Free Republic
Browse · Search
General/Chat
Topics · Post Article

Skip to comments.

Gallup Poll: 4 in 10 Americans still hold creationist views
Science on MSNBC ^ | 12/19/2010

Posted on 12/20/2010 7:19:04 AM PST by SeekAndFind

If you're in a room of 100 people, odds are likely about 40 think God created humans about 10,000 years ago, part of a philosophy called creationism, according to a Gallup poll reported Friday (Dec. 17). That number is slightly lower than in years past and down from a high of 47 percent in both 1993 and 1999.

And 38 percent of Americans, the poll estimates, believe God guided the process that brought humans from "cavemen" to today's incarnation over millions of years, while 16 percent think humans evolved over millions of years, without any divine intervention.

This secular view, while a relatively small number, is up from 9 percent in 1982, according to Gallup.

Like most American attitudes, Gallup wrote, views on human origins have political consequences. For instance, debates and clashes over which explanations for human origins should be included in school textbooks have persisted for decades. And with 40 percent 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, according to Gallup.

The findings also stand in stark contrast to another announcement Friday, this one by John Holdren, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. The memo was issued to federal science agencies to guide them in making rules to ensure scientific integrity.

The Gallup results are based on telephone interviews conducted Dec. 10-12 with a random sample of 1,019 adults, ages 18 and older, living in the continental United States. The findings were weighted by gender, age, race, education, religion and phone lines to make the sample nationally representative.

(Excerpt) Read more at msnbc.msn.com ...


TOPICS: History; Religion; Science; Society
KEYWORDS: 2010polls; academicbias; creation; creationism; evolution; gagdadbob; gallup; oldearth; onecosmos; pravdamedia; scienceeducation; timingissuspicious; youngearth; zogbyism
Navigation: use the links below to view more comments.
first previous 1-20 ... 61-8081-100101-120 ... 401-419 next last
To: antiRepublicrat

2nd Law of Thermodynamics is discussed in the online creation science book from my post #40 of this thread.

It’s not an equation but it is a thorough refutation of your talking point.


81 posted on 12/20/2010 9:14:52 AM PST by BrandtMichaels
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 77 | View Replies]

To: SeekAndFind

“Americans’ views on human origins varied significantly by level of education and religion, the poll found. Those with less education were more likely to hold a creationist view that God created life thousands of years ago, while college graduates were more likely to hold one of the two viewpoints involving evolution.”

The more you know, especially about science, the less likely you are to be a creationist.


82 posted on 12/20/2010 9:14:54 AM PST by allmendream (Tea Party did not send the GOP to D.C. to negotiate the terms of our surrender to socialism.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: CynicalBear

Time is relative. There really is no arguing with this truth of Creation. What is one day in one frame of reference can be billions in another. Genesis apparently was written from God’s perspective. From our perspective it took billions of years. There is no contradiction in this. We wouldn’t have know this about His nature if we hadn’t studied His creation with science.


83 posted on 12/20/2010 9:15:48 AM PST by DManA
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 80 | View Replies]

To: antiRepublicrat; BrandtMichaels

> “The Earth is not an isolated system.”

.
The Earth is a part of an isolated system called the universe, and the second law is fully in force here, so take your auditorium full of monkeyes and typewriters and move on.
.


84 posted on 12/20/2010 9:16:33 AM PST by editor-surveyor (Obamacare is America's kristallnacht !!)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 77 | View Replies]

To: SeekAndFind
And still, the cornerstone of American republican self-government and liberty remains unchanged:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men..."

"Self-evident," or, to put it in the modern vernacular, "as plain as the nose on your face."

One must ask themselves the question: Why do those who can't see something so obvious, though they are a distinct minority in this country still, have so much power?

It has to have something to do with the failure of the majority to effectively demand true representation, I think.

85 posted on 12/20/2010 9:16:42 AM PST by EternalVigilance (Men who legislate against the natural law are like moths confidently flying into a bug zapper.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: editor-surveyor

I don’t understand that. Could you explain?

and it says in Genesis that he expanded them from Earth.


