Evangelicals Reject Creation Museum, but Still Believe in Creationism

The Campaign to Defend the Constitution along with Lake Research Partners have put out the results of a phone survey completed last month. 800 likely voters were surveyed. The test has a margin of error of +/- 3.5%.

As they write in the report (PDF), the results show:

Voters, including evangelicals, reject creationism museum.

Evangelicals reject intelligent design which divides them from their candidates.

That first bulletpoint above was based off of this question:

And recently a Creationism Museum opened up in Kentucky. The museum portrays dinosaurs living alongside Adam and Eve as well as dinosaurs on Noah’s Ark. Which of the following words best describes your view on this?

54% of all voters said the museum was scientifically unsound, biblically inaccurate, or bizarre. Among white evangelicals and fundamentalists, the number was 49%.

They were also asked which statement best described their point of view.

53% of all voters and 78% of white evangelicals and fundamentalists said this was the best choice:

God created the Earth and all its creatures in 6 days as described in the book of Genesis 6,000 years ago.

6% of of all voters and 5% of white evangelicals and fundamentalists agreed with this line:

God created the earth as described in Genesis, except that dinosaurs were with Adam and Even [sic] and Noah’s Ark.

Among white evangelicals and fundamentalists, 0% believed in evolution, which was represented by this statement:

All animals, including man, evolved from a common ancestor millions of years ago, but this process is guided by nature without a Creator.

So the dinosaurs seem to be throwing everyone off.

Creationism is true, they say, but not the dinosaur bit. The Creation Museum (which has dinosaurs alongside Adam and Eve) is a bunch of crap, but remove the dinosaurs and then it would coincide with our beliefs.

That doesn’t make me feel better…

DefCon’s blog states that the survey shows:

95% of Evangelicals reject the version of Creationism promoted by the Creation Museum.

90% of Evangelicals don’t support Intelligent Design when given a choice between it and Creationism.

Atheists and Evangelicals are united! We all reject the Creation Museum’s version of life’s origins!

Wait… most Evangelicals still accept Creationism in some form. The fact that they choose it over Intelligent Design just makes them appear more ignorant than usual on this subject.

Ken Ham, the president of Answers in Genesis and the Creation Museum founder, said this about the results:

“If that poll is valid … then it just proves what we’ve been saying all along about the need for this museum.”

Ham also said this:

“This DefCon poll should be a wake-up call to Christian leaders who compromise with evolutionary ideas and an old earth… Such pastors and theologians need to know that secular humansists [sic] are using them to advance an anti-Christian agenda.”

[tags]atheist, atheism, Ken Ham, DefCon, evangelical, Christian, fundamentalist, evolution, Creationism, Intelligent Design, Genesis, dinosaur, Noah’s Ark, Answers in Genesis, Creation Museum[/tags]

globalizat

I think one way of understanding these rather odd results is to note that while most conservative Christians who believe in Creationism are taught that the world was created in 6 days and the Earth is not millions of years old, the question of dinosaurs is still up in the air. I know that growing up I believed the earth was created in six days, but nobody really understood where dinosaurs fit in. They may never have actually lived, but the earth was created with those fossils (or they’re all hoaxes). That sort of view might go a long way toward explaining the poll.
HeIsSailing

“90% of Evangelicals don’t support Intelligent Design when given a choice between it and Creationism. ”

Huh?? So.. 95% say you can have creationism, but NOT intelligent design? I thought I understood the ID movement, but this makes no sense to me. Can somebody explain to me what this means?

As a whole though, I think what this survey demonstrates is that Christians want their cake and eat it too. They want creation to be true, but don’t want to look too hard at the Bibilical details and implications because deep-down, they know they cannot stand up to scrutiny. I have to give Ken Ham some credit in this regard. At least he presents an Honest Biblical View of the world and thoroughly works out all the implications of that worldview – wacky as it is.
QrazyQat

I think what the survey shows is that Americans in general don’t know much about science and even less about evolutionary science. This is not suprising when you realise that the rightwing has been working for decades to dumb down science and especially to dumb down or remove evolution from biology classes. The result is ignorance, which is why you see such confused and contradictory answers to surveys on the subject.
Joe

“All animals, including man, evolved from a common ancestor millions of years ago, but this process is guided by nature without a Creator.”

Did they provide an option for evolution with a creator? The evolution=atheism myth seems way too pervasive in the US.
Polly

Obviously dinosaur fossils were planted by Satan to trick us into believing in EVILution. Duh!
Joni

Man I used to read and research and debate(years ago) about the creation vs. evolution thing and to be honest, I haven’t kept up with the theories and arguments through the years. I basically wanted to just throw in some humor. A friend and I used to muse (as Christ followers) that evolution seemed like such an unlikely and impossible way for an entire universe to be created that it just might be the way an all-powerful God might do it, just to prove that He can in fact do anything!
miller

There is an article here that tries to explain why many evangelicals do not like the ID movement.
http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/07-06-06.html
llewelly

That doesn’t make me feel better…

Remember all the money, time, and energy that went into those museums, and Smile. The poll shows the Yabba-Dabba-Doo creationists have poured a ton of resources into a failed enterprise.
Obviously those resources would have been better spent on Camp Quest (ha! as if!), but given that Ham et al were not going to spend those resources on anything favoring good sense, it should be some consolation that what they have spent their resources on is a failure.
Joe

“Remember all the money, time, and energy that went into those museums, and Smile. The poll shows the Yabba-Dabba-Doo creationists have poured a ton of resources into a failed enterprise.”

Failed enterprise? I don’t quite understand how 100,000 visitors in under two months qualifies as a failure.
And on a different note, I’m so sick and tired of hearing everyone spew “oh all of that money could have been spent on better things”. Here’s an idea, let’s take the $12.6 billion dollars a year that is spent on porn and feed the entire world’s population of starving people.
Gene Bob

they’re now (25 July 2007) claiming 100,000+ visitors.

http://www.citizenlink.org/CLBriefs/A000005110.cfm