Wednesday, August 31, 2005

New Poll: Liberal Democrats Support Teaching Both Evolution and Creationism

For what it is worth, there is a new poll by Pew on a number of topics, including beliefs about origins. But who comes up with these questions? Better questions would have produced more interesting results.

On the other hand, there were some remarkable results in the demographic breakdown of opinions on teaching policy. The New York Times article discussing it, entitled "Teaching of Creationism Is Endorsed in New Survey," contains this:
John C. Green, a senior fellow at the Pew Forum, said he was surprised to see that teaching both evolution and creationism was favored not only by conservative Christians, but also by majorities of secular respondents, liberal Democrats and those who accept the theory of natural selection. Mr. Green called it a reflection of "American pragmatism."

I note that the poll was conducted in July, which was before Bush's recent comments on August 2 in response to a reporter's question on teaching intelligent design.

I wonder what the results would have been if they had included the option of teaching the scientific evidence and arguments for and against macroevolutionary theory. This is the position of many of the leading proponents of ID.

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