86 posted on 12/20/2010 9:17:50 AM PST by DManA
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 78 | View Replies]

To: Titus Quinctius Cincinnatus

>>Nevermind that there are documented cases of basalts and other rocks that we KNOW cannot be more than a century or so old (because we know when the eruption occurred, etc.) that give false positives of being tens or hundreds of millions of years old.<<

That’s a nice theory but my question has always been that they are testing the rocks formed by eruptions that they know the date of but what they do not know is the age of the substance those rocks were made of during that eruption.


87 posted on 12/20/2010 9:19:41 AM PST by CynicalBear
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 66 | View Replies]

To: antiRepublicrat
The Second Law is very specific, a set of mathematical equations. It controls the amount of useful work that heat can do in an isolated system. The Earth is not an isolated system. But, basically, the Second Law deals with equations. You’re just babbling if you can’t produce an equation showing that Evolution violates it.

I'm guessing that you can't honk to tell everyone you passed P-Chem?

88 posted on 12/20/2010 9:26:07 AM PST by Titus Quinctius Cincinnatus (is a Jim DeMint Republican. You might say he's a funDeMintalist conservative.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 77 | View Replies]

To: CynicalBear

Is it not also part of the radio-isotope dating method that molten lava ‘resets’ the clock back to their original conditions?


89 posted on 12/20/2010 9:27:24 AM PST by BrandtMichaels
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 87 | View Replies]

To: DManA

In the English translations, it is not well defined, “the dividing of the waters,” but in the masoretic the term used is “raqia,” which is an expanding by working, such as in pounding out a metal shield from a lump of metal, but in both cases, the center is the Earth.

Read “Starlight and Time,” by D.R. Humphreys.


90 posted on 12/20/2010 9:30:18 AM PST by editor-surveyor (Obamacare is America's kristallnacht !!)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 86 | View Replies]

To: editor-surveyor; SeekAndFind; Alamo-Girl; alstewartfan; betty boop; Blogger; Blood of Tyrants; ...
... God created humans about 10,000 years ago, part of a philosophy called creationism....

Jeepers, editor-surveyor, I regard myself as a creationist — but not by this definition! Who came up with this definition?

I am just a simple, plain-vanilla creationist. That is to say, one who believes that God created all things in heaven and on earth, and pre-eminently man, in the Beginning. And that, as the Gospel of John tells us, "All things were made by him; and without him was not anything made that was made." (John 1:3)

The physicists tell us that the estimated age of the universe is 13.7 billion years. To speak of "age" at all implies a beginning. It doesn't really matter to me how old the universe is. That is irrelevant to the idea of its having had a beginning. Regardless of its age, the Creation was "in the Beginning" — the spiritual creation as described in Genesis 1.

Just my thoughts, FWIW.

91 posted on 12/20/2010 9:30:21 AM PST by betty boop (Seek truth and beauty together; you will never find them apart. — F. M. Cornford)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 46 | View Replies]

To: DManA
"How He Did is is [sic] left as an exercise for the student - the answer is not in The Book."

How He Did it is in The Book.

"And God said..." is written 8 times during creation in Gen 1 with mankind being created with the 8th "And God said...". 8 is the number of resurrection.

Man was created to be resurrected from the very beginning.

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life; and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not."

How it works is an exercise for the student.

How He Did it is clearly explained.

"And God said..."

92 posted on 12/20/2010 9:32:35 AM PST by GourmetDan (Eccl 10:2 - The heart of the wise inclines to the right, but the heart of the fool to the left.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 61 | View Replies]

To: Spudx7
"For the THEORY of evolution to be true, it would have to trump the second LAW of thermodynamics."

The second Law of Thermoldynamics, itself one of God's creations, doesn't apply since the Earth is not a closed system.

93 posted on 12/20/2010 9:32:49 AM PST by Natural Law
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 14 | View Replies]

To: GourmetDan

That is Truth in poetry and metaphor.


94 posted on 12/20/2010 9:35:06 AM PST by DManA
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 92 | View Replies]

To: CynicalBear

> “That’s a nice theory but my question has always been that they are testing the rocks formed by eruptions that they know the date of but what they do not know is the age of the substance those rocks were made of during that eruption.”

