, yes, there was a meeting at Salamanca in 1491, but Irving's version of it, to quote a distinguished modern historian of Columbus, was "pure moonshine. Washington Irving, scenting his opportunity for a picturesque and moving scene," created a fictitious account of this "nonexistent university council" and "let his imagination go completely...the whole story is misleading and mischievous nonsense."

But now, why did the false accounts of Letronne and Irving become melded and then, as early as the 1860s, begin to be served up in schools and in schoolbooks as the solemn truth?

The answer is that the falsehood about the spherical earth became a colorful and unforgettable part of a larger falsehood: the falsehood of the eternal war between science (good) and religion (bad) throughout Western history. This vast web of falsehood was invented and propagated by the influential historian John Draper (1811-1882) and many prestigious followers, such as Andrew Dickson White (1832-1918), the president of Cornell University, who made sure that the false account was perpetrated in texts, encyclopedias, and even allegedly serious scholarship, down to the present day. A lively current version of the lie can be found in Daniel Boorstin's The Discoverers, found in any bookshop or library.

The reason for promoting both the specific lie about the sphericity of the earth and the general lie that religion and science are in natural and eternal conflict in Western society, is to defend Darwinism. The answer is really only slightly more complicated than that bald statement. The flat-earth lie was ammunition against the creationists. The argument was simple and powerful, if not elegant: "Look how stupid these Christians are. They are always getting in the way of science and progress. These people who deny evolution today are exactly the same sort of people as those idiots who for at least a thousand years denied that the earth was round. How stupid can you get?"

But that is not the truth.

[DameAutour]

The Creator may not be the actual reason behind creation?

That sounds nonsensical.

[bert]

I would argue that 60 % of Americans are not adequately educated to know one way or the other. It may be higher than that.

[Dimensio]

Quite aside from abiogenesis, which is such an absurdedly insoluable problem for abiogenesis that many of the best evo proponents try to simply avoid the subject, claiming that it has nothing to do with the core of Darwinism

Well, there would also be the fact that abiogenesis really does not have anything to do with evolution. Darwin didn't even include it in his theory; he attributed the origin of the first life forms to a "Creator".

[Dimensio]

It may be higher than that.

I'm putting my money on 75% or more.