I believe that got walked back a little to “Evolution went on along until God decided to add Man into the mix and Man was purely formed and given life/soul by God.” So it doesn’t discount the existence of the various early hominids on the scene when man appeared, but it does cleanly separate man from them in an evolutionary sense. There was no H. sapiens baby without H. sapiens parents as opposed to God taking some random mutant H. heidelbergensis baby and saying “Ok, this one gets a soul.”
I don’t have a cite off hand (or time to dig for it right now); I learned this while looking into it on the Vatican’s website some years ago. Anyway, I personally interpreted the poll as asking about Six Day Creationism as a literal reading of Genesis.
Edit: I should note that even the above isn’t “official” doctrine but rather accepted theory by the Church. I don’t believe they have an official “This is law” Doctrine about the age of the universe or evolution and would be surprised if they did. They seem to balance between the traditionalist Genesis believers and Jesuit priest astronomers talking about what happened six billion years ago in the universe.
I won’t paste a giant block of text but interested parties can read *COMMUNION AND STEWARDSHIP: Human Persons Created in the Image of God* off the Vatican website to see some attempted Catholic balancing between theology & science. The useful stuff for purposes of this conversation start at section #62.
This is no attempt to vouch for the validity of any belief. Just a chance for people who are interested to learn what others are saying.
You don’t know any Catholics? The Catholic church has no problem with evolution. It’s all part of God’s work naturally in theor opinion but it happens and the church is no denying it.
Spell it out for me, please. What role does God take in evolution? Is He a prime mover, a catalyst, an overseer? How does the origin story jibe with evolution? Where is God’s hand in the soup?
Because every Christian I know, and of course that includes Catholics, believes that God created man and the earth in its present state. Whether or not that means he molded Adam from dust or arrived late on the scene and breathed a soul into a hominid He called Adam, there’s a leap for each to make that is convenient to his personal grasp of science and theology. But God is credited nonetheless.
I’m guessing you’re young. Most people over thirty don’t know as much as you do.
A lot of Christians ponder God without pretending to know what his/her/its nature really is, and believe in the Big Bang or Big Bounce and cosmological theory and evolution.
Am I confusing the OP with Young Earth Creationism? If so, my vote in the poll should be ignored. But if the question is do Christians believe that God is responsible for the earth and its inhabitants, the answer has to be yes, doesn’t it, or they aren’t Christians? It doesn’t matter when in the process God put His hand in, but at some point in the process every single Christian believes that God is ultimately responsible for life as we know it. Right?
There is really only one guy, a co-worker who I see once a week when our shifts overlap for an hour.
He is a Young Earth proponent and quite a nice guy, but he just never got into much science training. He is also a conspiracy nut so he does not believe most of what the media tells him.
He knows that I am an astronomy buff so we were talking about the full Moon a couple of months ago. He started talking about the “dark side” of the Moon. I told him that was just a Pink Floyd album, and that actually the Sun shines on all of the Moon at different times.
I put 3 objects on the table, one for Earth, Moon and Sun, and showed him how the phases of the Moon work. And that when there is no Moon the Sun is shinning on the side we don’t see. That the Sun is always lighting up one full side of the moon and how we see this from Earth.
He saw that I was right and was completely dumbfounded! He simply isn’t a science type person and the whole Cosmos does not fit into his Young Earth view. Apparently the whole star stuff was just sort of God’s window dressing, or something.
Nice enough guy. He just hasn’t been exposed to enough rational science, can’t separate it from the woo, or is not a deep thinker. He is a well read person who only reads books that support his world view.
When I hear the specific term “creationism” I always assume it to mean the literal belief in Genesis. Anything else falls under the intelligent design umbrella.
I’m not seeing the difference between what I said and the definitions in the poll above the graph. Divine creation/intervention is a requirement for Christian belief, isn’t it? A purely scientific origin story has no need of a Prime Mover.
I’m lost. Intelligent design means that a god had a hand in creating life in its present form, doesn’t it?
Creationism? Nearly everyone I know believes in creationism to some extent. Even my very liberal, mostly agnostic friends believe that there is “probably” a God and that he “probably” created the universe. I have very few atheist friends who don’t adhere to some amount of creationism.
As far as my family goes, most of them are hardcore creationists, if not even young earth creationists. They definitely believe God created mankind specifically to rule the Earth, etc etc.
I honestly simply do not believe the results of this poll so far. I think people must be defining creationism differently, because I really doubt that most people on this message board are surrounded by atheists, or religions that don’t believe that God created the universe and the world, and man, etc.
Even the most liberal christians are still probably creationists (believing that God created the universe and set things up so that evolution would lead to mankind and blah blah blah).
I’ve seen that definition many times in polls. My understanding is that Catholics believed that God intervened invisibly to cause humans in our current form to evolve (and inserted a soul at some point) but that the process is pretty much indistinguishable from standard evolution. Behe, who is a Catholic, thinks that you can see traces of irreducibly complex mechanisms that show God’s meddling directly, but otherwise he accepts evolution and say no the Gallup question. That is in the Times - it seems that when Creationists pay him he is a bit less supportive of evolution.
Depends on the context. The Behe ID just has some direct intervention by God in some places. Then the term got inserted by Creationists into their texts to sound more scientific and to get around the prohibition on religious teaching. It didn’t work.
Intelligent design is clearly possible - humans do it all the time. There just isn’t any evidence of it happening before we got involved.
So we’ve narrowed the gap to “It was all here evolving independently because science, until God came across the hominids and inserted souls, cue Adam and Eve”?
How are you lost? Intelligent design means you think there was some sort of higher power behind everything. Creationism means you believe the Creation Myth as put forth in the book of Genesis. Creationism has no wiggle room. Intelligent Design has a lot of wiggle room. The poll in the OP follows this definition of Creationism. You can make up whatever definition you want, no one is stopping you.
In regular evolution that we evolved to look like we did was an accident - the first intelligent life could have been very different. I think Catholics believe that we were the intended end product. I also think they’ve given up on a literal Adam and Eve, and now say that they were the first true “humans” - but I don’t quite get how they get around the importance of choice in the Fall.
I’m not aware of any place in which Catholic science diverges from non-Catholic science in any measurable way. They might say that God nudged the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs into orbit, and we could say it was an accident, but it is impossible to prove anything one way or another.
Quite a number of people I know are Creationists. I live in Nashville, Tennessee – one of the top contenders for the coveted “Buckle of the Bible Belt” status – and was raised in the fundamentalist Church of Christ.
For the purpose of this discussion you would have to go with what was originally asked in the Gallup poll linked in the OP.
It asked which of the following statements comes closest to your views of the origin and development of human beings?
Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided the process.
Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life but god had no part in this process.
God created humans in pretty much their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so.
The poll showed that 46% of the population believed in #3. The OP asks how many people you know who believe in #3. #1 and #2 are not part of this question.