Public Acceptance of Evolution

Posted by ryan at 01:04 PM in . | 1 Comments

Public acceptance of evolution in the United States hovers somewhere around 40%. Those who were shocked that 3 Republican candidates raised their hands when asked if they do not believe in evolution should be less shocked when you consider that more than half of Americans would have raised their hands.

The acceptance of evolution is lower in the United States than in Japan or Europe, largely because of widespread fundamentalism and the politicization of science in the United States.

The concept of the evolution of humans from earlier forms of life is unacceptable to biblical literalists and causes concern even among some holders of less conservative religious views. Catholics and mainstream Protestants generally accept variations of a theological view known as theistic evolution, which views evolution as the means by which God brought about humans, as well as other organisms. Evolution is nonetheless problematic to some of these nonliteralist Christians, because it implies a more distant or less personal God (1–3). Efforts to insert "intelligent design" into school science curricula seek to retain the divine design of humans while remaining agnostic on earlier creationist beliefs in a young Earth and the coexistence of humans and dinosaurs (2, 4).