In America, 46% of People Hold a Creationist View of Human Origins 1359
An anonymous reader writes "The latest Gallup poll is out, and it finds that 46% of Americans hold the view that God created humans in their present form within the last 10,000 years. According to Gallup, the percentage who hold this view has remained unchanged since 1982, when they first started asking the question. Roughly 33% of Americans believe in divinely guided evolution, and 15% believe that humans evolved without any supernatural help."
in other words, 46% of americans are dumb (Score:1, Insightful)
in other words, 46% of americans are dumb
Some have a more nuanced view (Score:4, Insightful)
It doesn't have to be either "take the Bible literally" or "science and evolution".
Some are perfectly fine with believing the science and the process of evolution, but also see religion as a framework of stories. Someone once said, "The Bible says what God did; science explains how He did it."
Re:Until you can prove them wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure it is.
Who created the devine creator?
In fact the idea of a devine creator is 2x as silly, since it requires that the devine creator was created and from nothing.
Re:Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
There's a big difference between what people tell pollsters because they think that's what they *should* say, verses what they actually do or believe
Even assuming what you say is true, it's still a pretty strong reflection on how screwed up your society is that people are coerced into espousing a particular worldview due to pressure.
Land of the free indeed.....
Explains a lot (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:in other words, 46% of americans are dumb (Score:5, Insightful)
They are not dumb. They are victims of an virulently infectious and devastating mental illness (faith). They can't really help it and they should not be insulted for it any more than a kid with polio should be insulted about being in a wheel chair.
Re:Really? (Score:2, Insightful)
"Kinda sounds like No-True-Scotsman logic to me."
Not quite. Religions have doctrines that you follow or you only 'religious' in name only. In fact many holy texts make it pretty obvious who is and isn't part of their religion with rules and general guidelines for 'fake/false' believers, etc. Go read the new testament if you doubt this.
Re:Who answers these polls? (Score:5, Insightful)
That doesn't tell you much about the demographics involved.
Those 1,024 adults could have been somewhat self-selected. What kind of person answers the telephone without first confirming who the call is from, then proceeds to answer a bunch of inane questions? A person stupid enough to believe in creationism, that's who.
The reason Christianity has this problem. (Score:5, Insightful)
You'd think this is actually just the ignorance of 'Dumb Americans.' That isn't so. The reason is evolution is a deal breaker due to the structure of the Christian religion.
Kalinka told me the following.
It doesn't have anything to say about the existence or non-existence of any gods. It is a problem with the way the Mythos of Christianity works in particular.
The Mythos of Christianity absolutely depends on a a literal understanding of Genesis. In Judaism, Genesis can be metaphor, it changes nothing. But the Sacrifice of Jesus is contingent on an event called the fall of man, where Eve and Adam ate the fruit from the tree of knowledge, angering Yahweh (God) and damning all Humans to Hell save for a few Jewish Prophets and anyone who accepts Jesus as the Savior.
The fall of man is considered the *Primary Sin* which sends us to Hell. (The main Reason.)
If The Book of Genesis is metaphorical, then Jesus died for nothing because no fall of man ever occurred for Yahweh to have a reason to send us to Hell to begin with. Ergo, Christianity is collapses because Saint Paul was a liar.
This is why Christians have a problem with Evolution and Jews do not.
The real reason that this doctrine that Paul created was put into place was to exclude the Jews from Salvation.
He didn't for see the evolution problem. That came along later.
If the Garden of Eden never happened, the fall never happened. then there would be no need for the death of Jesus Christ. Which means that Christianity was wrong all along. Biological evolution collapses a core foundation of Christianity.
Re:Who answers these polls? (Score:2, Insightful)
Any poll conducted by telephone is inherently biased. Assuming they're calling (predominantly? only?) land-line phones, this method is becoming even more biased over time.
Re:~79%? (Score:2, Insightful)
You conservatives keep talking about how great the Constitution is, yet want to ignore the parts you don't like, such as the separation of church and state.
