Saturday, June 09, 2007





As if we needed more evidence that Americans are in dire need of an intellectual upgrade:

Americans believe in both evolution, creationism: poll

Asked their views on whether human life is a result of God's creation or a product of evolution, one quarter of Americans chose both conflicting theories, a poll suggested Friday.

"All told, 25 percent say that both creationism and evolution are definitely or probably true," USA Today said.


At least simple ignorance is fairly easy to understand. But believing in Creationism and evolution simultaneously strains comprehension. My guess is that it's the ontological equivalent to channel-surfing: we want to watch two programs at the same time so we jump back and forth so rapidly that we fail to appreciate either and come away with our heads spinning from an overdose of disparate pixels. And then it's off to McDonalds and the local megaplex.

14 comments:

Garth said...

Americans will ultimately believe what they're told to believe; it's easier that way.

Mac said...

Unfortunately, you're almost certainly right.

Tony said...

I don't know . . . The Catholics (and many others) have a term for this called "theistic evolution" and it seems to give people of faith a way to understand the practical mechanics of evolution/science without any guilt or feeling like it counters with some of the better stuff in the bible like the whole love your neighbor thing and what not . . .

Unknown said...

Many people seem to feel this guilty urge to believe in creationism, but deep down their bullshit detector tells them evolution is probably correct. Americans are fickle people; it's no surprise they believe something one day and deny it the next.

Anonymous said...

Actually, I think the reporter, Jill Lawrence of USA Today, may have made both a math or statistical error and a misleading statement in the article the Yahoo News cite Mac noted came from:

----------------------------------
"All told, 25 percent say that both creationism and evolution are definitely or probably true," USA Today said.

"At least simple ignorance is fairly easy to understand. But believing in Creationism and evolution simultaneously strains comprehension. ..." (Mac)
----------------------------------

See: (for the actual poll numbers)
http://www.usatoday.com/news/politics/2007-06-07-evolution-poll-results_n.htm
See Also: (for article Yahoo cited)
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2007-06-07-evolution-debate_N.htm

I don't know where the 25% figure came from, and it may be more like 10 to 15% overlap, if that, as part of the problem lies in the order of questions and wording of questions asked in the Gallup/USA Today poll.

I've sent an email to the "reader editor" of USA Today, Brent Jones, asking for clarification, with a copy to Mac, so unless I'm wrong, I think the quote from the article was at the least misleading, or wrong, based on the numbers from the actual poll I looked at. USA Today's answer to my questions, assuming they reply, should be interesting.

Anonymous said...

So if I build a self-replicating robot that has random variations which affect subsequent generations' replicating abilities, and then hide myself from sight, those robots will (by analogy) be idiots for believing in the ontological possibility that they were both created and evolve?

Now, I'm no theistic apologist, but using false dilemmas tends to make people look as though they couldn't pass an introduction to logic course.

(For future reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma)

Ed said...

There is a "clockmaker" theory that allows for both creation and evolution - the idea is that the universe was created with initial conditions such that evolution could take place.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clockmaker_hypothesis

Of course, this idea is not falsifiable, so it is not a scientific hypothesis. However, it does allow people to hold a belief in both creation and evolution simultaneously.

Anonymous said...

I believe in G-d. I also believe in evolution. I see no conflict in that. I believe there is an intelligent (ingenious)design to the universe that includes evolution. I do not know if we evolved from apes, or were seeded here from another planet, or something I have not thought of. The world is not 6000 years old.

Stan

Mac said...

Tony--

he Catholics (and many others) have a term for this called "theistic evolution" and it seems to give people of faith a way to understand the practical mechanics of evolution/science without any guilt

But why should anyone feel guilt at being a part of the universe? To me that's absurd. People go to unnecessary lengths in order to feel "special" and central.

As for the universe being an artifact set in motion: I'm sympathetic to the idea. I don't happen to believe in it, but it doesn't strike me as necessarily implausible. If the Cosmos *is* a creation, I'd like to know who did it!

Unknown said...

Most people are an intellectual mess of unexamined and uncritical beliefs. (There is probably not an insignificant number of people who think the world is BOTH flat and round too.) So I am neither suprised nor particularly bothered by this kind of poll result. (In fact, in general, despite the popularity of these kinds of polls in the media, I pay virtually no attention to them except as predictors of how a political vote is likely to come out.)

--WMB as my real name

Anonymous said...

Terrifying.

Katie said...

When I was still a church-going sort, I worked it out in my head that the theory of the creation as stated in the Bible and evolution could go hand in hand, as long as you messed about with the concept of time.

God, being an immortal being, might well have created the Earth in seven days, as long as you consider on of God's "days" to be millions upon millions of years.

Because the order of how things were created wasn't that off, just the length of time it really took to make it happen.

It seems like such a simple way to meld the two theories, but having tried to get a couple of hard-core Creationists to buy into it has been more difficult than I might have imagined.

Unknown said...

katie -- Interesting comment. But your "hard-core Creationists" are hard core precisely because they believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible. Bible says God created the world in 7 days, it MEANS 7 days. And counting all those "begats" and multi-hundred year lifespans of Biblical characters, we come up with 4004 B.C.E. as the year in which God created the world.

I grew up in the so-called Bible Belt and remember hearing in church how there actually were no such animals as dinosaurs. What God did when he made the world was to bury fake dino fossils to test our faith. So this would be my criticism of the "Museum of Creation" -- If you're going to buy into a literalist interpretation of the Bible, at least get your theology stright and don't put dinosaurs on Noah's ark 'cuz there WEREN'T any!

--WMB as my real name

Johnny Rook said...

Besides the incorrect assumption that Christian belief is always in line with a literal interpretation of the bible, there's also a misconception that science walks hand-in-hand with atheism. Someone mentioned that science deals only with ideas that can be falsified, which does not meen "prooven untrue." It means that something can be tested and verified or denied. As long as religion stays in the realm of the spiritual understanding and reveals information to humanity "as only the mortal mind may yet comprehend" then there is no conflict with science and religion. When science steps into the boundary of spirituality I will stop defending science. Richard Dawkins is a poor scientist and I have yet to meet anyone in academic scientific circles that defends his promotion of atheism through science. Science is agnostic, at best, being unable to qualify or quantify any religious claim. Fundamentalist Christianity, however, has been making dangerous progression into dictating viewpoints on the material world and claiming that any contradiction is immoral. Hooray for people who believe in evolution as a method established by an intelligent designer, but be careful of the dangerous fundamentalists who use that non-conflicting view to crowbar their way into getting you to reject a scientific understanding of the world. Denying an understanding of the world developed through the senses that God gave you is more of a sin than the fundamentalists hope to avoid.