Too Many Creationists
• Superstitious Folly
The average American if told by a movie star, television personality or preacher that the earth is flat would believe it. That a poll shows that most people are incapable of discerning where reason ends and wishful thinking begins is no reason to start teaching nonsense.
The Pew Research Center has just released its latest series of interviews with 2,000 American citizens. Most of them probably nice enough people but their gray matter is barely alive.
The poll found that 42 percent of respondents held strict creationist views, agreeing that "living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time."
In contrast, 48 percent said they believed that humans had evolved over time. But of those, 18 percent said that evolution was "guided by a supreme being," and 26 percent said that evolution occurred through natural selection. In all, 64 percent said they were open to the idea of teaching creationism in addition to evolution, while 38 percent favored replacing evolution with creationism.