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.
The Bible says that? Thats a lot of food! Maybe he grew some plants on the ark?
Yes, unless I misunderstand Gen. 6:21,22.
You are correct! I looked it up.
Always good to check out what one is told and all that...
I am willing to bet hard coin that a ‘Belief in GLOBAL WARMING, by Education Level’ would be the mirror image of ‘Belief in Evolution, by Education Level.’
It seems that if they went fishing, it would have saved a lot of space on the ark.
Oh, there is no doubt it is meaningful. But what exactly that meaning is, is the question. It might mean that more Catholics became non-Catholics(to use the evolutionists favorite theistic evolutionists) and more people who were reluctant to state their stance on pure evolution(ism) "came out". Whatever the reason for the change in that number, the percentage who reject any form of evolution has remained the same over the time period.
According to the written record, God defined the terms and that same record says nothing about Noah disobeying, making a mistake in this event, nor failing to carry out what God told him to do.
A change from 47 to 50 percent is a DROP? You failed math 101.
I don’t respond to people that make fun of disabled veterans and call DD214’s silly.
Not my definition. Your definition as you refer to the ID.
This had me thinking though...instead of bringing horses on board, why didnt Noah just grab a bunch of these little guys...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orohippus
Use the chart we are talking about, before you shoot your mouth off.
Forty-four percent in 1982, forty-four percent in 2008.
Here is your post:
“If anything those numbers show a drop in people who believe in evolution,”
It goes from 47 to 50 percent.
Please keep my comments in context. You presented number from a Feb 2009 Gallup poll. That poll had a result which gave no option for an intermediate answer. I presented the poll which gave the intermediate question and the results show that 50% of those polled believed in a form of evolution. The 2009 poll showed that only 39% of those polled believed in evolution. That is a significant drop from the 2008 poll. Thus my comment "Apples/oranges".
I gave you numbers directly from your post.
Correction. The only numbers I gave were the 47 to 50 percent increase in believers of evolution taken from YOUR poll in YOUR post.
Possible, but not sure why it matters.
I don't see what would give you cause to consider a T-Rex to be some sort of problem.
Apparently it took baby (newly-hatched) T-Rexes a couple of years to grow from cat size to golden retriever size. So as long as you had enough fresh meat and a decent enough pen, and were dealing with hatchlings, the logistics wouldn’t be too bad.
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