Re:Until you can prove them wrong (Score:3, Insightful)
A man was eating pizza one day when suddenly a guy eating a double cheeseburger approaches him and says, "You know eating pizza will make you fat."
You say that it is silly to believe in an uncreated creator while believing in an uncreated universe/multiverse/etc...
Not that it matters, but your logic is flawed anyway. The definition of a divine creator is an entity that just is and was never created. Since such a creator would have created even time itself, it is nonsensical to ask who created the creator since that would imply that time existed before creation.
In any case, it doesn't matter if you're a theist or atheist; at some point you have to believe in the absurd notion that everything came from an uncreated something.
Re:in other words, 46% of americans are dumb (Score:5, Insightful)
in other words, 46% of americans are dumb
If by "dumb" you mean "below median intelligence", that's approximately correct.
Re:Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn if these people firmly believe life on earth is less than 10.000 years old, or they are just saying that because they heard it in bible class. The fact is these morons vote, and they are ruining things for the rest of us.
Percentage of error greatly understated. (Score:3, Insightful)
No, it means the +/- 4% poll error is grossly understated. Look, we all know that the selection methodology used to generate the sample size leads to that sort of minimum percentage error. What people don't talk about is what the OP is - the difference between:
a) what people say they do and what they actually do.
b) whether people answer with the dogma of their faith vs. what they actually believe.
Throw in things such as:
a) weak wording in the questions conflating or confusing two ideas: "God created human beings pretty much in their present form within the last 1,000 years or so" or "most closely represents your beliefs".
b) problems with interviewees not understanding the question or not giving a shit
c) inability in the survey to record whether the interviewee has been educated in evolution or basic science classes, let alone not failing them
d) strange slant towards Christianity
And there is no where near a 95% confidence the margin of error is 4% or less.
But the hokey bullshit talking about the results of the survey will continue and well end up with another 2000+ post thread with 90% "LOL, thems are idiots" comments, just like what happened earlier in the week.
Re:Until you can prove them wrong (Score:3, Insightful)
since it requires that the devine creator was created and from nothing.
Not really. Something "outside the universe" cannot be assumed to exist as what we know as "matter" or "energy", nor would it be subject to what we know as "time".
To argue that it would need to be "created from nothing" itself is making all sorts of assumptions.
Its absurd as a Princess Peach saying the Mushroom Kingdom universe must have been spontaneously created from nothing because its 2x as silly to think there is some sort of creator.
Re:Until you can prove them wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
If I'm wrong, I loose nothing. If I'm right, you lose everything.
So, you believe in God "just in case"? At least have a backbone about it, that's the worst reason you can have. At least those with *faith* are at about a level 5 of human motivation ("finding a higher purpose"), you haven't even climbed past level 1 ("survival").
Stupid ideas die with older generations (Score:4, Insightful)
I've watched debates on this topic for almost two decades and they never seem to go anywhere. People who believe in supernatural entities tend to justify their beliefs through less logical arguments, and people who do not believe in them have logical reasons to support their view; ergo there's no satisfactory middle ground - there's no common language between believers and non-believers.
This is a case of a belief that'll die with their adherents, as new generations seem to hold less superstitious world-views than their parents. Hallelujah to that.
Re:Why (Score:5, Insightful)
46% of the US population rejects the entire foundation of modern life (science), and you wonder why it's news for nerds? It shows exactly how small a space the technologically literate occupy in this world.
Re:Until you can prove them wrong (Score:3, Insightful)
The who created the divine creator argument is almost as old as the chicken and egg paradox which, if you apply naive logic, shows that chickens and eggs, and other birds for that matter, do not exist, and cannot exist, because the question of which came first has no logical answer.
As for the distant past, the idea that it is illusory is a rational and logical one, and is as plausible as your Linux box being installed from a DVD by a user at a fixed point in its history, vs everything having been compiled from scratch though the C compiler.
