According to a 1999
[Gallup poll] commissioned
to gather the public's views on the teaching of evolution in public schools (which most favored),
47% of Americans believe that God created human beings at one time within the last 10,000 years
pretty much in their present form, while 49% believe that human beings have developed over
millions of years from less advanced forms of life.
Of that latter 49%, 40% believe that God guided the process, and 9% believe that God had no part
in the process.
The poll represents the responses to phone interviews of 1,000 randomly selected Americans
18 years of age or older.
The responses to questions about belief in evolution are essentially unchanged from the
three previous times they were asked--first in 1982, and then again in 1993 and 1997.
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.
/Talk