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Should we laugh or cry? Man has only been on the earth for 10,000 years? Have these people completely ignored the fossil record? Well, if they are biblical literalists, yeah they do. But this number, 46%, according to Gallup, has remained relatively unchanged for the last 30 years.
Forty-six percent of Americans believe in the creationist view that God created humans in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years….About a third of Americans believe that humans evolved, but with God’s guidance; 15% say humans evolved, but that God had no part in the process.
Highly religious Americans are more likely to be Republican than those who are less religious, which helps explain the relationship between partisanship and beliefs about human origins. The major distinction is between Republicans and everyone else. While 58% of Republicans believe that God created humans in their present form within the last 10,000 years, 39% of independents and 41% of Democrats agree.
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This seems to go hand-in-hand with the belief in American exceptionalism. If America’s been specially chosen to lead the world, it must have been God that chose it! This also reflects the importance the US places on “science” and “facts” in the education system, and why the country consistently ranks so low in comparison with other first-world countries. Sigh. And sigh again.
I am curious how this is possible. Why do people wish to believe it? How could so many be so misled?
I attend Catholic schools for 12 years, taught by nuns for all of those years.
Not one of them told me – that God created humans in their present form within the last 10,000 years.
In high school biology, Sister H.R, PhD in exobiology, taught us Darwin’s Theory of Evolution.
I believe that I could not have received a better education in Biology, Chemistry and Physics (at the high school level) than I got from those Dominican nuns, remarkable women, devoted to their vocation.
I am no longer a practicing Catholic, but I have nothing but gratitude to those wonderful women.
The Catholic Church has actually accepted evolution as a valid explanation of the origin of species for quite some time. As I understand it, doctrine holds that each soul is created by God, but our bodies are the result of millions of years of evolution.
But if God didn’t create humans only 10,000 years ago, that would mean that I can’t be a virgin again simply because I want to be. And just when I was considering it….
“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics.” – Mark Twain
I think there are two potential reasons why this statistic can’t be trusted. The first is the nature of the way Gallup does polling. They call people on the phone. There has of course been a major demographic shift away from using land lines to using cell phones as the choice of primary-use phones. Gallup claims that they include cell phones in their polling, which they probably do. The problem is that cell phone users respond to marketting calls differently. People used to answer the phone when it rang. Today, people check to see who it is from and if they don’t recognize the caller, they don’t answer. With land lines, children often used to answer the phone and got an adult. Today, parents answer their own phones. Because of this, Gallup polling is being skewed toward ever narrower demographics. People who still use land lines primarily, most often members of an older generation, are more heavily represented than they used to be. The other over-represented demographic is people who by their nature are more inclined to take time to help out a pollster. That kind of spirit is more common among church goers. Cell phones have a natural tendency to favor older and more Christian demographics in the results.
The other explanation is screwing with the data. Gallup is lead by an evangelical Christian. Now, he probably has to be careful to maintain an image of credibility, but the fact that they chose to make this question a subject of polling is itself evidence of their religious focus. They can easily choose to call people in the Bible belt. They can put heavier emphasis on land line use. They can call people in rural areas over urban areas. They can organize their collection of polling data so as to produce their desired outcome.
There is plenty of reason to distrust these results.