The truth is we cannot be sure about our distant origins, and we cannot even be sure that the distant past may even be deduced from evidence. Whether the apparent distant past is virtual or real is one for philiosophers, not everyday people, who just need a workable explanation to get the question answered to their satisfaction. Divine origins do this better than a rough principle (which is all the lay person will grasp from evolution) and to be honest, there is no single person alive who fully appreciates the complexity of evolution, let alone who can use it to explain our origins in terms of it to sufficient detail to rule out other alternatives (as is the case in physics for example.)
Those who believe that science can do more than offer a theory that fits the evidence do not understand the philosophical foundations of science or the limitations of inductive methods. Sooner or later on your philosophical and metaphysical travels, you will find, as I did, that you have to make a leap of blind faith. One cannot reason around this, and ignorance and scientifistic hand-waving do not provide an alternative, though they may be convincing to some.
Some of a religious persuasion have the arrogance to believe that they hold Divine Truth in their hands; too many followers of science are treating the scientific pronunciations of the day in the same way, and this is a tragic, as is the ignorance of the antireligious of the scientists, mathematicians and other rational people who see no problem with a religious faith. Think things through before making pronouncements on the silliness of someone who believes other than you do, or else appear silly yourself.
Re:Really? (Score:3, Insightful)
Generally speaking, it would mean you have at least a slightly better understanding of science than the 46% listed in the summary... so yes, I would say that would indeed mean that they're more fit to vote.
Re:Until you can prove them wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
Not that it matters, but your logic is flawed anyway. The definition of a divine creator is an entity that just is and was never created. Since such a creator would have created even time itself, it is nonsensical to ask who created the creator since that would imply that time existed before creation.
I think the problem is in the inability of religious people to come to terms with the fact that adding a "creator" into the equation only complicates things, it doesn't simplify them. Arguing against the notion of the relatively simple entity that was the primordial universe just springing up into existence, with the idea that universe was created by another entity "just existing", only much more complex, capable of human-like mental processes combined with vast knowledge and abilities, seems somewhat redundant and ridiculous to me. Ultimately, you are facing an even more difficult question.
Re:Really? (Score:0, Insightful)
No, but that doesn't stop any of them from thinking thats the case.
Your stance on the existence of God has no more relation to your intelligence or knowledge than your opinion on the meaning of life or the infinity of the Universe, or what lays outside of the infinity of the universe. These are things our mind simply can not comprehend.
It doesn't REALLY matter what you believe (within reason).
I believe in God and that he created humans. I don't know the particular order or path that got here for sure, and I'm fairly certain it took more than a few thousand years to do it as I firmly believe in evolution.
Of you course, most Atheists are more ignorant than religious nut jobs. And my most Atheists, I mean only the ones that feel the need to tell the world they are atheists in order to make themselves feel superior. Anyone who comes out and starts debating something by leading their argument with critisms of someone rather than their though patterns, its certain they aren't talking about anything they actually know about.
Re:Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
Wow, 8 AC responses to the question so far. You should get a /. achievement for that or something.
It does amaze me how many people believe "anyone who disagrees with me is just to stupid to vote". Yeah, here's the thing: if we did have a dictatorship, you wouldn't get to be El Presidente for Life, the guy who disagress with you on everything would get the job. Stupid people voting beats stupid people in tyrannical control any day!
Re:Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'll insert myself here by saying "YES."
It's bad enough that these businesses in the US exist to collect donations which go to pay for their land, buildings and the ridiculously high salaries of priests, preachers, pastors or whatever they want to me called and do it all tax-free because it's "religion." But they go on to insult the whole educational process in every way possible by asserting things without evidence or experiment or verification of any kind. Some people even get real PhD's in this crap.