.
Simply put, when rock is melted at temps of 2000 - 6000 degrees, all the inert gases are supposedly released, and the process begins anew.


95 posted on 12/20/2010 9:35:29 AM PST by editor-surveyor (Obamacare is America's kristallnacht !!)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 87 | View Replies]

To: CynicalBear
but what they do not know is the age of the substance those rocks were made of during that eruption.

True...but theoretically at least from a radioisotope dating method perspective it doesn't matter, since the process of melting the rock "resets" the rock's age. In the molten state, to look at the K-Ar method, argon is theoretically released, which leaves you with just the potassium-bearing material that then crystallises the form a now-solid rock. The same type of problems, especially related to segregation and so forth, apply to solid-solid transformations like the U-Pb series.

The underlying assumption of old-earth approach to radiodating is that, for instance with the K-Ar method, that when a rock solidifies, it contains NO argon trapped within the lattice structure of the rock. The idea then is that any argon found within is the result of potassium isotope decay, which since this occurs at a known rate, allows us to determine the rocks age since it was formed by some eruption or so forth. Yet, we KNOW from experimentation under similar conditions to actual zircon formation that argon is, in fact, trapped within the lattice as it cools, often substantially. This, then, gives a false positive by millions of years.

It IS true that, as you say, we cannot know what the age of the rock material was before it was molten. There's no way to tell, since even the presence of argon can't be experimentally determined or theoretically predicted with any accuracy, even should we assume that all of that argon was already present from previous radioactive decay of the rock before it became remelted, another assumption we know wouldn't be sound.

Essentially, the age of the earth could very well be 10,000 years, or it could be 5 billion years, and radioisotope dating can't really resolve it one way or the other.

96 posted on 12/20/2010 9:38:14 AM PST by Titus Quinctius Cincinnatus (is a Jim DeMint Republican. You might say he's a funDeMintalist conservative.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 87 | View Replies]

To: editor-surveyor
The Earth is a part of an isolated system called the universe, and the second law is fully in force here

Yes, the heat death of the universe is predicted. Until then, we have these things called stars pouring obscene amount of energy onto their planets. There is no violation of the 2L with a decrease of entropy on a planet because it is on the net offset by a vast increase of entropy in its star.

97 posted on 12/20/2010 9:38:36 AM PST by antiRepublicrat
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 84 | View Replies]

To: Natural Law
"The second Law of Thermoldynamics [sic], itself one of God's creations, doesn't apply since the Earth is not a closed system."

The skillet on my stove isn't a closed system either and it operates according to the 2LoT AFAIK but those eggs never do unscramble themselves.

This is something I've personally tested many times...

98 posted on 12/20/2010 9:39:32 AM PST by GourmetDan (Eccl 10:2 - The heart of the wise inclines to the right, but the heart of the fool to the left.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 93 | View Replies]

To: betty boop

I too had some belief in the old-ages theories. Problem is they are not Biblical. The Bible tells us the age of the earth by telling us so and so begat so and so at a certain age - how Usher came up w/ 4004 yrs BC. Other Bible historians argue that some folks were removed from biblical history due to God’s displeasure w/ their sin(s). Factoring in possible gaps still leaves us short of 10,000 years.

But my cousin, who is a pastor, put it best when he questioned me about my salvation in Christ. Aout how our ultimate ‘source’ of this was from God’s inspired Word. So then he asked me if Genesis was not as indicated where exactly in the Bible do I think God stopped telling lies?


99 posted on 12/20/2010 9:40:04 AM PST by BrandtMichaels
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 91 | View Replies]

To: DManA
"That is Truth in poetry and metaphor."

Actually, it's simply Truth. No poetry or metaphor there.

100 posted on 12/20/2010 9:41:26 AM PST by GourmetDan (Eccl 10:2 - The heart of the wise inclines to the right, but the heart of the fool to the left.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 94 | View Replies]


Navigation: use the links below to view more comments.
first previous 1-20 ... 61-8081-100101-120 ... 401-419 next last

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.

Free Republic
Browse · Search
General/Chat
Topics · Post Article

FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson