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OT Difficulties - a Dead Horse diversion

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  • Doc TorDoc Tor Admin Emeritus
    No. No it doesn't. The same equations that describe the nuclear reactions that heat the water that turn the turbines that create the electricity that powers your computer that enables you to type such utter rot also describe how to measure the age of the oldest rocks we know (primitive meteorites, my PhD).

    You can hope that those equations are wrong, but clearly, they're not.
  • And this is another thing @MPaul - estimations from simple observations of rock formations show that the earth is far, far older than a few thousand years. Much more sophisticated techniques get to this in various other ways.

    But the simple fact is that the earth is old - you could quibble about the nuclear dating techniques, but I wouldn't advise it. On the most basic level they are telling you that the world is old.

    Any other explanation is akin to claiming that the world is pink; despite everyone else saying that it isn't, despite various careful explanations as to how it cannot be; despite open knowledge about how these techniques are theorised and used, people still think it is a credible position that the world is pink.

    At some point, unless you are a complete idiot, you've got to stop claiming that the world is pink and accept that other people have good reasons to think differently.

    And that your pink obsession is a problem that is entirely yours not theirs.
  • Barnabas62Barnabas62 Shipmate, Host Emeritus
    Reflecting on mr cheesy's limestone point.

    We did this, when our children were aged 7 and 5.

    Included in the memorabilia from that memorable holiday is an amazing ammonite fossil, which my children prised out of a loose bit of cliff about three feet above the shore, shortly after we'd made the 600 foot descent.

    I remember looking up to the top of the cliff and reflecting that God is not in the business of deceiving children. Unlike those who would discount such obvious and readily available evidence of long dead deeply buried life from bygone ages in favour of a particular mode of scriptural interpretation.
  • I've come across YEC-ers who argue that the world is young but God made it to look old in the same way that Adam and Eve were created as mature adults rather than babies.

    It gets really silly.
  • KarlLB wrote: »
    MPaul wrote: »
    Martin54 wrote: »
    MPaul wrote: »
    Nick Tamen:They are approaching Scripture seriously and
    Tiresome? To whom? To hypocrites who pretend to be Christian while attempting to redefine its basic terms? to the pathos of: Jesus is a good man, a great teacher, but not really God’s unique son. (What does Anglicanism really do with CSLewis?)

    So what is seriously? Really, if you discount supernatural events and you discount historical truth and along with miracles, you downgrade prophecy to the meanderings of Bronze Age superstition, what actually is there left to take seriously?

    No one here but you discounts historical, as a subset of forensic, scientific, truth. No . one .

    Hardly any one here, including me, doubts that Jesus is really God's unique son. The unique human. He isn't the sole incarnation of course. That is utter meaningless nonsense in the face of the fact of infinity from eternity.

    A large majority here do not discount the miracles of Jesus or His immediate followers.

    Prophecy cannot be upgraded to foretelling the future as it hasn't happened. Even God can't know what it is in His physical realm. Beyond obvious broad historical brush strokes and common sense at the local level based on omniscience of the past and present. And any actual intervention He actually has planned. If any.

    So who are these hypocrites pretending to be Christian?

    What there is left to take seriously when you get rid of all of the delusional, irrational, a/anti/un-historical, unscientific dross is that Jesus is the only hope.

    If someone defines a category, Christian, they can mean by that and usually do their version of the Christmas and Easter stories. That is fine by me.
    However it is unsatisfying. Let’s look at Peter. Dear chap who was with Jesus for the entire 3 years. How would Peter define that category? I think that if I want to redefine it different to him then it is not really ‘Christian’. If I want to say, for instance that the ascension did not happen or the man at the beautiful gate was not cured of lameness or that tongues of fire did not appear on the day of Pentecost or that the resurrected Christ did not appear to the 120, or that there was no miracle of th3 loaves and fishes then I have to call dear ole Pete a liar. What I say is Christian is not what he would say is Christian.

    Instead I want a symbolic or cosmic or other Christ that I can interpret as a symbol of hope then will not another symbol do as well? Why must I reinvent Christianity and insist that I am Christian and ole Pete was deluded regarding his story. None of that stuff really happened! I know cos I am an enlightened technologically educated and unsuperstitious 21st century homo sapien and I evolved Into my present status of being.
    But wait, I am Christian..my version of it anyway..Or amI? I don’t know what I am..Help!

