Gallup: More Than Half of Americans Reject Evolution, Back Bible
A Gallup report released today reveals that more than half of all Americans, rejecting evolution theory and scientific evidence, agree with the statement, “God created man exactly how Bible describes it.”
Another 31% says that man did evolve, but “God guided.” Only 12% back evolution and say “God had no part.”
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Wow.
There’s more detail there, including the fact that the trends are as you would expect: the older the respondant, the higher the chance they’re a God-er, and the more education the respondent has the lower the chance. But even with those trends as you expect, the absolute values are still stunning:
Support for this Bible view rises steadily with age: from 43% for those 18 to 29, to 59% for those 65 and older. It declines steadily with education, dropping from 58% for those with high school degrees to a still-substantial 25% with postgraduate degrees.
25% of post-grads reject evolution and think man was created? What are they D.D.’s?
Surely this is just poor survey design or something, right? These answers can’t be right? Gallup must not know how to do polls.
Let’s look at results from a different pollster:
Nearly Two-thirds of U.S. Adults Believe Human Beings Were Created by God
While many in the scientific community may question why this issue has been raised again, a new national survey shows that almost two-thirds of U.S. adults (64%) agree with the basic tenet of creationism, that “human beings were created directly by God.”
Wow. Harris also doesn’t know how to do a poll?
Actually, Harris shows the situation is actually getting worse:
A majority of U.S. adults (54%) do not think human beings developed from earlier species, up from 46 percent in 1994.
Almost as bad are the results from yet another poll, this time by Zobgy, discussed at WorldNetDaily:
A new poll shows 69 percent of Americans believe public school teachers should present both the evidence for and against Darwinian evolution.
The Zogby International survey indicated only 21 percent think biology teachers should teach only Darwin’s theory of evolution and the scientific evidence that supports it.
A majority of Americans from every sub-group were at least twice as likely to prefer this approach to science education, the Zogby study showed.
About 88 percent of Americans 18-29 years old were in support, along with 73 percent of Republicans and 74 percent of independent voters.
There are only 21% who think that only science should be in science class, and everyone else thinks you can “teach the controversy”? What controversey??!? Damn.
I could go off on that, but it’s actually already handled over at The First Church Of Free Speech:
Americans are particularly vulnerable to this “equal time” bullshit because we tend to think everything should be a democratic process and that the will of the people reigns supreme.
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What the intelligent design people are asking is akin to making a high school physics teacher cover all the cases where Newtonian gravity and motion fail and forcing him to go into relativity, which is absurd. And that’s is a case where there is legitimate opposition to Newtonian mechanics! In biology, the overall theory of evolution is about as rock-solid as you can get in science. Granted, evolution isn’t a perfect theory, but it is an exceedingly good one. There probably are examples of its predictions not coming through here and there, and I know that some biologists are saying that natural selection isn’t the only thing responsible for imposing selective pressure. (Note that none of them are proposing The Hand of God as an alternative mechanism.)
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Every time I run into this (and if you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you know it’s pretty common) I have a lengthy period of just having to accept that people are even still talking about this. I really thought this was something that we made fun of in the 1920s, and certainly would not consider worthy of discussion today. The fact that some of the trends are going the wrong way over time makes me hideously depressed.