A PhD in ancient Greek or Roman or other mythologies is "okay" but to declare a difference between that and "religious studies" is simply ridiculous and I demand an explanation of the fundamental difference between "mythology" and "religion." You have to realize that today's "religion" will be tomorrow's mythology right? Just as today's mythology was yesterday's religion?
Re:in other words, 46% of americans are dumb (Score:5, Insightful)
No.
The minister who believes all gays should be jailed believes that because his faith in his religion demands that he condemn homosexuality.
Where do your morals come from?
Do they have an objective rational basis?
Or do you believe them because someone or something you are not permitted to question told you to believe them?
Morality dictated by authority is not moral. It is just as likely to be abhorrent as it is to be good. It is arbitrary. It is the exact same thing if it causes you to believe as the minister you mention, or to respect your parents, to not eat pork, to not kill, or blow up airplanes.
My morality is a superior morality. It is formed from an objective rational basis. Justice, liberty and equality are not well served by irrational thought based on the crumbling edifice of religions built on a mountain of skulls.
Why do I say that faith is a mental illness? Because it is. It behaves exactly like a virus The mechanism of infection takes over the mental machinery of the host and modifies it to ensure that it propagates throughout the population, just as an organic virus infects a cell and takes over its genetic machinery to propagate itself. The faithful are strongly compelled to spread their faith to others.
Faith itself is belief in the absence of reason, belief in the face of contradiction. It makes it easier for someone to believe in things that are objectively and morally wrong. And these sometimes malevolent and violent memes follow in the wake of faith like secondary infections follow the compromised immune system of an HIV victim. These memes con often not be separated from the basis of faith and they form a complementary complex that further spreads the infection (often by eliminating the uninfected or those infected by a competing vector by violent force).
I used to be very religious. I was a fundamentalist christian once. The more I learned about God, the happier I became to realize that he was nothing more the dark specter of a fevered mind.
Re:Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
If I remember correctly, escaping the dictatorial rule of people with your point of view was one of the primary reasons this country was founded.
People left England because of religious oppression.... Then you know what they did?
They set up their own theocratic territories which doubled down on the behaviors they had left England to escape.
To think that you know the "truth" about religion and everyone that disagrees with you is a moron pretty much makes you worse than most of those you despise.
Science isn't about Truths, it's about facts and (adequately) predictive models that explain those facts.
It's not bigoted to call someone a moron because they believe something that's factually wrong.
Re:Really? (Score:4, Insightful)
Stupid people voting beats stupid people in tyrannical control any day!
That's a pragmatical and defeatist argument, you are saying that although morons indeed "ruin it for us" in an ideal sense, there's no practical way to reach that ideal. Any practical method to restrict the vote of the morons would come back against "us", so this is the best of all possible realities.
Even accepting that argument as is, I still believe there's some leeway here for smart people: educate the morons by force, ridicule their belifes on every occasion, don't just sit back and take their crap in the name of religious tolerance.
Obligatory (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Until you can prove them wrong (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
being an athiest (or better yet, simply rejecting the bullshit that religion tries to force on us) means you are able to THINK on your own and not be swayed by fear of authority figures.
yes, I do think that makes better voters. I think religion, in today's world, is a form of mental disorder.
Re:Really? (Score:2, Insightful)
"Do you really think that by claiming to be an atheist means you're more fit to vote?"
Yes. It means they are sane.
Re:Really? (Score:4, Insightful)
I thought science was about observation and describing what already exists.
Re:Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
Science can't disprove God for the same reason that God can't be proven, but it can remove many of the rationalizations that supports the concept of God in the first place. What's left is something very implausible that you deliberately have to take on faith. The constant droning about imaginary tea cups in orbit (or not) around the moon are attempts to demonstrate why the same arguments wouldn't fly with anyone if you just changed the case from religion to something else that can't be proven. Without historical and cultural context, there's no reason to believe anything on the same premises other than simply wanting something to be true.
Re:Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
If you define god to be unobservable then it doesn't really matter if god exists or not.
