Gallup: 40% of Americans Are Creationists, but a Record-High 22% Accept Reality

[NeoGreen]

https://friendlyatheist.patheos.com/2019/07/26/gallup-40-of-americans-are-creationists-but-a-record-high-22-accept-reality/

Gallup: 40% of Americans Are Creationists, but a Record-High 22% Accept Reality
By Hemant Mehta, July 26, 2019

The good news: Belief in Young Earth Creationism is nearly as low as it’s ever been, and acceptance of evolution by natural selection is at an all-time high!

The bad news: Belief in Young Earth Creationism is still nearly twice as popular as reality.

Forty percent of U.S. adults ascribe to a strictly creationist view of human origins, believing that God created them in their present form within roughly the past 10,000 years. However, more Americans continue to think that humans evolved over millions of years — either with God’s guidance (33%) or, increasingly, without God’s involvement at all (22%).

The latest findings, from a June 3-16 Gallup poll, have not changed significantly from the last reading in 2017. However, the 22% of Americans today who do not believe God had any role in human evolution marks a record high dating back to 1982. This figure has changed more than the other two have over the years and coincides with an increasing number of Americans saying they have no religious identification.

So the news isn’t awful… but only because it was never that incredible to begin with. If there’s any positive news from the last time this poll was taken two years ago, it’s that fewer people believe the wishy-washy idea that evolution is real but God guided the process — as if that reconciles science and religion — and a slight majority of those who no longer subscribe to that view have just taken God out of the picture altogether.