According to new poll data, just about 40% of Americans believe in the strictest form of Creationism, that God created the world about 10,000 years ago and that evolution had no part in the presently observed bio-diversity. A roughly equal percentage of Americans believe in a middle position which holds that the world we see today is a result of evolutionary development with God’s involvement. Approximately 16% believe that human beings evolved through a process of natural selection without divine action.
The report from Gallup draws these conclusions from their study data:
“Most Americans believe in God, and about 85% have a religious identity. It is not surprising as a result to find that about 8 in 10 Americans hold a view of human origins that involves actions by God — that he either created humans as depicted in the book of Genesis, or guided a process of evolution. What no doubt continues to surprise many scientists is that 4 out of 10 Americans believe in the first of these explanations.
These views have been generally stable over the last 28 years. Acceptance of the creationist viewpoint has decreased slightly over time, with a concomitant rise in acceptance of a secular evolution perspective. But these shifts have not been large, and the basic structure of beliefs about human beings’ origins is generally the same as it was in the early 1980s.
Americans’ attitudes about almost anything can and often do have political consequences. Views on the origins of humans are no exception. Debates and clashes over which explanations for human origins should be included in school textbooks have persisted for decades. With 40% of Americans continuing to hold to an anti-evolutionary belief about the origin of humans, it is highly likely that these types of debates will continue.”
Read the full article here (along with graphs showing how the relative weights of these positions have evolved). There’s also a discussion of political and educational correlations to the data.