Apes
June 19, 2007
Half of all Americans responding to a recent Gallup poll believe in Creationism.
The group of Americans who attend church weekly—about 40% in this sample—are strongly likely to reject the theory of evolution. The group of Americans who attend church seldom or never—also about 40%—have the mirror image opinion and are strongly likely to accept the theory of evolution.
Clearly, regular church attendance has powerful mind-altering properties, and should be banned like other similar drugs.
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Call me crazy…but I cannot believe that that many people believe in Creationism (and its falsenesses)
But then again, the church does tell people how to think, act, feel, breathe, etc.
So quick to cast aspersions!
: )
I’m a regular church-goer (I’ve missed Sunday services — except for reasons of travel — maybe 5 times in my adult life)... and I have no problem with the theory of evolution.
Nor do many of my contemporaries.
Perhaps it’s because I’m Mormon, and Mormonism has a strong, positive correlation between education and faithfulness.
But I’m more willing to bet that there’s a problem with the poll itself: older Americans tend to be more faithful in their church attendance… and older Americans tend to be more skeptical of science in general.
Another issue is how the poll was worded: did the poll allow for people to believe in both God’s role in man’s creation and the theory of evolution? Or — as it often is in the media — was it cast in a false dichotomy?
Anyway… I wouldn’t be so quick to pull out the pitch fork.
; )
The poll was actually really interesting in the different angles from which they asked the questions. If you read down to the bottom, they asked an open-ended question: “What is the most important reason why you would say you do not believe in evolution?” The answers to that were some of the strangest of all.
That said, I really don’t have a problem with churchgoing people. Just consider it my “modest proposal” for dealing with this problem. :)
Hehe.
:)
But looking at the questions up-front: I can still see how this is still skewed towards a false dichotomy… in the survey, you must either believe in evolution (that humans evolved from lower life forms) or that God created the world some time in the last 10000 years, and peopled it ex nihilo.
Neither of those fit my view of the cosmos… so which would I choose? Were I forced to?
I am a 5th grade Science teacher and a Roman Catholic who is a Sunday church-goer. I teach the Big Bang in my science class in a catholic school. I am also the 5th grade religion teacher. Because, of the current culture we are living in we tend to see things as one way or another i.e.: Republican or Democrat, Pro-Life or Pro-Choice, Safe-sex or Abstinence. I teach my students that our God is our creator, however not in the Adam and Eve sense of the term. I challenge them to see God ad the “Perfect Scientist” who put every thing in place for the Big Bang and Evolution to occur. Because, He is God and He knows all, I believe he “created” the “Evolution”. I am not trying to convince anyone of anything or change the opinions of the participants of this discussion, but I do agree with Silus’s point of how the questions were worded. If I was asked do you believe in Creationism or Evolutionism, I would choose the former. Oh, and if you are wondering how I explain Adam and Eve to 10 year olds, I teach it in a historical context. The people that came before and after Jesus Christ could not read and write. They relied on folk tales to teach their children and keep their history alive. Adam and Eve is a folkloric story that helped the illiterate people at that time understand that God is our creator. Church as a drug, I mean c’mon Matt.
It takes just as much faith to believe in evolution as it does to believe in creationism. There is a large (and growing)contingient of scientists (some Christian and some not) who openly reject evolution due to the fact that there isn’t much evidence to support it. If you will look at most of the traditional arguments for evolution, you will see that most have been disproven. The fossil record does not support evolution, and evolutionist theory says this will be changed in time…we will have to wait and see I guess. I have a strong science background and I have read extensively on both theorys and creationism has just as much scientific basis as evolution does. It is just not taken seriously since it involves religion.
Um… Ninja Luke… the fossil record is incomplete, but that should not be construed as not supporting evolution. Evolution is an integral part of modern biology. Period…
On the whole “Creationism not being taken seriously” front, I’d suggest that conflating a solid religious arguments with scientific theorums is a huge part of the problem.
That is just the problem. I bet you haven’t read any of the science behind intelligent design. It is not a bunch of pastors making this stuff up. A lot of the major minds beind intelligent design are multiple phd holders and professors at major universities throughout the country. That is one of the big misconceptions of evolutionists, that it is people who want to close thier minds and just belive in faith what the bible says. Like I also mentioned before, Christians are not the only scientists questioning evolution.
To me the thing that never made sense, and explain this if you can, because I have never heard it explained to my satisfaction. All of the evidence in the universe points towards the big bang creation model. That implies a creation point. How does that reconcile with the no creator model?
By the way, I was athiest at one point and the actual science behind the design theory impressed me way more than the evolution argument. This was at a point where I was trying to deny the existance of God…