Coincidentally 46% (Score:3, Insightful)
Coincidentally 46% is also the amount of Americans without education.
Re:Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
being an athiest (or better yet, simply rejecting the bullshit that religion tries to force on us)
I think those are the same thing (atheist/rejecting religion). You are strategically excluding Agnosticism, i.e. people who try to remain neutral/skeptical rather than get into the religion war on either side.
I think religion, in today's world, is a form of mental disorder.
That's not better than a position of a raving religious zealot. The only difference is that you sound like a raving anti-religious zealot. You know, many religious people are quite sane and do not believe that religious beliefs should be imposed on others or involved politics. Hopefully, you are aware of this.
Re:Until you can prove them wrong (Score:3, Insightful)
That's because the notion of the creation of the universe is senseless.
Science: time is a coordinate inside the universe or inside a local (suitably defined) part of the universe. Thus a time is a measurable (in principle) part of the internals of the universe.
The notion of the universe is therefore outside of time. What do we know about the universe? We just know that it is. There's no (before, after) pair of times concerning its change in existence. That would require an outside-of-the-universe containing time.
Confusion about this could appear from e.g., "what if there's something before the big bang", say. But we can include any such potential extras now or in the future inside the definition of 'the universe', i.e. keep the meaning universal.
The underlying confusion about creation comes from applying everyday thinking about time to the wider situation, as if time is outside the universe. We don't think of spatial coordinates outside the universe. But experience of time is different, because internally, at a local spot in the universe there is a past and future.
There IS a question to answer: why does anything exist? However, the answer is not that it was created, in any usual sense of that term. And redefining 'created' would simply be an attempt to adjust the brain, not solve the problem.
Re:Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not an atheist because I can disprove the existence of God(s). I'm an atheist because I don't believe any of the claims theists have ever made. Your failure to understand atheism is the problem, not my disbelief.
Re:Really? (Score:3, Insightful)
My biggest problem with atheists is that they're too damned religious. :)
There may be a god. I haven't seen any good evidence for it, but I haven't seen any evidence against it either. Without evidence one way or the other I don't consider the question settled. Atheists *do* consider the question settled. So do "religous nutjobs." They both *believe* with insufficient evidence. That's religion.
And personally, I don't consider the question *interesting* either.
Re:Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
Got a time machine then? I mean, I'm no YECer myself believing more in Theistic Evolution (evolution as God's engineering methodology, as opposed to Intelligent Design, I'm a software designer myself and I know very little intelligence goes into anybody's design), but even I have to admit that absent a written historical record from 11,000 years ago, I can't actively disprove YEC. I'm pretty sure we have good evidence that is far older than that; BUT absent a time machine, I can't rule out that evidence being created as is 10,000 years ago.
By the same token, there are many other religions in the world whose ideas directly conflict with yours (and have precisely the same amount of evidence: an old book purported to be nonfiction and a group of people that have practiced that religion for a long time), so you can't rule them out either. So what made you choose this particular belief? Clearly you already do some mental gymnastics to sidestep at least some of the obvious physical impossibilities (shoehorning the overwhelmingly probable concept of evolution into a belief system that traditionally includes nothing like it), so why bother holding to the rest?
Personally, I considered myself a Christian some time ago, but I started over when I realized how many modifications I was making to make it work scientifically, along with the realization that, had I been born to one of the other 67% of people in the world who have different beliefs, I also would have started out believing something different.
Also, I think explanations like god-guided evolution are evidence of the phenomenon that was posted earlier this week on Slashdot: scientific literacy doesn't help people approach the world more scientifically, it just makes them try to use that knowledge to justify (or fit that knowledge into) their existing world view.
Re:Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, but that level of cognative dissonance typically leads to compartmentalization... holding two contradictory beliefs in your head at the same time.
