I found that “Gallup poll that reports that 45% of Americans believe they were created in their present form by God 10,000 years ago”:http://www.unl.edu/rhames/courses/current/creation/evol-poll.htm. I find a few of the other numbers in this study interesting.
Given that a discussion of God and His role in the universe is one that cannot be done by science, and can only be done by religion, philosophy, or metaphysics, I find the following numbers comforting. 37% believe that humans developed over millions of years with God guiding, while 12% believe that humans developed over the same period without God guiding. Because science cannot distinguish those two possibilities, since there is no way to “test for God”, I find it comforting at least that 49% believe that humans developed over millions of years (with or without interference by an omnipotent being).
49% is a better number than 45%, at least. Don’t forget the +-3% margin of error on these numbers (that means that with 95% certainty, the correct answer taken over all Americans lies between 46%-52% for the “millions of years” response). What’s shocking, given the above, is that 57% of Americans appear to be more comfortable with creationism. That’s a bit odd. It makes me wonder if they even know the definitions of “evolution” and “creationism”. Certainly, taking millions of years to develop is “evolution”, even if guided behind the scenes by a puppeteer, and at the very least flies in the face of literal creationism. Why, then, do 44% of Americans side with the literal creationist reading of the Bible while 57% feel more comfortable with Creationism? Those numbers contradict one another, and suggest confusion in those interviewed.
The poll even notes this discrepancy, saying, “The results indicate some differences in interpretation based on which question is used. More Americans agree with the word ‘creationism’ than agree with ‘evolution,’ but a slightly larger number choose an evolutionary explanation rather than a creationist explanation when given specifics.
In order to better understand these issues, we examined the relationship between responses to these two questions, looking at how people who said they believed in or leaned toward one of the two theories answered the more specific question describing the three approaches to the origin and development of human beings.”
The authors of the study conclude, after studying the breakdown, that “the vast majority of ‘evolutionists’ are consistent and choose an evolutionary explanation, with or without God’s involvement… While 57% of Americans claim to lean toward the label of ‘creationist,’ in actuality, only 41% of Americans are ‘creationists’ who do not support an evolutionary way of thinking about human development.” That jibes with my comment about the 37%+12% above.
The last few questions are, to me, the most interesting. They indicate that the majority of people (47%+11%+6%=64%) offered opinions but felt they were only partly, minimally, or not at all informed. This points to the very thing I am most worried about: that we have failed as educators and scientists to actually teach people to understand science and issues surrounding theories of nature. The final numbers echo the lack of education on such an issue: 39% of Americans feel that evolution is “just one of many theories and one that has not been well supported by evidence” (in fact, evolution is completely supported by all known observational evidence and there are no competing scientific theories, only differences in internal details of evolution), while a whopping 25% of people “don’t know enough to say” whether it is or isn’t supported (yet they likely offered a strong opinion about the origin of the human species)!
What is most clear to me from this poll, especially from the last bunch of numbers, is that we have truly failed our fellow Americans when it comes to understanding science and discerning what is scientific and what is not.
