Poll Finds Support for Pairing Creationism With Evolution

c. 2005 Religion News Service WASHINGTON _ Nearly two-thirds of Americans support teaching creationism alongside evolution in public schools, according to a new poll, but there is far less agreement over who gets to decide what is taught. The poll, released Tuesday (Aug. 30) by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, found that […]

c. 2005 Religion News Service

WASHINGTON _ Nearly two-thirds of Americans support teaching creationism alongside evolution in public schools, according to a new poll, but there is far less agreement over who gets to decide what is taught.

The poll, released Tuesday (Aug. 30) by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, found that three-quarters of Americans believe God created life on Earth, and 64 percent support teaching both evolution and creationism.


The battle over evolution in the classroom has flared in public school districts in Kansas, Pennsylvania and elsewhere. The poll showed 41 percent of Americans want parents to decide what children are taught, compared with a slightly larger combined group who think the decision should be made by teachers (28 percent) or local school boards (21 percent).

Those figures roughly mirror the number of Americans who believe that life has always existed as we know it today (42 percent) versus those who believe life has evolved over time (48 percent).

John Green, a senior fellow in religion and American politics at the Pew Forum and director of the Bliss Institute of Applied Politics at the University of Akron, said the allow-both-sides approach was typically American.

“This is an example of American pragmatism,” Green said. “Most Americans are not especially ideological people … and this is one way, from the point of view of the average American, to solve the problem: teach both sides and let the students sort it out.”

Perhaps not surprisingly, people who support the idea that God created human life in its present form are the strongest supporters of allowing parents to decide what their children will learn in science class.

A similar poll conducted last November by CBS and the New York Times, and then another Pew poll last March, found the proportion of people favoring a dual approach has remained relatively steady, between 57 percent and 65 percent.

But advocates of evolution said they were concerned about the new figures, especially the 41 percent of people who want parents to set scholarly standards.


“It’s a popularity contest,” said Gerry Wheeler, executive director of the National Science Teachers Association in Arlington, Va. “That’s not the way scholarship works.”

President Bush recently touched off a national debate over creationism and “intelligent design” _ the belief that human development was so complex that it was overseen by a higher power _ by suggesting that both approaches should be presented in public schools.

“I think that part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought,” Bush told reporters earlier this month. “You’re asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas. The answer is yes.”

Wheeler said adding creationism or intelligent design in the interest of fairness is misplaced.

“At first blush, being fair seems to mean, well, we ought to do both of them,” Wheeler said. “The challenge is that it’s not fair to the students to present a religion in the guise of science.”

Robert Crowther, director of communications for the Seattle-based Discovery Institute’s Center for Science & Culture, a leading proponent of teaching about intelligent design alongside evolution, said allowing both approaches to be presented solves the problem.

“We see this as a common-sense approach that avoids the extremes and focuses on teaching students about the scientific debates over evolution,” said Crowther. “I would think from these poll results that most Americans would agree with that approach to science education.”


The poll of 2,000 adults, conducted July 7-17, has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.5 percentage points.

MO/PH END ECKSTROM/BANKS

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