Ay yi yi -- 46% believe in creationism

[silvia]

http://www.gallup.com/poll/155003/Hold- ... igins.aspx

Interesting to note that while people's views on gay marriage have trended steadily more liberal since the 1980s, their views on the question of human origins have remained more or less the same. I wonder if it has something to do with declining quality of science education, or just that it takes a decent amount of sophisticated thought/ brainpower to understand how evolution works. It's a whole lot simpler to believe God just created everything at once less than 10,000 years ago.

[snarkbillie]

A lot of people I work with claim to be creationists because they believe in God in some form. There's a difference between "there is a God" and "the world is 6K years old" but they don't seem to get it. They have no qualms about dinosaurs living millions of years ago before humans existed and yet they still say they believe in creationism. It confuses me.

[silvia]

A lot of people I work with claim to be creationists because they believe in God in some form. There's a difference between "there is a God" and "the world is 6K years old" but they don't seem to get it. They have no qualms about dinosaurs living millions of years ago before humans existed and yet they still say they believe in creationism. It confuses me.

Indeed. Plus, I really think the pollsters should add a "don't know" option for this particular question. As an agnostic, I honestly wouldn't feel certain about endorsing any of the three possible statements they provide (well, I'd definitely give a big NO to the third one).

[CanadianHippie]

The poll doesn't cover all creationist arguments, just saying. There are those who believe that the time line science set out for things (earth being billions of years old that is) while still believing that God created the world. Basically it's creation of the world via Genisis, but God's time and our time differ so 7 days to him could mean millions or billions of years to us. So God created humans as they are but more like millions of years ago rather than less than 10k years ago.

[Peas n carrots]

Results for this USA Today/Gallup poll are based on telephone interviews conducted May 10-13, 2012, with a random sample of 1,012 adults, aged 18 and older, living in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia.

Sometimes these samples are so small, I don't really believe you can get a good sense of the true demographic splits, especially if you are sampling roughly 20 people in every state.

Anyhoo, it's still a frightening number of people who only believe the earth is 6000 years old. Are there really that many people who haven't seen a fossil and thought "that can't be _X_ million years old!"

[CanadianHippie]

Sometimes these samples are so small, I don't really believe you can get a good sense of the true demographic splits, especially if you are sampling roughly 20 people in every state.

Anyhoo, it's still a frightening number of people who only believe the earth is 6000 years old. Are there really that many people who haven't seen a fossil and thought "that can't be _X_ million years old!"

Done correctly, a small sample can be more accurate than a larger study. In fact one of the issues with Kinsey's study on human sexuality is he tried to eliminate the margin of error by interviewing too many people. It screwed with his numbers.

[Terrie]

As noted, there are "Old Earth" creationists. It's just seems that crazier people are in the name of religion, the harder they push themselves into the public spotlight.

[ElphabaGalinda]

I'm hoping a lot of people just misunderstood what it meant by creationism. I think it may be that the people who say they believe in creationism believe in evolution and other scientific fact but believe God created it/set it all in motion.

In this case though, as long is no creationsim is taught in public schools or legislated in anyway I think people can believe anything they want. It's when it affects me or other non believers that the beliefs of others are a problem.

[silvia]

Yeah, the Old Earth creationism I just don't get. It's like they're trying to acknowledge the legitimacy of one field of science (geology/ fossil records that show humans have been around for millions of years) but not another (evolutionary biology). But even their attempt at giving credence to fossil records is half-baked, because fossil records point clearly to the existence of evolutionary processes.