    You seem to think that the world is divided into YEC fundamentalists and unbelievers, with some of the latter claiming the Christian label.

    As so often, nuance seems to escape you. As does the evidence of most of the active contingency of this website who are neither of those extremes. Do I smell an excluded middle here?

    But I can underside why someone pinning their faith to literal interpretations of Genesis 1-3 via a "slippery slope" argument would not be very interested in evidence. Even the blindingly obvious.
    This. And it's the suggestion of "claiming the Christian label" that comes across as standing in judgment of other Christians.

    I'd add, @MPaul, that it seems like you have a real concern, perhaps a fear even, that if any portion of Scripture is not literally true and historically accurate—that if, for example, Adam and Eve were not real people who lived in a real Garden of Eden—then nothing in Scripture is trustworthy. This seems to be coupled with a perception that rejection of the historical accuracy of something like Adam and Eve being real people is automatically a rejection in toto of any possibility of divine revelation in the first chapters of Genesis.

    Is that so? If it is, why do you think that?

  • Barnabas62Barnabas62 Shipmate, Host Emeritus
    edited October 2018
    I've come across YEC-ers who argue that the world is young but God made it to look old in the same way that Adam and Eve were created as mature adults rather than babies.

    It gets really silly.

    I think the problem is not the logic but what it says about the character of God. I've argued a few times in DH that it is inconsistent to argue that 'this book is right, this rock is wrong'. If you believe that God spoke creation into being then why should he speak deceptively in his created order but truly in the written word?

    Similar arguments apply to the evidence of light being generated aeons ago but reaching the earth now. YEC requires a belief in the deceptiveness of the created order which sits very uneasily with belief in the straightforward meaning of scripture.
  • BroJamesBroJames Purgatory Host
    Barnabas62 wrote: »
    <snip> I've argued a few times in DH that it is inconsistent to argue that 'this book is right, this rock is wrong'. <snip>
    I think sometimes there is an overweening confidence in our ability rightly to read ‘this book’.

    In the same way as we may need to modify a confident, ‘The Lord says…’ to a more cautious, ‘I believe the Lord is saying…’ so I think we sometimes need to revise our, ‘The Bible says…’ to ‘I believe the Bible is saying…’

  • finelinefineline Shipmate, Host Emeritus
    I think too it's about a certain approach, maybe more of a Western approach - seeing the concept of truth as binary logic and very literal language. Which to me is a reductive way to approach a holy book, and seems to be a way Jesus himself warned against, but I know many who do approach it that way.

    I think sometimes it can be a fear thing. People can have a fear of there being things about God and the Bible that we don't understand - they sometimes feel safer when they have a neat answer to everything. It gives a feeling of being more in control. And people worry about misrepresenting God - I've known people who think that they are letting God down if they don't have an answer for everything, and that saying 'I don't know' is a poor witness.
  • I think all those things apply, Barnabas62, BroJames and Fineline.

    It's the antithesis of Mystery and a chimerical quest for complete certainty. There's no room for even the slightest nuance lest the whole edifice come crashing down. At worst, it's kindergarten Christianity.
  • I think it is earnestly held belief. Without using the powers of reason, and the powers of the senses. To broaden understanding can be a dramatic as Paul's on the road to Damascus. It hurts, it stretches, but does lead to a much better way.
  • KarlLBKarlLB Shipmate
    One of three things has to happen in due course, surely:

    1. Somehow the belief is maintained by a constant swatting away of evidence, ignoring of the evidence, assuming evil motives in those presenting the evidence, and clinging on to a series of Gish Gallop takeaways.

    2. A move to a more rational position gradually occurs.

    3. Massive crisis of faith following a period of cognitive dissonance leading to a complete shift in outlook.
  • finelinefineline Shipmate, Host Emeritus
    As it happens, I recently got back in touch with an online community I used to be part of, not a Christian group as such, but a group where quite a few people were young American conservative Christians, with a very black and white, fundamentalist approach to the Bible. I was quite surprised that a few of them are now saying they abandoned their faith, or they have gone from being totally focused on their faith to the opposite extreme of it not being part of their life at all. These people are women. The men seem to have the same black and white approach as before. And a few of these people simply haven't mentioned their faith (which in itself is unusual for them), so I wonder whether it is simply less black and white for them now.

