I’m from Ireland and know no creationists and in general the early parts of the bible were taught to us as simply allegories and stories for people from times that were just more ignorant of the world about them. Now I’m watching clips on youtube of debates and its generally US TV shows and a few UK TV shows that have most of the debates. (like bill maher etc). Is it predominantly a US thing? or is the movement strong in other countries? And how big is it there?
I think you will have to differentiate between the active creationists and the passive creationists. For the passive creationists the results are pretty dismal with 40-70% believing in creationism depending on how you define it. However, most of these probably haven’t really given it much thought one way or another and so couldn’t be said to be part of a active creationist movement.
Results split up depending on the phrasing, etc but I’d say that claiming ~60-70% of Americans believe in some form of creationism (“God guided process”, etc) and ~40-50% believe in literal Six Day Genesis-style Creationism wouldn’t be an exaggeration.
As noted above, a lot of this is passive and doesn’t represent the population of the “Protest at school board meetings” set.
Ireland is a predominantly Catholic country. The numbers I have seen for US Catholics is somewhere in the 90%+ range for believe in (theistic etc.) evolution, can’t imagine Ireland is much different. As mentioned, in Northern Ireland, the Democratic Unionist Party has creationist links, particularly through their strong links through the Free Presbyterian Party of Ulster. Note that the DUP voters aren’t all voting for religious reasons but political/demographic reasons (all those UUP voters didn’t turn fundamentalist overnight).
That 40-70% is in the USA. There are far fewer creationists (even amongst fervent Christians) in Western European countries. Creationism, in its modern form, was itself created by certain very conservative and strongly protestant Americans less than 100 years ago, and its influence has only fairly recently began to spread to conservative protestants (by no means all of them) in other countries. Christians in The Republic of Ireland (where curiousprincegeorge seems to be) are overwhelmingly Catholic, and the Catholic Church accepts evolution and firmly rejects the sort of Biblical-fundamentalist creationism that is rampant in the USA (even though some American Catholics may be unaware of this).
The DUP in Northern Ireland, however, is radically protestant, militantly anti-Catholic, and very conservative/right-wing in political outlook. It thus does not surprise me to hear that it has associated itself with what has become very salient feature of American radical-protestant conservativsm. Even so, I doubt whether most of the people who vote for the DUP (themselves a minority, though a plurality, of people in the small province of Northern Ireland) actually accept this aspect of the party’s ideology.
As an American (Roman*) Catholic, the topic of evolution vs creationism never really came up during my religious education. But some of the basics of evolutionary theory came from people in the church (such as the famous Mendel squares) and I think it most US Catholics lean towards a “theistic evolution” opinion if they have one at all.
This chart from Pew Reseach shows Catholics as the US Christian group most likely to agree that evolution is the most likely answer.
*There’s a separate (minor) church called the “American Catholic Church”
Cheers for the answers. I’ll just affirm my question properly this time round.
What I meant was people that are strictly creationist. as in fossils that look more than several thousand years old were put there to test us kind of thing. The literal readers of the old testament if I can call them. like Ray comfort. Not the people who believe in evolution but still believe that god had a hand in everything.
Thanks for the answers so far tho. Still checking out the links
The populations of Muslim-majority countries tend to be predominantly creationist. I’m not sure how their education systems deal with the topic, though.
Ran into my first Actual In-Person Creationist this summer on a mission trip. We were rebuilding houses and a youngster from a southern Bible College turned to our pastor and said “You don’t believe in Evolution, do you?”
This old, wise man of the cloth turned to him very slowly, fixed him with a steely gaze and said in a paternal tone of voice: "I don’t see why what I believe would make any difference as regards the Fact of Evolution. You might as well be asking me if I Believe in Gravity…"
Thanks for the link. That seems like a MAJOR semantic issue, though. Asking “do you believe in evolution?” and “is evolution the BEST explanation for the origins of human life on earth?” and “do you believe that organisms can change over time” might all look the same on the surface, but won’t be interpreted the same way, and someone might answer differently to the question depending on how it is worded.
I was raised Roman Catholic and I’ve only ever met one person who was absolutely and vocally a creationist. This fellow had a grade 6 education and was reborn in The Lord fairly late in life. He was adamant, when the subject came up, that the Bible presented the literal and indisputable historical fact of the entire of history and that everything else was obviously wrong. He found it inconceivable that I would have any interest in repeatedly visiting the Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology, since nothing in that entire building was real, aside from being mildly interesting rock formations.
Now I’m not saying that people of limited education and/or intelligence are most likely to subscribe to such a patently foolish point of view but… yeah, actually that’s exactly what I’m saying.
P.S. Everything I learned as a kid about dinosaurs and evolution was presented to me in science class at Catholic school.
You need to go down to 2005 and earlier on the Polling Report link I gave earlier but here’s a few questions related to direct Six Day Biblical creationism:
I think some of it is the semantic issue. I’m going to answer “No” to the first two questions for one simple reason: Evolution/the theory of evolution works from a naturalistic point of view and provides an explanation that doesn’t require divine influence. Even if I’m willing to accept Genesis in a purely allegorical or metaphorical sense, the point is still that God did the creating with intent. This rules out random mutation and natural selection. What is evolution but random mutation and natural selection? If I’ve ruled those foundational principles out, can I really say that I believe in evolution?
Likewise at Catholic schools in Australia. Even from an early age we were taught that science gives an accurate account of creation (both in the big bang and evolution senses), and the biblical accounts are just allegory. Science and religion classes were kept very much separate, and it was religion’s job to explain how it fit into science, not the other way around. In later years when we could choose our subjects we were pushed to choose science over religion (which was seen as a slacker’s subject even by our religious teachers).
I don’t think I even heard of modern young-earth style creationism until after I finished high school. Anyone suggesting that sort of thing in science classes would have been laughed out of the room.
Y’all should come see a public high school science class in the Bible Belt then.
The majority of people here are very literal biblical creationists. I myself believed in creationism until I reached college. I was firmly convinced that fossils were either misunderstood or deliberately planted by demon-possessed scientists to lead the world away from an understanding of God.
I don’t think I was even that radical. Really, it would blow your minds to be here.
This YouTube video from Texas in 1996 is about on target for what I experienced in my HS in the countryside of South Carolina. I graduated in 2000, fwiw.
I especially like the bit right at the end. :smack:
Indeed. As I understand it, some creationist “intellectuals” accept something that they call “microevolution”: basically the idea that over the last 6,000 or so, since Eden or the flood, some species may have changed a little bit (although no new ones have emerged) via more or less Darwinian mechanisms. They do this in order to try and explain away examples of evolutionary processes happening in historical times, such as industrial melanism in hawk moths, or the emergence of antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria. (The argument does not stand up to examination, but it is at least a half-hearted gesture toward confronting actual evidence.) Given this acceptance of “microevolution”, with some careful parsing a dissimulating creationist could honestly answer “yes” to the first and third of your questions. (although yer average creationist is doubtless quite unaware of this).
On the other hand, a Catholic theistic evolutionist, while fully accepting all the real science, might perhaps baulk at the second question (“is evolution the BEST explanation for the origins of human life on earth?”). As I understand it, Catholic doctrine is that although evolution may have produced the living homo sapiens body (as well as those of other organisms) what makes us actual humans (as opposed to upright walking apes) is the infusion of an immortal soul into that body, and that is a miracle from God.
Science, of course, has nothing to say about where immortal souls come from.
