fayfreethinkers.com

A new Gallup poll, released Dec. 17, reveals that 40 percent of Americans still believe that humans were created by God within the last 10,000 years. This number is slightly down from a previous high of 47 percent in 1993 and 1999.

Another 38 percent of respondents believe that humans have evolved from more basic organisms but with God playing a role in the process.

A mere 16 percent of respondents subscribed to the belief of "secular evolution": that humans have evolved with no divine guidance. However, this number has nearly doubled from nine percent of respondents in a poll from 1982.

The poll also revealed that beliefs in creationism and evolution are strongly related to levels of education attained. When results are narrowed to those with college degrees, only 37 percent of respondents maintain beliefs in creationism. Meanwhile, the belief in evolution without the aid of God rises to 21 percent.

See here.

DOUG
OK, so the good news:
38% believe in God-guided evolution + 16% who believe in secular evolution = 54% who believe that human beings evolved.

So as far as anti-evolution creationism is concerned, the culture war is over. The creationists lost. Game over.

In their new book, "Evolution, Creationism and the Battle to Control America's Classrooms," Michael Berkman and Eric Plutzer explore the ongoing conflict between religious and scientific teachings.

...The data was collected from 926 nationally representative participants in the National Survey of High School Biology Teachers, which polled them on what they taught in the classroom and how much time they spent on each subject. They also noted the teachers' personal feelings on creationism and evolution.

On the surveys, many teachers indicated that they steer clear of discussing human evolution completely, while the majority only dedicated a small amount of class time to the subject.

The Study wrote:Seventeen percent of teachers surveyed did not cover human evolution at all in their biology class, whereas a majority of teachers (60%) spent between 1 and 5 hours of class time on it.

Many teachers among the 60 percent that kept evolution instruction brief explained that they wanted to avoid confrontation with students and parents who believe in creationism. In many cases, their own evolution knowledge was also limited.

The Study wrote:At the opposite extreme, 13 percent of teachers explicitly endorse creationism or intelligent design, and spend at least on hour of class time presenting it in a positive light. An additional 5 percent reported that they support creationism in passing or when answering students' questions.

See here.

Excerpt from an essay by Frans de Waal, author of Our Inner Ape: A Leading Primatologist Explains Why We Are Who We Are:

"I am wary of anyone whose belief system is the only thing that stands between them and repulsive behavior." [In response to claims by theistic moralists that there would be nothing to keep THEM from killing or raping whomever they pleased but for their belief in God, Jesus, the Bible, etc.]

de Waal summarizes the evidence for emotional linkages between primates, including empathy and consolation, other prosocial tendencies, abundance of examples of spontaneous helping, as well as cases of reciprocity and recognition of fairness/unfairness between primates.

He ends his essay with these words:

"Humans moved from a purely socially reinforced system to one with religious backing. A big step perhaps, but not big enough to claim morality as a religious invention. Without claiming other primates as moral beings, we may assert that the seeds for a moral order seem far older than our species. Empathy, sympathy, reciprocity, fairness, and other basic tendencies were built into humanity's moral order based on our primate psychology."

Also:

"Forgiveness is not, as some people seem to believe, a mysterious and sublime idea that we owe to a few millennia of Judeo-Christianity. It did not originate in the minds of people and cannot therefore be appropriated by an ideology or a religion. The fact that monkeys, apes, and humans all engage in reconciliation behavior (stretching out a hand, smiling, kissing, embracing, and so on) means that it is probably over thirty million years old, preceding the evolutionary divergence of these primates. . . . Reconciliation behavior [is] a shared heritage of the primate order. . . ."

http://networkedblogs.com/ht9iv

Creation science TV. The Creation Adventure Team. Watch the whole thing, IQ drops 10 points:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DtU5q4z- ... ded#at=210