Pew Forum: Public Opinion on Religion and Science in the United States
this is a more helpful poll based on a larger sample.
i'm not at all saying "yay creationism" btw--not at all. what i am saying is that the viewpoints are particular--if you look at this poll, the lowest levels of acceptance of the notions connected to natural evolution are amongst evangelical protestants. this isn't exactly shocking, is it?
and there are alot of these people in the united states.
but the point nonetheless remains that a majority of people accept some version or another of darwinian-style evolution.
within the scientific community, however pew chose to define it, the numbers are overwhelming in the opposite direction, btw. over 80% accept evolution as an explanation.
it's curious that you use the same language as the christians who accept "creationism" to denounce it: that it is an abomination for example. that's a big sin. bad bad bad.
a curious thing in the polls though: belief.
as if accepting the theory of evolution and accepting the idea of some god mucking about doing stuff are equivalent...how'd that happen? so you get basically a poll about matters of faith. how exactly did evolutionary theory get reduced to a matter of faith? what does it mean to "believe in" evolution?
the problem is that in significant areas of the united states, the way these questions are framed remains dominated by christianity, directly and indirectly. it is an indicator of just how non-secular the united states really is. compare the polls in the us to those in any other industrialized country on this question: the differences are pretty shocking.
my main point is that so far as i am concerned i don't particularly care what people imagine about the world around them so long as the more wacky beliefs--creationism among them--don't acquire a degree of political power. people believe all kinds of stuff. so i see this as a political matter more than as a social matter--only important as a function of mobilization of a particular sector. so the solution, if you like, is to undercut that political power and let the evangelicals slide back into a richly deserved political irrelevance. but so far as the actual beliefs go, while i in principle agree with you, will, i don't really care about it as a problem. i am concerned with the political frames that enable such lunacy to take hold are, because they're part of the process that enables political power to be obtained & held....so it's like that more.