Gallup: 40% of Americans Are Creationists, but a Record-High 22% Accept Reality

[NeoGreen]

https://friendlyatheist.patheos.com/2019/07/26/gallup-40-of-americans-are-creationists-but-a-record-high-22-accept-reality/

Gallup: 40% of Americans Are Creationists, but a Record-High 22% Accept Reality
By Hemant Mehta, July 26, 2019

The good news: Belief in Young Earth Creationism is nearly as low as it’s ever been, and acceptance of evolution by natural selection is at an all-time high!

The bad news: Belief in Young Earth Creationism is still nearly twice as popular as reality.

Forty percent of U.S. adults ascribe to a strictly creationist view of human origins, believing that God created them in their present form within roughly the past 10,000 years. However, more Americans continue to think that humans evolved over millions of years — either with God’s guidance (33%) or, increasingly, without God’s involvement at all (22%).

The latest findings, from a June 3-16 Gallup poll, have not changed significantly from the last reading in 2017. However, the 22% of Americans today who do not believe God had any role in human evolution marks a record high dating back to 1982. This figure has changed more than the other two have over the years and coincides with an increasing number of Americans saying they have no religious identification.

So the news isn’t awful… but only because it was never that incredible to begin with. If there’s any positive news from the last time this poll was taken two years ago, it’s that fewer people believe the wishy-washy idea that evolution is real but God guided the process — as if that reconciles science and religion — and a slight majority of those who no longer subscribe to that view have just taken God out of the picture altogether.

[NeoGreen]

1. To repeat...

...

[Major Nikon]

14. ...

[Downtown Hound]

2. 40%. Right around the tangerine Nazi's approval rating. n/t

[smirkymonkey]

4. Hmmm! Do you think there might be a connection?

This is why it is so important for children in this country to be educated in how to think critically and not just absorb what is spoon fed to them. It is no wonder that republicans are trying to undermine the educational system in this nation.

[SamKnause]

3. Sad and horrifying.

[Act_of_Reparation]

5. "Fake Christians", amirite?

Somewhere, in Plato's Realm of Ideal Forms, the one, true, objective Christianity has a sad.

[Voltaire2]

11. Get back in the cave.

[uriel1972]

25. I love it :)

[Major Nikon]

15. Someone here works overtime pretending literalism is an outlier

But the 40% of the population that believes in 900 year old humans is pretty much exclusively Christian. Given that about 75% of the population identifies as Christian, you don’t need a doctorate in math to figure out a majority of Christians believe in an extremely literal interpretation.

[Act_of_Reparation]

21. Yeah, but they've all been reading their Bibles wrong.

Some VERY SERIOUS THEOLOGIANS said the flood story is just allegory for good hygiene, so it must be true.

[gtar100]

6. Is reality black and white?

Creationism vs. Materialist Scientism*...neither provide a complete satisfactory answer. But talk about a biased headline! A little self-congratulatory.

* Science is a method of inquiry, not a monolithic philosophical perspective on reality. Scientism is a descriptor for the use of science to describe philosophical matters. Unfortunately, too many mix up the terms.

Creationists aren't a block of people that believe in all the points listed above. It's messier than this article portrays. Many don't really think about it all that much but prefer the religious explanation by default. Some are more considerate of the possibilities but don't buy the materialist perspective.

So, is the accepted "reality" one in which there is no intelligence behind the creation of the universe? That it all happened by accident and evolution only progresses by means of accidental but beneficial mutations and natural selection? Any belief in a non-human intelligence behind the creation of galaxies, stars, planets, and life is simply woo and the real reality is a lifeless blob of matter, churning through chemical reactions, that is just so immense and long-lived that the reality we observe in and around us, is simply an emergent phenomenon caused by a "happy accident" of nature?

What exactly is this "reality" that all the smart kids ascribe to? Is my description accurate?

[NeoGreen]

8. Really?...

...

What exactly is this "reality" that all the smart kids ascribe to?

How about, the reality we all experience and live in, the one without magic.

[gtar100]

10. You assume too much. I gave a description of what I'm hearing from the smart kids.

Is it accurate? What is yours? Your statement assumes a self-evident knowledge that I don't think is all that self-evident.

And your world doesn't have magic? Tragic. But I'm sure you've got a definition of what you mean by that that supports your ascertain. What is it? Why do you assume that too is self-evident?

[Voltaire2]

12. Ok so you are part of the 40%.

And you seem to be proud of it.

Congratulations.

[gtar100]

13. Sure, it'll make it easier on you to just toss me into a 40% category.

Regardless of accuracy. But I do see that the questions I've raised are being ignored.