    It has got me thinking about the impact on a person's life and faith of holding such black and white views - whether that does make a person more likely to abandon their faith, and whether a person has that sort of faith because of black and white thinking, or develops black and white thinking because of being taught that sort of faith.
  • A bit of both. I can think of politicoes and pagans I know or know of who have got just such a black and white view when it comes to their own fairth or ideological positions.

    Such faith doesn't bend when the wind blows, it snaps.
  • finelinefineline Shipmate, Host Emeritus
    Yes, that makes sense that a rigid faith is more likely to snap. Though I have known people with this sort of faith who rethink their faith entirely when something bad happens in their life, because their understanding had been that God was blessing them because he loves them, and then they can't understand why he would let something bad happen to them. Though I don't think these people previously consciously believed God didn't love all the people suffering in the world, say with war and famine. It seemed more that they had selective focus, but once something bad happened to them too, they couldn't maintain the selective focus. But I find many people do rethink their rigid faith and broaden their understanding in the light of things like this, though the broadening is often more with relation to their own lives, and they may still be quite narrow about things that don't affect them.
  • Doc TorDoc Tor Admin Emeritus
    There are well-documented testimonies of children brought up in 'Christian' schools, or homeschooled, whose faith utterly collapses when confronted by the whole glorious, ancient edifice of creation, because they've had it drilled into them that either the Bible is all literally true or all utterly false.

    Less well-documented are those curious about Christianity who turn away at the first approach because they think being a Christian also means believing in YEC.
  • OhherOhher Shipmate
    I was never of the "it's-all-plain-spoken-truth-or-it's-all-rubbish" mindset myself (though one can sort of see its appeal to a mildly obsessive-compulsive personality), but what boggles my mind is the internal contradictions in this approach: The Intricately Perfect Divine Revelation of God's Great Plan, Shared Bit by Bit Over Several Thousand Years of Human History with an Oddly Scattershot Assortment of Characters Apparently Chosen at Random.

    The kicker, though, is the mechanics of the revelation: through highly fallible, vulnerable, craven, needy little creatures with short lifespans, distracted attentions, poor impulse control, limited intelligence, inability to learn from experience (one's own or other's), all-consuming emotions, propensities for selfishness, self-aggrandizement, and violence, short-sightedness, streaks of meanness, and a profound ability not only to Lose the Plot at the slightest provocation, but occasionally and quite deliberately chucking that Plot straight out the nearest tent-flap because it interfered with getting supper on the table or Concubine #476 between the sheets.

    One imagines God watching from a nearby planet with Her head in her hands muttering "Oi veh."

    If I believed in miracles, that would have to be biggest one: that a perfect revelation made it into perfect recorded form through the efforts of a bunch of hopeless misfit losers like us.
  • Martin54Martin54 Deckhand, Styx
    MPaul wrote: »
    Rubbish. Let me introduce you to a little thing called geology which has some inarguable* evidence to show that the planet is billions of year old
    Evidence really only shows what we want it to show. It is not evidence that determines what we believe. What determines that is hope.

    2/3
  • Barnabas62Barnabas62 Shipmate, Host Emeritus
    I scored it 0/3. Evidence shows what is, independent of what we hope for. What we believe may be disproved by evidence e.g on the basis of previous character we may believe someone to be innocent but the evidence proves otherwise. Hope should not determine how we look at evidence. Honesty should.
  • I've come across YEC-ers who argue that the world is young but God made it to look old in the same way that Adam and Eve were created as mature adults rather than babies.

    It gets really silly.
    An idea spawned by Philip Gosse in Omphalos two years before The Origin of Species.

  • The interesting thing for me is that geology is a lot easier to understand if one accepts the evidence of an old world. If you are stuck in a rut of believing that it must be thousands of years old, then it is really hard to understand the processes. To the point where presumably everyone just throws up their hands and gives up trying to understand it.

    I think biology goes a stage even further than that - not only is evolution deeply embedded with genetic understanding now, it is actually educating how to move forward in science. You don't have to believe in evolution to be a plant geneticist, but my goodness it helps.

    That's the fundamental thing here: believing in this stuff does not hinder science and understanding and manipulation of the world around us. Understanding the great, slow, geological events helps us understand many useful things about the world around us. Understanding about evolution helps biological science move forwards because, basically the system works as if it is billions of years old and as if evolution was true.

