Please see the gallup poll results. These numbers have stayed about the same for many years (40 or 50+ I think) despite the advance of science & tech during this time.
gallup.com
Only about a third of Americans believe that Charles Darwin's theory of evolution is a scientific theory that has been well supported by the evidence, while just as many say that it is just one of many theories and has not been supported by the evidence. The rest say they don't know enough to say. Forty-five percent of Americans also believe that God created human beings pretty much in their present form about 10,000 years ago. A third of Americans are biblical literalists who believe that the Bible is the actual word of God and is to be taken literally, word for word.
The 1/3 of Americans who are biblical literalists are a subset of the 45% who think the earth and humans were winked into existence about 10K years ago.
Those numbers are large enough to be significant, and the stupidity involved is monumental.
For an example of how this affects voting in the USA, in this last election I found this data:
Evangelical Voters: 23% (27.1 million) of all votes cast were by evangelicals. Bush received 78% (21.2 million) of those evangelical votes, representing an amazing 35% of his total of 60.5 million votes. (In 2000, evangelicals cast 15 million votes (15% of the total) and Bush received 71 percent of those votes, representing 21 percent of his 50.5 million total votes.)
Undoubtedly, one of the reasons that moral issues ranked so high in this year's election was the 80% increase in the number of evangelical voters from the 2000 election. (In 2000, 15 million evangelicals voted; in 2004, nearly 12 million more evangelicals voted - a total of 27.1 million). This surge was one of the factors in reelecting Bush and in increasing Republican gains in both the U. S. House and Senate.
Please note that evangelicals are very strongly in the 45% of americans who think the earth popped into existence 10K years ago.
The above quote was from the following link, which is a good read on the religious angle of 2004. BTW, I know nothing of the site, just googled to get info on evangelical vote in 2004.
wallbuilders.com
I also found this quote:
The percentage of the electorate consisting of evangelical voters rose slightly from 15 percent in 2000 to 19 percent in 2004, although Schneider added that a change in indentifying evangelical voters might have accounted for part of this difference.
form:
aei.org
which does not agree with the data shown above for evangelicals. So which is more correct, I don't know. |
