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.
‘Secret knowledge’ ... and only Agamemnon knows the secret handshake.
What he should be looking for is the handwriting on the wall.
You should speak for yourself.
Thanks for clearing that up.. I was betting angermemnon was a nutrasystem or amway rep of some kind.
Have these poll questions been asked of Freepers:
1. Would you vote for a presidential candidate (with stellar conservativ bonfides - tax cutter, pro-life, pro-gun) but publically declares he/she believes in evolution over all other alternate theories?
2. The opposite. Would you vote for the stellar conservative who publically declares he/she doesn’t believe in evolution instead believing ID or Creationism?
I’ve been engaged in these discussions before and it’s because of completely idiotic, waste of kb comments like yours that I’ve backed off. But I just couldn’t let you get away with thinking that comment had any validity at all. The difference between Christians and the Taliban are far greater than the difference between the Taliban and Darwinist, Eugenicists, Leftists, RINO’s, and on and on. If you’re talking about the old Roman church, you’re not talking about Christians.
I’m talking the idiocy of literal genesis creationism, and the cult that shames all of God’s creation acting the way they do. Given the chance, they would act out exactly like the taliban, to force their beliefs down the throats of others.
People who believe God’s revaluation of Himself have no desire to act like the Taliban.
There you go again, mentioning something having to do with mental illness in the pejorative! Are you now mentally ill also? I don't believe any one here called you mentally ill. Phony, yes. Mentally ill? No.
No, in fact it was you who tried to hide behind the mentally disabled to try to gain a cheap advantage in a debate with GGG even as you cast the same stones form another web site. I simply put GGG on notice about you.
Then your mouth became pathologically unhinged in a manner clearly frowned upon by FR standards. Any credibility you thought you had went with that.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but before you got banned from FR a couple years ago
True. Though my posting privilege was obviously restored, the atheist who started the flame war remains banned to this day on account of threats he made to those here at FR. The guy allegedly had a PhD in something too -- kite flying perhaps -- though not that that necessarily counts for much when he obviously demonstrates he had so little common sense to begin with -- much like yourself, in fact sans "PhD".
In fact, partially as a result of that flame war, soon afterward most of the site's Darwin Central crowd either opused out or just got banned outright. It eventually comes to light what you evos are really all about. Your sludgemouth has revealed as much about you already.
...you were just starting up your consulting firm in the early part of this decade.
Incorrect. I have owned this present consulting practice since 1988 and in 1998 - the year I chose to join FR, in fact, my firm acquired the firm which first hired me back in 1982. For the mathematically challenged such as yourself, 21 years is greater than 20 years by definition.
I also recall you on some rather informative threads about the Cipro issue; in which you made it quite clear you worked for the FDA at some point in the 90's along with some stints at a couple pharma companies.
Here you are only partially correct. This is likely, because, assuming you have ever been employed in your life, or are even employed now, unless all you did was mow lawns for your friends’ dads for cash under the table, you may have only received income by way of W-2's all your life.
For instance, unless you owned the franchise yourself, when you ran the Slurpee machine at the local 7-11, you were likely paid only as a W-2 employee – unless, here too, you happened to work "off-the-books," or as barter-in-exchange for provisions of some sort.
Maybe that included living space in the dumpster out behind the place too, with a spare set of keys to the porta-potty facing the traffic on the interstate.
Yes, you are successful. Yes, you know quite [a bit - ed.] about about your chosen field...
Which is why you wrote this in post #139: “Your seething post seems to point to a failed academic career.”
So what you are really saying is that when you wrote what you wrote here, you wrote it knowing full-well it was lie all along.
And again you have just proved what has been my entire point about you right from the start!
BUSTED AGAIN!
...(I used to enjoy your defense of the FDA and the Bayer - I think - Cipro issue) but even a dimwitted dullard like me has the ability to retain information.
The Cipro discussion to which you refer from roughly 8 years ago IIRC was with some guy who posed as a patent attorney, finding himself in need of a serious dressing down who understood nothing about rights such as they pertain to intellectual property, and as they pertain to patents and patent law in a pharmaceutical context. This discussion was likely in the context of the Medicare prescription drug bill being debated at the time.