    To the point that even if you have doubts about evolution, you have to act as if it were true in many different biological disciplines to get cogent results and to make the big changes. Sure, we could breed new crop varieties without working within the parameters of genetics and evolution, but it wouldn't be as good. Sure, we could understand how vulnerable particularly rare species are without understanding the pressures of evolution, but it would be incomplete and ultimately ineffective. Yes we could understand about disease, and innoculations and resistance without understanding about evolution, but our solutions would be crap.

    Even if the world is young and even if evolution is total bullshit, the natural world works as if it was true - and we are better off as mankind acting as if it were true than tossing out all that useful stuff on the assumption that we can't believe our own observations if they disagree with some holy book.
  • Also, as I get older, it becomes starker to me how lopsided Creationism is.

    Somehow we are supposed to believe that the Bible is a never-to-be-contradicted scientific textbook on geology - and yet nobody* take it to be a definitive guide to accountancy, or mathematics, dietitics (is that a word?), the rules of war, political philosophy, etc.

    What's so special about some old myth that makes it definitive in one thing but ignorable in many others?

    * Well, I suppose you never know
  • KarlLBKarlLB Shipmate
    edited October 2018
    mr cheesy wrote: »
    Also, as I get older, it becomes starker to me how lopsided Creationism is.

    Somehow we are supposed to believe that the Bible is a never-to-be-contradicted scientific textbook on geology - and yet nobody* take it to be a definitive guide to accountancy, or mathematics, dietitics (is that a word?), the rules of war, political philosophy, etc.

    What's so special about some old myth that makes it definitive in one thing but ignorable in many others?

    * Well, I suppose you never know

    No, you're right. We probably do have a few people somewhere who want wars of annihilation, a draconian lawcode including stoning fornicators to death (including rape victims if they were too terrified to scream), and religious code enforcement on pain of death, but they're considerably more fringe than YEC.
  • mr cheesymr cheesy Shipmate
    edited October 2018
    I want to STM that basically nobody take the Bible literally on the majority of subjects I've mentioned above. It is fairly obvious that the YEC believers don't think that the dietary standards apply and I'm doubting that many YEC accountants practice according to biblical accounting standards, few skin doctors who look to the Bible on skin disease.

    I'd further venture that YEC isn't actually about that* at all. I believe that there are a small number of people pulling strings - for some Machiavellian power trip, presumably - and a huge number of saps that swallow it.

    * By this I mean that Creationism is projected as being about some concept of biblical purity - when all the evidence is that nobody acts as if it was literally true and accurate about absolutely everything
  • KarlLBKarlLB Shipmate
    STM?
  • Submit the motion
  • Isn't it the case that those that believe that God created each species inseparably show little concern about the extinction of those species?
  • KarlLBKarlLB Shipmate
    edited October 2018
    Incidentally, I've often thought that YEC is a three tiered structure - at the top are Originators - well known creationists who write the books, do the circuits, come up with daft arguments (banging on about Information Theory was popular last time I was interested this stuff). Then there are Propagators, your ministers and pastors who feed the Originators' crap to their congregations ans listeners. Finally the Rank and File who have been fed this stuff as if it were valid and therefore think it is A Reasonable Thing To Believe. There's a cycle going on whereby discredited arguments (PRATTs - Points Refuted A Thousand Times) are replaced by equally fallacious arguments, but the cycle takes time and I bet there are people out there who still tell their children that the depth of the dust on the moon's surface proves it's young and the Evilutionists are therefore wicked liars.
  • agingjb wrote: »
    Isn't it the case that those that believe that God created each species inseparably show little concern about the extinction of those species?

    I don't know, I hadn't really thought about that.

    But then, of course, extinction of species is a natural part of evolution - so conservation appears on some readings to be acting against natural processes anyway.
  • mr cheesymr cheesy Shipmate
    edited October 2018
    I've been trying to think of something else that has this much power - to the extent that belief in it is being used as a yardstick to measure the "sound-ness" of the bedrock of other people's faith position.

    I mean, obviously people use different ways to include or exclude people from their holy huddle, but I can't think of much off-hand that is used to such devastating effect when it is a thing that has never been central to the religion. It's not about Christology, isn't about anything in the Creeds, etc and so on.


