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shafique wrote:So, what is the % of Americans who believe

that all living species were created 6,000 years ago in their current form.

Is it still above 50%?

Cheers,
Shafique

Noam Chomsky: We must bear in mind that the US is a very fundamentalist society, perhaps more than any other society in the world – even more fundamentalist than Saudi Arabia* or the Taliban**. That's very surprising. About half of the [US] population believes that all living species were created 6,000 years ago in their current form.

In September 2005, Gallup slightly altered the wording of this question as follows:

Which of the following statements comes closest to your views on the origin and development of human beings -- : human beings have evolved over millions of years from other forms of life and God guided this process, human beings have evolved over millions of years from other forms of life, but God had no part in this process, or God created human beings in their present form exactly the way the Bible describes it]?

The basic pattern of responses between these two ways of asking the question is quite similar. The minor wording changes appear to have resulted in a slight increase in the percentage of Americans choosing the literal biblical alternative rather than the "evolution with God's help" alternative.

Definitely
True Probably
True Probably
False Definitely
False Unsure
% % % % %

.


"Evolution -- that is, the idea that human beings developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life"


6/1-3/07
18 35 16 28 3

Young Earth creationism (YEC) is a form of creationism that asserts the Heavens, Earth, and all life were created by direct acts of the Abrahamic God during a relatively short period, sometime between c. 5,700[1] and 10,000 years ago.[2] Its adherents are those Christians and Jews[3] who believe that God created the Earth in six 24-hour days, taking a literal interpretation of the Genesis creation narrative as a basis for their beliefs,[4][5] and include around 10-45% of American adults, depending on various polls.

...
YECs regard the Bible as a historically accurate, factually inerrant record of natural history. They accept its authority as the central organizing text for human life — the sole indisputable source of knowledge on every topic with which it deals. As Henry Morris, a leading YEC, explained it, Christians who flirt with less-than-literal readings of biblical texts are also flirting with theological disaster.[36][37] For the vast majority of YECs, an allegorical reading of the Genesis creation myth, the Fall of man, the deluge myth, and the Tower of Babel would undermine core Christian doctrines like the birth and resurrection of Jesus Christ. According to Morris, Christians must "either ... believe God's Word all the way, or not at all."[36] Therefore, YECs consider the Genesis creation myth as an historical account of the origin of the Earth and life, and that Bible-believing Christians must regard the Genesis 1-11 as historically accurate.

event horizon wrote:Yes, for anyone who actually lives in the US, touting claims that half of Americans believe the earth is six thousand years old is pretty funny.

I fully understand you want to keep your head in the sand and deny the evidence that 73% of your fellow republican church going brethren believe that the Bible's account of creation trumps science (and they believe that man was created less than 10,000 years ago).

shafique wrote:
PS - here's a link to Gallup's surveys and the questions specifically relating to the Bible:
http://www.gallup.com/poll/21811/americ ... igins.aspx

shafique wrote:

event horizon wrote:Yes, for anyone who actually lives in the US, touting claims that half of Americans believe the earth is six thousand years old is pretty funny.

See what happens when loons are presented with evidence.

They go into denial.

The stats actually show that 73% of eh's fellow religious republicans believe the Bible's account of creation above that of science. That's 3 in 4 !!

Of course, our young loon's response is 'I don't be believe it' - which is ironic!

Cheers,
Shafique

shafique wrote:You obviously don't go to Church, do you Green Tiger?

According to Gallup (link given above) 73% of event horizon's peers do reject science and believe that man was created between 6000 and 10000 years ago, because that is what they believe the Bible says. As 'eh' quoted Chomsky in the first post of this thread - this statistic is indeed 'surprising'.


Cheers,
Shafique

shafique wrote:

shafique wrote:
PS - here's a link to Gallup's surveys and the questions specifically relating to the Bible:
http://www.gallup.com/poll/21811/americ ... igins.aspx

Evidence, young loon, evidence.

73% of your brethren believe that science is wrong. Chomsky has been proven right despite your protestations (and no evidence) that he is wrong.

event horizon wrote:The evidence has already been provided:
...
Sorry, but you can't blame lack of education or ignorance/confusion on evolution when it comes to Turkey - and even there, a much lower percentage of Turks accept evolution than Americans.

shafique wrote:...

Anyhoo - here is what Chomsky said in 1989 (taken from pg 50 of 'Understanding Power - The Indispensible Chomsky')

Footnote 34:

For polls on Americans' religious beliefs, see for example, George Gallup, Jr. and Jim Castelli, The People's Religion: American Faith in the 90's, New York: Macmillan, 1989, pp. 46-48, 4, 14. This study gives the United States a rating of 67 on its "Religion Index," based on various indicators -- whereas West Germany, Norway, the Netherlands, Great Britain, and France all had scores in the thirties, and Denmark brought up the rear with a 21. ..

