Evolution Poll

Here are the some of the results of a 1999 [Gallup poll] on creationism, evolution, and public education:

• 4% of Americans had no opinion (down from 9% in 1982)
• 47% believe that God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so
• 49% believe that human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life.

Of that latter 49%, four fifths (40% of total) believe that God guided the process, and one fifth (9% of total) believe that God had no part in the process.

Do the positions given correlate with "creationism" (47%) and "evolution" (49%)? Does the 49% break down into "guided evolution" (40% of total) and "the theory of evolution" (9% of total)?

The poll was commissioned to gather the public's views on the teaching of evolution in public schools and represents the responses to phone interviews of 1,000 randomly selected Americans 18 years of age or older. The responses cited here are essentially unchanged from the three previous times they were asked--first in 1982, and then again in 1993 and 1997--except that fewer people gave no opinion.

The United Nations "Planet Project" polled people over the Internet to get worldwide views, though those are considerably less reliable than phone polls. On average about 18% of Europeans polled believed that man was created divinely by God (although this does not necessarily exclude evolution of the rest of nature) and the remaining 82% believed that humans descended from other species. This result is consistent with the fact that the two largest Christian denominations in Europe are the Roman Catholic church which accepts evolution, and the Lutheran church which has no official position but does not generally oppose it in practice.

See: Creationism, Evolution, Theory of Evolution, [Educational issues]?

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