To go back on topic (with the grandparent or whoever, I'm not going to count how many far back in the stack it is, forgive me :-), I think it IS scary that these people vote, and I DO think that atheists and agnostics are better voters in that they're clearly (on average, not in every instance) more rational and knowledgable.
That nearly 50% of the American Public believes in creationism is really scary, a sign of a failure of our education system, and a scary foot-note to that same population's voting patterns (voting on myth and belief, not on fact).
I've never had a problem with... (Score:5, Insightful)
Spiritual people. There is something absolutely amazing about life and death. One minute a person is there and then suddenly, all that remains is a husk. Yes, I understand fully the mechanics of the process, right down to the baryons. That doesn't change the fact that in my experience, something profound and ineffable has vanished from my perception, my grasp, and has left the world that I can comprehend.
None of this is an excuse for willful ignorance and stupid, stubborn, hubris. No matter how hard I believe, the world will not stop. If it did, the thin skin of the planet would tear free from the mantle and continents would slide over one another. Life on the planet would evaporate in a magmatic cataclism that would make the eruption of Mt. St. Helens look like a popcorn fart in a hurricane. If there is a creator, I'm guessing she doesn't go around suspending physics to mess with the creation. Just a guess (having created a few virtual worlds of my own, I'm supposing we're well past the beta.) Our world is chock full of mythologies. Its a human penchant to come up with stories to explain what we don't understand. Its also a penchant to attempt to describe nature and observe its inner workings. Folks who have at an early age divorced themselves from reality are missing something. We live in a truly remarkable universe. Even more disconcerting is that some people who choose to ignore reality seem to treat reality as though it bends to their opinions. The harsh conservative element in our government seems to have faith that a government that gives all its money away to the wealthy and takes no taxes can work and its people (at least the ones that matter) can thrive. This is the danger of faith based thinking, policy, society. The belief is more important than the fact, and those who have faith in driving straight on a crooked road endanger themselves and all others on the road.
A wise person surrenders to reality that which is real, and leaves that which untestable, unexplainable, or just humanly ineffable to faith. In these people I have no problem, I find myself among them. I simply know where to draw the line, and as our science improves, so the line moves.
Re:Really? (Score:2, Insightful)
Oh, not this "atheists are religious nutjobs themselves" crap again.
What could even constitute "evidence against the existence of a god", if you're willing to postulate a sufficiently ambiguous or non-interventionist god? The fact that there isn't "evidence against it" has more to do with silly unfalsifiable definitions of god than it does with any actual evidence or lack thereof in the universe. It's not like "evidence for" and "evidence against" are epistemologically equal alternatives and therefore the correct state of belief is halfway in between.
I'm sure that there are an infinite number of things that you haven't "seen evidence against", yet nevertheless are quite certain don't exist. Invisible pink unicorns, etc.
Re:Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
There is no evidence for the existence of god, point. There doesn't have to be an evidence for non-existence of something to rationally assume it doesn't exist. See Russel's teapot.
Re:Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
So what else about religions shouldn't be taken literaly?
Re:Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
Hitler
Would this be the Hitler who sent soldiers to war with the slogan "Gott mit uns"? The same one who said "Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord"?
Or perhaps he wasn't a True Scotsman?
Re:Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
You don't need science to disprove god - logic is sufficient.
Re:Really? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm sorry, but YOU are in fact the moron. Athiests took over in the 70's? Since when? What delusional world are you living in?
Atheism isn't a "belief". It's not a religion. It's a rejection of THEISM. It is the very definition of rational thinking.
You clearly have no clue what you're even talking about. Which is just sad.
Re:Really? (Score:2, Insightful)
English uses a comma to separate. We're speaking English. We should use a comma. QED.
Or do you think it'd be fine to start using French guillemets for quotes too?
Re:Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
I really wish more people understood exactly what Atheism means. Atheism is not a lack of belief like most think, but rather a belief that there is no god.
Um no. Atheism is a lack of belief in god. Christians simply cannot tell the difference between a lack of believing and a belief there is no god.