Only 1 in 5 Americans believe in pure evolution – and that's an upswing

I think my son summed it up quite well ....

..... when he said 'I think there might be a god, but I don't believe in Jesus'.

I'm an atheist, I do not believe in God (you know, the Christian loving God, that wiped out humanity ..... twice) but I will accept that different people have different faiths, mortality is scary and some people need that safety blanket of heaven to cope.

Science is there to be questioned, religion is to be accepted. I would rather question.

Educate...

As long as people are thinking for themselves and not swallowing the media message, we will have this problem.

Clearly, these guys are not watching enough movies, documentaries or TV dramas. They can't be reading enough magazines or books either. This free thinking is turning people into loose cannons.

Maybe some kind of compulsory adult education classes should be introduced, or reduced state benefits/services based on their browsing history (if they browse the Dawkins Foundation a lot then they get more service from the state than if they browse extremist sites like Biblegateway, for example).

But something drastic needs to be done if wall-to-wall evolutionary education and mockery of creationism isn't working.

Title is too long

"He (and The Reg is willing to bet that most of them believe that He is, indeed, a He and not a She)"

Gender is a function of biology. It’s hard to imagine that if God exists that it has a gender and if it does, why? It would imply the existence of other Gods of the opposite gender and by extension, lots of little Gods and Godettes running round the place (Mount Olympus?). Maybe they’re the ones wreaking havoc.

Need a spawn of divine being icon.

Still

On the upside that's now more Americans believing in evolution that have actually evolved.

American logic

And the Americans still fervently believe in democracy and go to war to impose it without a trace of irony.

of course it doesn't help that the evidence for evolution is somewhat exaggerated by science types. One question that goes unanswered for example is why are there still monkeys around if they are supposed to have evolved into humans? the fact we don't see new humans evolving in monkey enclosures in zoos is rarely commented on. I am not saying it disproves evolution (you can't disprove a negative) but it certainly raises questions that the likes of dawkins etc are loath to address in their fancy books on the subject.

...and God did not directly guide this process...

That statement "...and God did not directly guide this process." implies the existence of a god, as a true atheist I would not accept participation on such survey as all possible answers are skewed towards the existence of certain deity.

Take completely out god out of the equitation, then you can have my opinion.

W O W!

Makes the 'mericans look rather stupid!

Why is it beyond the mentality of church chickens to believe that maybe their god created human beings and other animals via evolution? They are always referring to nature, but never considering that God's nature is nature itself. Many of them are strangers to nature and locked into a belief that nature and God are somehow separate. They cling to a man made book while ignoring what God's nature is telling them. In some respects, they seem to hate God's nature while proclaiming that they love God. Really quite dumb how they never fail to claim that certain groups of people are "unnatural," yet they are totally ignorant about how God's nature works. Seems to me that they are not capable of this line of thought, as they use religion as an excuse for their willful ignorance and as a tool for male domination and power over other people's lives. The laws of nature are God's laws, not some book written by a bunch of goat herders that created religion as a weapon of conformity against those that have other beliefs. "God is both good and bad, the positive and the negative." Only a fool would believe that God is any more perfect than God's own nature is.

This mental illness of "religion" needs to be addressed.

All those faith believers who dismiss scientific discovery should be denied medical treatment and let their god treat them!

How many of these thought that Jesus was a former president? Or that he was born in the "Good ol' US of A"?

I'd like to see the same poll carried out among the world's 1.6 Billion Muslims.

'Mericans don't have a monopoly of common ignorance y'know.

Even Science doesn't support the widely held views of evolution

The THEORY of evolution suggests a "tree of life" where we started from something basic & evolved into more sophisticated creatures. Unfortunately the unpalatable truth for those who want to belive this is that genetic evidence does not support it. As reported in New Scientist some while back, the GENETIC EVIDENCE suggests a "web of life" instead i.e. what you would see genetically from hybridisation - like when you get a cross breed between 2 plants.

I think the article is in the January 2009 issue of New Scientist.