  • KarlLBKarlLB Shipmate
    Sexuality.
  • Free-trade (and/or anti-socialism)
  • KarlLBKarlLB Shipmate
    Gun rights in some places at least.
  • It's also interesting how these things intersect. Not all Evangelicals are Creationists, but those who are..

    I dunno, maybe that's too much of an exaggeration - because if it is true then perhaps Creationism is a gateway to these other things.
  • I'm something of a first (maybe?) I've taken this tangent back to Purg in the hope we can discuss it without, you know, getting bogged down in the DHs.
  • Martin54Martin54 Deckhand, Styx
    How are we going to reach out from our liberal handicapped ghetto to the eternally conservative majority without a weak, irritating, self righteous, pointy stick?
  • mr cheesy wrote: »
    agingjb wrote: »
    Isn't it the case that those that believe that God created each species inseparably show little concern about the extinction of those species?

    I don't know, I hadn't really thought about that.

    But then, of course, extinction of species is a natural part of evolution - so conservation appears on some readings to be acting against natural processes anyway.

    Given that humans are a part of nature, one could argue that what we do is perforce a natural process. We evolved in such a way as to act as we do.
  • Martin54Martin54 Deckhand, Styx
    edited October 2018
    You'd think that everybody here but MPaul would know that and work with it. There again it's taken me 50 years to get there.
  • mr cheesy wrote: »
    It's also interesting how these things intersect. Not all Evangelicals are Creationists, but those who are..

    I dunno, maybe that's too much of an exaggeration - because if it is true then perhaps Creationism is a gateway to these other things.

    I think you're absolutely right. There is a desperate need to have the Bible be absolutely right in all things, lest we lose it altogether as an authority, and therewith lose our hope of salvation. This means we must defend to the death the practical or empirical deductions of our particular reading of every single bit of Scripture that may seem to have any such.

    The odd exception are those passages we can find a way to explain away, so that what seems the obvious interpretation can be skirted in favor of one less stupid as concerns is obvious contradiction with known fact. Thus very few YECchis try to defend geocentrism anymore, although to an outsider there seems to be nothing obviously separating geocentrism from young earthism.

    And for some reason the gateway drug into this strange addiction seems to be creationism. Brainchild of nineteenth century Seventh Day Adventism, somehow adopted by pentecostals and fundamentalists as well, to the increasing detriment of their handle on scientific reality. They grow estranged from the world God created, even add they think they are growing closer to God.
  • MPaulMPaul Shipmate
    You will all one day have to recognise what idiocy you are believing here. What amazes me is the utter blind futility of evolution. Around 40% of North Americans just plain do not believe it despite the protestations by academia. When one considers why that is, you cannot dismiss them all as cretinous idiots. It has to be really as Berlinski says, that the unreason behind it just cannot work nor can the improbility and it lacks the slightest shred of evidence that its two blunt levers, mutation and natural selection can in any scenario, perform the functions claimed for them. Darwin would not himself have believed it if he had known the complexity of the cell. The word of God has a far more reasonable explanation. God says he made it and tells us why.
  • MPaul wrote: »
    You will all one day have to recognise what idiocy you are believing here. What amazes me is the utter blind futility of evolution. Around 40% of North Americans just plain do not believe it despite the protestations by academia. When one considers why that is, you cannot dismiss them all as cretinous idiots.

    Hold my beer.
  • MPaul wrote: »
    You will all one day have to recognise what idiocy you are believing here. What amazes me is the utter blind futility of evolution. Around 40% of North Americans just plain do not believe it despite the protestations by academia. When one considers why that is, you cannot dismiss them all as cretinous idiots. It has to be really as Berlinski says, that the unreason behind it just cannot work nor can the improbility and it lacks the slightest shred of evidence that its two blunt levers, mutation and natural selection can in any scenario, perform the functions claimed for them. Darwin would not himself have believed it if he had known the complexity of the cell. The word of God has a far more reasonable explanation. God says he made it and tells us why.

    If only there was some way to test the sanity and/or intelligence of someone who rejected a nuanced, complicated, useful explanation for a useless one.
  • BoogieBoogie Heaven Host
    @MPaul
    Americans just plain do not believe it despite the protestations by academia. When one considers why that is, you cannot dismiss them all as cretinous idiots.

    I’m sure they are perfectly intelligent and good in their own fields.