[NeoGreen]

16. With all due respect, you can take your 'self'evident' strawman...

...and stuff it... with straw.

You are the one who introduced this so called 'self-evident' BS, not I, or anyone else posting in this thread so far.

I'll hang my hat on the description of reality that relies on a recursive observe-hypothesize-test-measure-report-adjust-observe-hypothesize-test-measure-report-adjust-observe etc. method known as 'science', and leave the unicorns, crackers-to-flesh magic for others.

Science doesn't ever claim that the current understanding we have is the last, final and never-ending word for what we call reality, again, the last, final and never-ending word BS is for the magic-users.

The magic-users said people were infested with demons, and would flog them until they were cured (or dead).

We now have a scientific discipline known as neurology and now know it's just epilepsy, and have treatments that don't rely on cruel methods with poor results.

Why don't you check out this thread

https://www.democraticunderground.com/1218281366

and let's see if you can answer the question in the OP.

[gtar100]

20. Ok, I've had a chance to ponder what you've written.

Apparently the words I'm using aren't really conveying the spirit in which they are intended. I blame myself for being very amateurish in my posts.

I'm not a scientist (obviously) but it seems to be the standard we are all held to in explaining everything. Science focused solely on physical phenomenon explains many things but it is not complete, not to me. Further, I view mind and spirit as domains independent of the physical world, similar to viewing time and space as separate but interdependent phenomenon. They have their physical representations in the form of our brains and nervous systems but they are ultimately not the result of physical processes, they are the reason for them. Bodies exist as expressions of mind and spirit. And as bodies develop (evolve) into more complex organisms, they are able to express that much more into the physical world. It's an exploration of consciousness and its possibilities in physical form. That's backwards from the materialist perspective but it has explained much to me, including the history and practice of magic (a whole other long topic).

Agree or disagree doesn't really matter at this point. All this is to say, the "self-evident" BS comes from the original op throwing out the word "reality" as if it were an obvious thing we would all know if we just dropped the religious bullshit. In the same vein, your statement, "the reality we all live in" appears to have the apparent assumption that we all know what that means. Most people would just nod and say yes but I think that glosses over details that really do make a difference. In everyday life, that's probably as far as it needs to go but I don't think so in this forum about religion since reality is its central subject (a point of obvious contention). The story about the elephant and the the three blind men conveys this notion. Maybe we're not all blind but our senses are limited and our experiences subjective.

That's my take in a nutshell. It can be interesting to compare notes on our experiences and observations and our resultant beliefs about life but it can also be a minefield. More often than not, the response is either "who the fuck cares" or "that's bullshit"...full stop. I'm not really that good at conveying my thoughts out loud so don't normally push it beyond that. I'm trying to be more expressive in this forum than I am face to face; and I do appreciate the banter...sometimes.

Thank you for your thoughtful response. I'll try to add an answer to the other thread you reference.

[Major Nikon]

22. Like it or not, science is what's used to describe reality

If you want to describe abstract hocus pocus ideas you can do so however you like, but you aren’t describing reality.

[uriel1972]

23. uh how can you determine these non-physical things...

what is the mechanism by which the physical world interacts with the non-physical world?

Yes, science is incomplete and always will be as our bodies are flawed and our perceptions prone to failure. However it's the best we got in the way of determining the accuracy of things.

There is no reason to believe our consciousness' are in some way 'special' or 'unlimited' by physical bounds, any more than computer programs are. They are phenomena defined by physical reality, just as the rest of the Universe is.

We don't need spiritual entities to explain consciousness, in fact the spiritual explanations have hindered medical progress by millennia.

Reality is what doesn't go away when you stop believing it... (someone said somewhere... can't remember.)

[Mariana]

19. By "smart kids" do you mean educated people?

Please define your term.

[Major Nikon]

17. You might want to read the OP again

The survey differentiated between young earth creationism and other creationists, so they weren’t all blocked together.

[Mariana]

18. This poll didn't ask about any of the things you're going on about here.

Here were the options given the respondents:

1) Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process
2) Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God had no part in this process
3) God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so

If the bias in the headline bothers you so much, try to remember that the essay at the link is clearly an opinion piece, in which the writer expresses his opinion about the results of the poll. It's the normal thing for opinion pieces to be biased.

[Karadeniz]

7. They couldn't analyze a turd into a toilet.

[NeoGreen]

9. But apparently, 40% love...

...an orange one.

[uriel1972]

24. Please tell me how you come to this conclusion...

some esoteric faith method perhaps?

[qazplm135]

26. There's your Trump base right there

Can't imagine many of those folks voting Democratic.

[democratisphere]

27. God would never accept responsibility for creating flawed creatures

such as humans. When it takes millions of years to create something you know there is a problem.