You have imperfectly retained some information, but without context, like sterile data found in some run-on spread sheet, such "information" does not rise to the point of one actually having acquired any amount of knowledge from it which has any inherent value.
Had you ever owned and successfully run an incorporated business, you'd know better what one is able to do with such an entity, how one enjoys tax-advantaged distributive income apart from that of mere W-2s, and how it is that I could actually run a consulting firm while simultaneously and legitimately serving for a time in government as well as at other times serving as a formal corporate officer. Get an MBA, get a company, get a financial planner, have a successful career.
Career success and satisfaction must be something completely foreign to you, or maybe it is something that has simply eluded you to this point. One gets a sense of that latent envy which percolates to the surface occasionally. Best to put a check on that. It will consume you otherwise.
You assumed you knew something about what did or did not constitute my own personal success, and I demonstrated a few posts back that your comparative lack of credentials or accomplishment likely places your "skills-set," such as it is, or isn't, somewhere substantially outside the same league.
Your commentary continues to affirm the "dimwitted" and "dullard" part of that self-styled personal description quite appropriately. I'd just add to that "... who is completely out of his depth of knowledge in the subject matter which resides in a creation vs. evolution debate thread, and uses natural sympathies extended toward the mentally handicapped community to hide behind, even as he uses the same diminutive references to their state of being to lodge his own cowardly insults behind the back of another Freeper on another web site."
There, fixed it.
Profundo! - Bravo!
You have correctly analyzed 90% of the evo contingent here.
Why not just start with the simple concept of freedom and not backing the secular humanist NEA/ACLU liberal public screwel indoctrination centers?
One would think even a liberal would understand such behaviour is anything but conservative!
Rosie O'Donnell made some sort of similar cock-eyed idiotic liberal drivel comment as most will no doubt recall. Something about Christians being just as dangerous and violent as the crowd lopping off heads and slitting throats in some sort of "honor-killing".
Only in a twisted liberal mind would you find such freakish conclusions.
Liberals project-alot.
I will pray for you, John. We are all in the same boat when it comes to salvation. We all need it, and none of us can do it on our own.
I'm glad we found some things to agree upon.
...the Bible says that it impossible for us to earn our way into the kingdom of God.
Oh, I know. And I agree. And it's good to be reminded that salvation is by grace.
At the same time, I think grace can become an excuse for whatever we want to do and for however we want to behave. When I say this, I'm talking about all of us, myself included.
I do also believe that if someone is genuinely seeking to follow the path that Jesus laid out, then it should make a practical difference. And personally, I think the biggest difference ought to be in the way that we treat each other. Again, I do include myself in this.
I've also become probably more content oriented, both in terms of others and myself, which is basically why, grace acknowledged, I mentioned some of the things like how I do business with others. Or maybe to put it another way, I'm not unaware of the statement "you will know them by their fruits."
Unfortunately, statistics on things like divorce don't seem to show much, if any, difference in this country between those who profess faith and those who don't.
The idea of a CINO bothers me, whether the potential CINO is me or someone else. All the more so because within the past couple of weeks I have suddenly become very conscious of how unfavorably "Christians" and "Christianity" are viewed by a significant and growing number of Americans. The image is one of intolerance and ugliness.
That bothers me. Even with my own come-and-go doubts about God, that does bother me.
You're right that I haven't read the whole book unChristian. You're even correct that I haven't read very much of it at all.
But still, I have read enough of it that it has shocked me what people think about Christianity and the church. Actually, I was kind of shocked even before I'd read any of it, as the gist of many of the main ideas were presented by the pastor of the church I go to. That's where I learned of the book.
Anyway, I do appreciate your prayers. I hope you understand a bit better where I'm coming from. I ended up saying a number of things that I didn't really intend to go into here, but I suppose that's sometimes the nature of conversation, and hopefully it will have all been worth it in the end.
Yes, all of the above and many years ago as well. My research mentor and now a long- time tenured professor at the same institution was the fellow who first shared with me the example of the mathematical impossibility of the formation of a single Hb molecule employing any mechanism proposed by evolutionary materialists.
How did you get into the consulting business?
See Freepmail I sent you.
Thank you for posting, that is an amazing poll!!
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