Wednesday, June 13, 2007

Another Poll on Evolution

Gallup: Now thinking about how human beings came to exist on Earth, do you, personally, believe in evolution, or not?



Posted by Jewish Atheist at 10:01 AM
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23 comments:

jewish philosopher said...

I'm suspicious about all polls on these kinds of issues.

I think about 30% of Americans are serious Christians, 50% are secular Deists and the remaining 20% are agnostic.

10:53 AM, June 13, 2007
CyberKitten said...

I still find it incredible that a significant percentage of people don't "believe" in Evolution.

I would how many of them don't "believe" in Gravity?

12:00 PM, June 13, 2007
Anonymous said...
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12:23 PM, June 13, 2007
Scott said...

That's why we're not suppose to be a democracy.

12:57 PM, June 13, 2007
Anonymous said...
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1:06 PM, June 13, 2007
CyberKitten said...

Isn't the USA a Constitutional Democratic Republic?

Seems like a pretty good definition of your political structure. Though 'Democracy' is a word with a *very* wide definition....

1:34 PM, June 13, 2007
Scott said...

We're a constitutional republic, yes.

Shouldn't matter what the general public thinks because the Federal Government shouldn't have enough power to invade people's lives, liberty, education, or what have you.

1:40 PM, June 13, 2007
None said...

For some irony.. I remember reading a story a few weeks ago.. It was how monkeys have continued to evolve and how humans have not.

1:50 PM, June 13, 2007
Anonymous said...
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2:03 PM, June 13, 2007
Scott said...

Well no, no it is not.

A democracy is majority rule, a republic is a rule by elected officials.

Democracy is a tyranny of a majority, a constitutional republic is rule by elected officials who are bound by the chains of constitution.

Democracy says if the majority of the people want evolution taught in schools, then it should be. A constitutional republic says it doesn't matter what the majority thinks, because educational authority isn't afforded to the State by the constitution.

A constitutional republic is a good thing. Democrazy is a BAD thing.

2:21 PM, June 13, 2007
Anonymous said...
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2:52 PM, June 13, 2007
Scott said...

Um, no.

It’s exactly because of people like you that confuse democracy and republic that we have problems like gay marriage. You think it’s fine to trample on someone else’s rights as long the majority of people think it’s okay. After all, in the long run the “Jeffersonian democracy will correct itself” or some such BS that you’ve spouted on the past. (maybe not you, but keebo, at this point I’m just referring to you both as the same person since you have no distinguishing characteristics anyway)

Under this line of reasoning murder, slavery, theft, or State mandated intelligent design teaching are all okay if that’s what the majority wants. There is no rule of law because you reject all absolute morality or natural law. You’re only guiding principal is majority rule.

This is exactly the kind of thinking the framers of the United States constitution despised. The kind they tried to avoid, even going so far as instituting the Electoral College so the majority would not directly elect officials.

The difference is key, the difference is the problem.

3:26 PM, June 13, 2007
Anonymous said...
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5:39 PM, June 13, 2007
Scott said...

Bah, I didn't "want" to talk government, you brought it up in your little anti-religion rant earlier.

This is why it's impossible to talk to you or keebo or whichever you are. You appear to not have the ability to think in logical sequence. Maybe that's why you can't type in normal paragraph syntax like everyone else, I don't know.

At any rate, you're probably right. I mean if wikipedia says they're the same thing than they must be. But just to clear something up so your not speaking for me I didn't claim the electoral college was fair, I said it was arranged to avoid direct majority elections.

And they weren't trying to limit the power of the people, they weren't trying to limit power period. End of story.

Later brother.

6:42 PM, June 13, 2007
Anonymous said...
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2:55 AM, June 14, 2007
BTA said...

Do they have a poll for how many americans "believe" in quantum physics?

What a bunch of f-ing morons our immediate neighbors are, whereever we live...

Would love to hear the poll repeated in Europe and Asia.

7:20 AM, June 18, 2007
BTA said...

should have googled first...

Colorful picture:
http://www.newscientist.com/data/images/archive/2565/25653701.jpg

Wordy version:
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn9786

7:23 AM, June 18, 2007
Anonymous said...

"And, to the 50% of you who believe in Creationism over Evolution . . . . you're nuts."

Is is possible that both are true? Personally I think it is more nuts to believe that everything I see in the world around me came about purely by chance and time.

If someone found a watch buried in the sand they would obviously assume that someone made it. After all, who would believe that a watch can make all it's intriquite parts and then assemble them into a functioning small machine by random chance over any period of time? A small fly is a million times for complex than a watch so I assert that people who believe that we are all here by random chance are indeed the ones who are nuts.

Evolution may be true, but even more obviously true is that a world as complex as the one we live in did not come about by random chance but indeed was created by a creator.

2:35 PM, June 19, 2007
Anonymous said...
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3:37 AM, June 20, 2007
Baconeater said...

Obviously true? No, not at all.

Oh, and a watch obviously was created by man. No scientist will tell you otherwise:) In fact, there is no evidence or scientific study that has ever been done that shows a watch may have not been created by man.

There is no evidence that God exists or ever has existed, and there are plenty of plausible theories as to what happened even before the Big Bang...though we don't know about that one for sure.

1:34 PM, June 20, 2007
Anonymous said...

Tigerboy,
The fatal flaw of complexity = divine creation argument is that
it understands complexity to be a sign of Godly creation.

But this is simply not so. Complexity is not a sign of Divine creation. Why not? Because there aren't two contrasting worlds: one world such that we both know it to be created by God and having a distinctive mark of complexity, and another world such that we know it not to be created by God and having no distinctive feature of complexity.
Since we don't have such two worlds to compare our world with, we can't say that: "since complexity is a distinctive feature of a divinely created world, and our world has complexity, it must have been created by God just like the other, divinely created, world."

9:43 PM, June 20, 2007
Anonymous said...

In fact, to draw a probabilistic argument that our world probably was created by God, you'd have to have two samples - one sample of with several divinely created worlds, and another sample with several natural worlds, and then you'd need to measure the complexity in our world and compare it with the average complexities of the divine and natural worlds, and then you'd be able to say with some amount of certainty whether our world came from a distribution of divinely created worlds or naturally occuring worlds.

Without that it's like finding a fingerprint and assuming that the fingerprint belongs to John Doe without having a sample of John Doe's fingerprint to compare it to.

9:56 PM, June 20, 2007
Anonymous said...

Jeff,
The way we know a watch is a man's creation and not God's is by consulting our experience that things with the features of a watch are created by man.

Do we have experience that a natural world can't give rise to complex objects? Is there a bubble holding a natural world separate from ours that we can consult?

10:55 PM, June 20, 2007

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