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.
Why all the hate?
As you well know by now, I'm not a phony.
I may not share all of the same views as you, but I'm not a phony.
"Do to others as you would have them do to you."
Can you honestly say that you have treated me as you would like to be treated?
"By this all men will know that you are my disciples: if you love one another."
Does your behavior on this board show that you are a disciple of Jesus Christ?
If not, then you owe an apology. Not just to me, but to Jesus as well.
They took his 'abuse' button away.
...and a phony.
PS Did you ever read that book you told me I was too afraid to read, but that, like so many other hypocritial areas of your life, you wound up admitting you hadn’t even read yourself?!
Look, you could have no possible way of knowing this, but I started my whole journey as a young earth creationist.
I even wrote a paper defending young earth creationism. That was a very long time ago, and it probably wasn't that good of a paper, but I wrote it. And I meant it when I did.
I first became a Christian because I believed in the truth of Christianity. I was convinced that the Christian faith was true.
And I also believed that God was not afraid of the truth, and that therefore, I shouldn't be either.
You might think that a mistake on my part, but I still believe that God is not afraid of the truth.
Do I have doubts about God? Yes. So did Abraham. So did Mother Teresa. So did Thomas. And so, apparently, did Jesus. At least, he asked: "My God, my God - why have You forsaken me?"
That sounds like a bit of doubt to me.
So if you want to cast me as not being a Christian for having doubts, then go ahead. All it will show (to me, at least) is that you may not have lived very long as a Christian, or thought very deeply, or experienced or ever understood some of the blows that some of the others of us have.
Do I sometimes think that I'm less of a Christian for not having the easy certainty that I first possessed? Sometimes. And sometimes, more of the time, I would say, I believe that my faith is older and better and very possibly stronger for the journey.
Why? Because I think my faith has withstood challenges that you probably have no idea of. And yet I still believe in God.
I have doubts, and yet I obey. And you have no doubts, but will not obey God's commands even when they are spelled out for you in complete plainness, again and again.
Tell me: Which do you think is a "real" Christian?
Obey what? The first words you ever said to me in the threads were all insults! Quit playing the martyr already. Don’t you realize that all the evidence of your real behavior is in the threads? Why don’t you just admit that you lost your faith (assuming you ever really had a genuine faith to begin with). I could honestly respect that. But don’t try to contort yourself into something you’re not just so you can act like the victim. Surely you can’t feel good about yourself when you engage in such behavior?
Okay. I’ll be very honest here.
Sometimes I do wonder whether I’m still a Christian.
But when push comes to shove, if you ask me whether I still believe in God, the answer is: yes. I do.
Based on all that I know and all of the experiences in my life (and in spite of some of them), I believe in God.
If you ask me whether I pray to God, the answer is: yes. In fact, I was praying to God just now. For you.
And if you ask me whether I am still a Christian, the answer is: by God’s grace, as much as I know how to be.
The word “Christian” frankly frightens me a bit now. I know what it means. It means “little Christ.” Am I a “little Christ?” Very honestly: a hell of a lot less than I ought to be, and a hell of a lot less than I would like to be. (And yes, I know very well that Christians aren’t “supposed” to use the word “hell,” except as a literal noun. But I no longer think God is quite so concerned about the little tiny stuff. I instead believe that He is concerned about the big stuff - like how people treat each other.)
I think most people who know me would say I’m a model citizen. Except for a rare cuss word - usually spoken to myself in private - I do pretty much just what a “good Christian” should do. I am in church every single week. I don’t go on Wednesdays; I work instead. But every Sunday, I’m there.
I am scrupulously honest in my business dealings. I even pay taxes on cash that people give me, even when they tell me they are paying me cash so that I can skip the taxes if I want.
When the man with the Christian fish on his car suggests that I cut corners on obeying the law, I politely turn him down.
I drive faster than the speed limit.
But generally, I’m pretty much of a model citizen. People who know me in person like me, as far as I know and can tell. I certainly try to do to them as I would have them do to me.
I do my best, every day, to live like I think I should and like I think God wants me to.
But am I a Christian? Am I really a “little Christ?”
To claim that name honestly sounds a bit arrogant to me now. The members of the early church didn’t even claim that title for themselves. They called themselves “disciples.” Learners.
If I can just be that, and a halfway-decent, sincere follower of Jesus, in the way that I understand that I should follow him, then I will be happy.
And would you like an apology? I apologize. I have not been as sensitive as I should have been. I have not been as kind as I should have been. For that, I apologize.
In any event, there’s not really anything more I can say. You and I apparently do not see eye to eye. As for “obey what?”, I will have to leave that with you. If you really are a follower of Christ, then you will understand it eventually. If not, well, in either case there’s nothing more that I can do. It’s all up to you.
I wish you well.
Their only stated goal is to have ‘infidels’ banned and removed from FR. Again, I state that they are becoming the new “christian taliban’, especially on FR. They act just like them.
Here are his first words. Not an insult.
"ping to those people I know of who seem interested in the issue. :-)"
I think if you actually sat down with those that answer as YEC and fully explained to them some particulars of that belief (that Man walked the earth with 100+ species of large meat eating dinosaurs until the Flood killed them all off), they’d put themselves in the OEC category.
I started to go their with my BIL. He is a really nice guy but his mind can not process this type of information.
CW : Metmom won't declare that God is the Intelligent Designer.
I confess that Jesus Christ is my Lord and Savior.
My opinion as to whether He is something which is some definition which you claim is irrelevant.
It depends on the modifier. Communist and a hard-left “education” are bad (such as the reeducation one would receive at an Ivy League school, a UC school, etc).[snip] This is precisely why the more education you get from our leftist universities, the more like you are to vote for Obama, or believe darwood’s evo-religious creation myth.
__________
It must hurt you deep inside to recognize that fully 62% of all the people occupying Cabinet positions in Reagan’s administrations were educated in the Ivy League. You can look it up. I did.
A handful from Stanford, Boston College, Notre Dame and Penn State, and than puts the percentage of Reagan’s cabinet educated at your communist and hard left schools at over 70%.
Shocking, eh, that people so educated could have done what they did, given your comments about those schools.
That's ironic coming from someone who won't recognize the Biblical definition of a Christian.
*Yawn*
That's getting as old, and meaningless, as the Hitler comparisons.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.