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.
Looks like that was from a Gallup poll.
Yeah, I would be interested to know where & how they sampled people, and how many.
Another interesting stat from the same poll: People with only a grade school education voted 67% Obama, 33% McCain.
My point is, there is less evidence to back up Evolution than there is a universe created by God. And it would take more faith to believe that everything was just here and we evolved out of a puddle of goo. Why don’t we see evolution today? Why do all men look the same? Why aren’t some more evolved than others? Not only in man, but, in all of nature. Could it be that the dinosaurs didn’t get destroyed by a sudden freeze. Rather that the life of all creation as time went on after the fall, lived shorter and shorter lives. Most reptiles continue to grow through out their lives. Crocs can get to 75ft. and live around 75 years or so. So if you take that same croc and he now lives say 500 years. Wouldn’t he be gigantic? Same with many snakes and lizards.
Thanks. Interesting information. I think part of this may depend on how evolution is defined. If evolution is simply defined as change over time, adaptation within species, or even as random mutation and natural selection where a gene is broken/changed but results in the ability of an organism to block toxins, then we probably almost all are “evolutionist.” If evolution is defined as the process by which higher order and increased information results in such developments as light sensitive chemicals turn into an eye, limbs turn into wings, or gills into lungs, then there are many skeptics.
Well, this thread had been entirely devoid of any silly name calling, and frankly was quite on the topic. That is until you chose to inject your boilerplate “ libtarded, evo-atheist, Obamabot”.
Sometimes, GGG, you may want to go with the flow. I realize you like the contentiousness of your threads, but this one was doing fine without the attempts to bait others into the well-scripted insults.
Hopefully, John, GGG’s attempt to hijack this thread and turn it into the same ole, same ole crevo thread will fail.
It is the least contentious I think I’ve ever read on FR, at least in recent memory. Folks are actually speaking without being shouted down with petty insults (something both sides are quite guilty of).
You are to be congratulated for that.
GGG, now you must write on the board 100 times, “I will not turn other’s crevo threads into free for alls like I like my own to be”.
I haven’t read your article but I will answer your question. I am a Christian and I believe God created the universe, he just didn’t do it in 6000 years. I find the idea that the earth is not millions of years old to be silly. I find the argument that God had to do it in 6000 years to be insulting (to God) it puts God in a box. The God that I know is huge. We will understand it all eventually.
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.?
WOW so 13% of the US has relatives living in almost every major city! (that has a primate exhibit)
They’re everywhere I tell ya!
Don't fall for this one GGG. This poster is a fake from the word go, and disingenuous to the core. He doesn't care a thing about Christianity but knows you do and he's playing you here. He's a left over from the Darwin Central clotch. Best to ignore him, or if not, just reply to him like the phoney he is.
Thanks for the excellent advice, AG. Of course, this entire post was meant as an insult to creationists, notwithstanding the moderate Obamaesque language used to communicate the insult.
I’m not sure how one would know for certain that the poster is disingenuous and does not have a clinically retarded child.
In any event, I’m sure most of us would agree that the label “tarded” is rather inflammatory and really doesn’t add anything of actual substance to the discussion.
It’s been refreshing to hear simply what people believe, and their opinions on the data presented, without the added name-calling. :-)
I'm afraid you're incorrect about that, GGG. I did not intend to insult anyone, simply to put out the information I found out about what people in our country believe concerning creationism and evolution. As I said at the beginning, I thought it would be educational and relevant. Most of those who've replied to this thread, whatever their particular point of view, seem to agree.
In fact, I think that whatever one believes, whichever of the major camps one falls into, from the data, you have lots of company.
Let's start at the other end here, and work our way to your particular viewpoint.
Those who are athiests are the smallest minority, but they are used to that in our society, as most of us believe in God. They will no doubt note with satisfaction that the higher a person goes in education, the more likely he or she is to agree with their viewpoint.
Those of us who believe in both God and evolution can be happy that the majority of college graduates in the United States share our particular point of view.
And those like yourself who are young earth creationists can be happy that yours is the single most widely-held viewpoint in the United States.
You can also be happy that college education, with a few exceptions, doesn't convince people to stop believing in God. If you believe in God, most of us are still in your camp.
I would think that you would see what you have in common with those who believe in God but who also believe in evolution, rather than what is different. By your own admission, belief in young earth creationism is not essential to salvation. I'm not quite sure why you don't welcome others who believe in God as your brothers and sisters, regardless of their belief in evolution, but that of course is up to you.
In any event, whichever of the three major viewpoints you take: that God specially created things much as they are, that God was involved in the development of our universe and world through the process of evolution, or that everything arose simply by chance without God being involved - whichever viewpoint you take, you're in good company.
FWIW, I'm a Christian who believes in God Creator and some sort of evolutionary process. My suspicion is Neo-Darwinist theory is insufficiently comprehensive to describe/explain the phenomenon of evolution.
Thanks again john for your post.
As a final note, I could add, of course, that we have staunch conservatives of all three major viewpoints...
One of the refreshing things for me from this thread (aside from the fact that all of the major viewpoints have a lot of good company) has been to see that there are a lot of different combinations of possibilities and that many of us don't fit 100% neatly into whatever category we find ourselves. You don't have to be precisely a young-earth creationist, or precisely in the theistic evolution category, or precisely in the naturalistic evolution category. And a lot of us aren't.
GGG hasnt been posting any AIDS threads lately, but there wre some questions I had regarding the world renowned Dr. Peter Duesberg and a book he tried publishing a while ago. I should ask him to ping me to his AIDS list, but he seems to be answering only sporadically.
Check out his homepage though, its got some fascinating links.
Maybe you can pm him with those. I’ve been trying to keep this particular thread on topic. :-)
Oh sorry, wrong thread! Sorry john.
A lot of us don't START with a doctrine (i.e., a rationalist structure).
I think Francis Bacons' approach is entirely appropriate for science — provided we respect the fact (as Bacon did) that the scientific method is not appropriate for all phenomena, but only empirical ones; and thus God in particular cannot be an object for science in principle.
Putting it crudely, Bacon thought that God is not "threatened" by science in any way; for it couldn't touch Him in the first place.
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