Richard Severo, "Poll Finds Americans Split on Creation Idea," New York Times, August 29, 1982, section 1, p. 22 (reporting a Gallup poll which found that 44 percent of Americans believe "God created man pretty much in his present form at one time within the last 10,000 years," 38 percent accept divine guidance of evolution, and a mere 9 percent accept Darwinian evolution -- a number not much above statistical error).

Religious Fanaticism

WOMAN: Fundamentalist religion has really taken off in the last decade, maybe as an outlet for some of this despair. Do you have any thoughts about the significance of that development in the U.S?


Chomsky: It's pretty amazing what's happened, actually. There have been a lot of cross-cultural studies of what social scientists call "religious fanaticism" not people who just believe in God or go to church, but they're really kind of fanatic about it, it's the kind of fanatic religious commitment that permeates your whole life. And what these studies demonstrate is that this is a typical characteristic of pre-industrial societies-in fact, it correlates very closely with industrialization: as industrialization goes up, this kind of religious fanaticism goes down. Well, there are two countries that are basically off the curve. One of them is Canada, which has more fundamentalist commitment than you would expect given its level of industrialization. The other is the United States-which is totally off the chart: we're like a shattered peasant society. I mean, the last study I saw of it was done in around 1980, and the United States was at the level of Bangladesh, it was very close to Iran.33 Eighty percent of Americans literally believe in religious miracles. Half the population thinks the world was created a couple thousand years ago and that fossils were put here to mislead people or something-half the population. You just don't find things like that in other industrial societies.


Well, a lot of political scientists and others have tried to figure out why this aberration exists. It's one of the many respects in which the United States is unusual, so you want to see if it's related to some of the others and there are others. For instance, the United States has an unusually weak labor movement, it has an unusually narrow political system. Think: there is no other industrialized Western country that doesn't have a labor-based political party, and we haven't had one here since the Populist Party in the 1890s. So we have a very depoliticized population, and that could be one cause of this phenomenon: if social and political life don't offer you opportunities to form communities and associate yourself with things that are meaningful to you, people look for other ways to do it, and religion's an obvious one. It's strikingly the case in the black communities, actually, where the black churches have been the real organizing center which holds life together: I mean, there's terrible oppression, a lot of families are falling apart, but the church is there, it brings people together and they can get together and do things in that context. And the same is true in many white communities as well.

Now, I don't think you can draw too many sweeping conclusions from religion itself-it's kind of like technology, it depends what you use it for. Like, even among the fundamentalists, you've got Sojourners [a politically progressive religious group], and you have Jerry Falwell [a right-wing televangelist]. But it certainly does carry with it the potential of aligning with other forms of fanaticism-and that's a big danger in the United States, because it's a very significant movement here. In fact, by now just about every major political figure in the country has to associate himself with it in some way. In the 1980 election, for example, all of the three candidates [i.e. Carter, Reagan, and independent candidate John Anderson] advertised themselves as Born Again Christians. In the 1984 election, one of the candidates advertised himself as a Born Again Christian, and the other was a Methodist minister or something.35 In the 1988 election, Dukakis was secular, which is unusual, but Bush said he was religious.

shafique wrote:RC - yes, the Quran is compatible with science (If you click on the link above and go to the thread in the Religion forum you can then go to the article selectively quoted by eh, there he explains what the Quran says about evolution) and I do indeed believe we were all created from less complex life forms and ultimately the universe was created in the Big Bang. However, 73% of eh's peers in America believe that humans were created in the form we are at some point in the past 10,000 years - because they believe the Bible is literally correct.

Red Chief wrote:Shafique, can you stop running just for a second and reread my question instead of replying on your own one. As you might guess I absolutely does not care what was written in Quran. It's your area but at my point of view you use foreign terms without full understanding them.

Red Chief wrote:Shafique, is there a difference between the evolution hypothesis and science for you?

Red Chief wrote:If it comes to science (not political activism) we should have found that amoeba, whom Sir Shafique was descended from, and all chain links in between of those two remarkable individuals. With all respect to both of you nothing from those has been found so far.

Red Chief wrote:Is it your new faith or something from Quran?

Red Chief wrote:Why don't you leave those terms to those strange people, who lived 1000 years before the Messanger, and had very weird pastime called mathetai. They could have explained you the difference between hypothesis and science as they practiced them.

event horizon wrote:In any event, I don't feel all that compelled to prove my case to a whack-job. This thread is here more for those who aren't loons and who would roll their eyes at Chomsky's dumb comment.