    But they are utterly blinkered on this subject. Sadly belief defies reason. Somehow what humans want to believe goes far, far deeper than evidence.

    The current regime in the US is proof enough that belief Trumps reason there :cry:



  • mr cheesymr cheesy Shipmate
    edited October 2018
    Boogie wrote: »
    @MPaul
    Americans just plain do not believe it despite the protestations by academia. When one considers why that is, you cannot dismiss them all as cretinous idiots.

    I’m sure they are perfectly intelligent and good in their own fields.

    But they are utterly blinkered on this subject. Sadly belief defies reason. Somehow what humans want to believe goes far, far deeper than evidence.

    The current regime in the US is proof enough that belief Trumps reason there :cry:



    There are very few creationists who have any credibility in any field outside of the creationist huddle - I guess because their obsession takes over their lives leaving little time for anything else.

    Of the tiny subsection who seem to have some training and show some evidence of having thoughts in their heads, the majority appear to be engineers.

    It's really sad. If they spent the amount of effort that they do on proving that squares are circles on anything else, they might actually achieve it.
  • It's kinda like the constituency of people who obsess about conspiracies or aliens - or even attempting to solve true crimes. One can dabble in these things in the shallows, but once one gets to be the status of True Believer, it mushrooms and becomes totally impervious to any outside influences.

    I don't know - is Creationism any more reasonable than believing aliens are abducting people? Much of a muchness.
  • Gee DGee D Shipmate
    As far as we are concerned, the evidence of evolution and the vast scale of the universe proclaim the great power of God much more strongly than the simple acceptance of the Adam and Eve account.
  • Just because I don't like unevidenced statistics I bothered to check that 40%. According to the 2017 Gallup poll,
    • 38% say God created man in present form, lowest in 35 years
    • Same percentage say humans evolved, but God guided the process
    • Less-educated Americans more likely to believe in creationism
    and that this percentage is falling. It's the first time since 1982, when this poll started, that creationism wasn't the most common view.

    To add data to the statement that less-educated Americans are more likely to believe in creationism, the more educated the person, the less likely they are to agree with this statement - 21%. The percentage agreeing with creationism goes up with church attendance.
  • KarlLBKarlLB Shipmate
    Usually the spiritual blackmail happens after an exchange of evidence. Perhaps creationists are learning that the evidence step doesn't generally go their way.

    To test the water - @MPaul, do you know what an Endogenous Retrovirus is?
  • Doc TorDoc Tor Admin Emeritus
    MPaul wrote: »
    You will all one day have to recognise what idiocy you are believing here. What amazes me is the utter blind futility of evolution. Around 40% of North Americans just plain do not believe it despite the protestations by academia. When one considers why that is, you cannot dismiss them all as cretinous idiots. It has to be really as Berlinski says, that the unreason behind it just cannot work nor can the improbility and it lacks the slightest shred of evidence that its two blunt levers, mutation and natural selection can in any scenario, perform the functions claimed for them. Darwin would not himself have believed it if he had known the complexity of the cell. The word of God has a far more reasonable explanation. God says he made it and tells us why.
    Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt. The more stupid the man, the larger his stock of adamantine assurances, the heavier his load of faith.

    I think Mencken already has the beer.
  • Just because I don't like unevidenced statistics I bothered to check that 40%. According to the 2017 Gallup poll,
    • 38% say God created man in present form, lowest in 35 years
    • Same percentage say humans evolved, but God guided the process
    • Less-educated Americans more likely to believe in creationism
    and that this percentage is falling. It's the first time since 1982, when this poll started, that creationism wasn't the most common view.

    To add data to the statement that less-educated Americans are more likely to believe in creationism, the more educated the person, the less likely they are to agree with this statement - 21%. The percentage agreeing with creationism goes up with church attendance.

    I've been puzzling over this comment and still can't make head-nor-tail of it. As far as I can tell, it doesn't say anything about the 40% claim. Fact-checking it ain't.
  • The 40% statistic of USA citizens believing in creationism is given by Wikipedia. It is referenced to a regular survey, the most of recent of which is this Gallup poll from 2017. Which did agree with MPaul's statement that about 40% of North Americans plain do not believe in evolution.

    What I found interesting was that the Gallup headline was that the figure is falling, that 38% is the lowest it has been since the beginning of the survey. Far more North Americans believe in evolution or God assisted evolution than creationism.
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