Posted on 10/23/2009 8:18:13 PM PDT by john in springfield
After spending time on some of the recent discussions here at FR about Young Earth Creationism (YEC) and other points of view (which I will call Old Earth Creationism (OEC) and Naturalistic Evolution), I found myself wondering: how many FReepers (and how many Americans) hold each particular view?
Obviously, there aren't any statistics on FReepers. But there are on Americans as a whole, and on certain groups of Americans.
The best general resource I've found so far on people's viewpoints is located here. I will summarize some of those here.
(Note: This page uses slightly different terms for a couple of these viewpoints, but as far as I can tell, they mean the same thing.)
About 45% accept the Young Earth Creationist viewpoint, about 37% accept the Old Earth Creationist viewpoint, and around 12% to 14% accept the Naturalistic Evolution viewpoint.
This has held fairly steady over the past 25 years or so. The percentage who believe in NE may have increased slightly, but overall, the numbers have held fairly steady.
A CBS News poll gave a bit different percentages: YEC 55%, OEC 27%, NE 13%.
Observations:
There are a lot of people who believe in young earth creationism, and there are also a lot of people who believe in old earth creationism as well.
The vast majority of Americans believe in God.
The majority of Americans believe in evolution.
The numbers change significantly among the college-educated:
YEC: 25%
OEC: 54%
NE: 17%
It is interesting to me that most - a full 54% - college-educated Americans accept the Old-Earth Creationist (or theistic evolutionist) view.
Note also the effect that a college education seems to have: With a few exceptions, people who go to college don't stop believing in God. However, quite a few do seem to shift from YEC to OEC.
This graph also means that an awful lot of people who don't go to college believe in YEC rather than in either OEC or NE.
Note that while this poll is nearly 20 years old, based on what we know from some other polls, overall beliefs do not seem to have changed greatly during this time.
YEC: 5%
OEC: 40%
NE: 55%
Note: The word "scientist" seems to be very vague in this poll, which apparently includes a lot of people with professional degrees in fields completely unrelated to biology, geology, etc.
In any event, a majority of "scientists" don't seem to believe that God was involved in the development of life on earth. It's not a very large majority, though. "Scientists" are divided as to whether God was involved. Most of those who think He was believe that this involvement included the process of evolution.
However, given that only 5% of "scientists" support YEC, the under-1% figure may well be true. I just don't know. Nor do I have access to the original 1987 Newsweek article to see exactly how they got their information.
If there's another poll or two out there on this, it might be interesting to know about.
A 2007 Harris Poll showed the following percentages of Christians who accept the theory of evolution:
Catholics: 43%
Protestants: 30%
"Born-Again Christians": 16%
Finally, a 2005 CBS Poll stated that a full two thirds (67%) of Americans believe that it's possible for one to believe both in God and in evolution.
Personally, I simply have never been able to conceive of God being threatened by truth. Of course, if you really take this position, then you have to be prepared for the real possibility that your understanding of certain things will change.
God cannot be threatened. Only distorted beliefs and practices can be threatened by the truth.
And Einstein's General Theory of Relativity is insufficiently comprehensive to describe the phenomenom of the universe but man is always advancing unless research is shutdown by narrow-minded control freeks.
How can Truth be threatened by truth? And I really do take this position, and I totally agree with your "takeaway": "then you have to be prepared for the real possibility that your understanding of certain things will change."
All I know for sure is that the more I know, the more I realize how much I don't know. But this doesn't trouble me; for I'm completely happy to continue on the quest, by the light of the Holy Spirit....
Certain lines of research don't get funded nowadays. To my mind, the real "control freaks" are the folks in academe, the professional journals, and politicized funding agencies who are mainly in the business of maintaining the status quo; for it benefits them. But I think science suffers....
There is no room for a mix of creationist theory with evolutionary theory. They are mutually exclusive.”
I think that is pretty much the view of many others. The age of the earth and the age of life on it need not be the same or even close from what I've learned.
But, according to YEC'ers, accepting an old earth is denying the Bible and totally non-Christian.
I thought that last part just too good to keep to myself and that you might remember it.
It may be too good to keep it to yourself but since noone can understand your post, you are keeping it to yourself.
That last part about earth bound perceptions was rather silly, wasn’t it? I’ll put it back where I found it and ignore any further posts.
Don't you mean:
'That last part about earth bound perceptions was rather silly, wasn’t it? I’ll put it back where I found it and I'll not make any further posts.'
“I thought this should be educational for all” bookmark
:-)
“Come to think of it, the longer one spends in a communist “education” system, the more likely one is to be a revolutionary evolutionist. Indeed, for those who go all the way to the top of a communist “educational” system, I would imagine that there would be very few non-communists left among their classmates. In fact, I am quite confident of this, as I have watched this story repeat itself over and over in the books written by Soviet, Red Chinese, Vietnamese, Eastern European, and Cuban defectors. In most cases they become more and more idealistic about communism the longer they remain in their indoctrination system, and then they become dissalusioned when they finally enter the “society” of their respective country-sized prison camps, and are soon dreaming of escape.
It seems the same thing holds true in the hard-left American university system. The higher American students rise in Indoctination U., the more likely they are to become an libtarted, evo-atheist, Obamabots. Indeed, isn’t the Obama administration filled with Ivy Leaguers who have earned graduate degrees from what David Horowitz would call Indoctrination U.?”
YOU are EXACTLY RIGHT!
Lighten up there, Francis U.R. Whatajoke. I just checked your posting history, and you have variously referred to Creaionists and IDers as insane, stupid, dolts, idiots, fundies, dumbasses, goofballs, rampage shooters, and...drumroll please...”SOCIALLY RETARDED.”
Now get out a mirror and start swearing at your sad, hypocritically self like you just told off Agamemnon. Or does the PC rulebook exempt you from the prohibition from saying such things if you have (or claim to have) a special needs son?
PS Is your Darwin Central screenname 38sw? Just curious.
==The “joke” doth protest too much.
You are absolutely, 100% correct...see my last.
My bad, it turns out the Whattajoke’s screenname is Whattajoke on Darwin Central as well. Or perhaps Whattajoke is both people. At any rate, Whattajoke has been using the word “retarded” to refer to creationists FReepers on Darwin Central as well. See link:
http://forum.darwincentral.org/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=22227&start=425
PS Whattajoke... Just out of curiousity, do you have two screennames over at DC?
I noticed your and your minions trend of using “retreads” when you meant to use the word “retards”.
“Come to think of it, the longer one spends in a communist “education” system, the more likely one is to be a revolutionary evolutionist.”
So.....education is bad?
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