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Author Topic:   How many Creationists in US?
RAZD
Member (Idle past 1405 days)
Posts: 20714
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Joined: 03-14-2004


Message 1 of 9 (728459)
05-29-2014 8:44 AM


Skepticblog » How many real creationists are there?
quote:
How many real creationists are there?
For decades now, the Gallup Poll has surveyed Americans about their belief in evolution and creation. Year in and year out, the numbers seem to remain constant: about 40-45% of Americans appear to be Young-Earth creationists (YEC). ...
... Gallup wrote these questions decades ago before there was much understanding of how the framing of a question can bias the answer, and for decades, they have kept the question the same so comparisons remain consistent. But social scientists know that polls can be very misleading, especially in the way the question is framed to force certain responses. For example, the Gallup poll only gives us three possibilities, and load two of the answers with God, which is an obvious bias right from the start. In addition, there is good evidence to suggest that human evolution is the real sticking point, and that most people don’t care one way or another if non-human creatures evolve or not. ...
... Most people don’t regard continental drift as controversial (YECs must deny its existence), don’t have any problem with the evolution of non-human animals and plants, or an earth more than 10,000 years old. On average, this suggests that the true YECs are only about 10% of the American population (31 million people), another 25% prefer creationism but not necessarily a young earth. That’s about 35% creationists total, not 45% as Gallup suggests. About 10% of Americans (another 31 million people) are non-theistic evolutionists, another 33% or so lean toward evolution, giving us about 35% evolutionists, not 12% suggested by Gallup. ...
Yet another set of polls seem to confirm that the number of YECs is much smaller than Gallup suggests, and is also declining. A combined CBS/YouGov poll showed that between 2004 and 2013, the number of people accepting the statement Human beings evolved from less advanced life forms over millions of years, and God did not directly guide this process jumped from 13% to 21%. Meanwhile, the percentage of people agreeing with the statement God created human beings in their present form within the last ten thousand years dropped from 55% to 37% over the same interval (2004-2013). ...
In short, not only are the polls skewed by the way questions are written, but the trends are positive. YECs are nowhere near as numerous as Gallup suggested, their numbers are declining rapidly, and the YECs are older and dying off. In nearly other developed nation in the worldCanada, northern Europe, Japan, etc. creationism has no influence on public policy. This is striking contrast to the U.S., where (despite the fact that YECs are a small minority according to these polls), creationists form the majority of the House science committees, and are the majority of GOP presidential candidates in the past two elections. I don’t expect to see the end of the YEC threat in the U.S. in my lifetime, but the times, they are a changin’.
And it is past time to retire the undoer GOP house. Maybe with Tea Poopers losing in the primaries there is some hope for more mainstream republicans (ones who care more about fiscal and social responsibility than fanatic religious beliefs.
Enjoy

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Replies to this message:
 Message 3 by New Cat's Eye, posted 05-29-2014 9:53 AM RAZD has seen this message but not replied
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