A new Pew Research Poll shows that “Christians” lag behind the rest of the world in believing that humans and animals evolved over millions of years, often showing as much as 35% disparity. While that is good news on the face of it, the number of professing Christians that do believe in it is far higher than it ought to be.
Like most polls from Pew or Barna, they ought to be taken with a ‘Lot’s wife’ worth of salt. One methodological point is that the graph doesn’t distinguish between the number of “Christians who say religion is very important to them” and “Christians who don’t”
Given that there is no such thing as a believer who says religion is not important to them, it’s a misnomer. If they wanted to know the percentage of Christians who believe in evolution, this would not be a self-identifying descriptor, but rather would only include those who say the Bible is the inspired, infallible, inerrant, sufficient word of God.
And then the number would drop down to < 1 %.
Though Tim Keller and his ilk at BioLogos want you to believe that the earth is billions of years old and humans or human-like-humans have been evolving for millions of years, this is not Christian orthodoxy.
Rather, God created the universe ex-nihilo and the book of Genesis is to be taken literally, including talking serpents, Adam and Eve, 7-literal day creation, naming the animals, angel guarding Eden, people living to be nearly 1000 years old, the flood, Nephilim, etc. All of it.
Macroevolution for animals? No. Microevolution for the same? Sure. Human evolution? Heck no.
According to the survey:
“[there is] broad acceptance of evolution across these publics. A median of 74% say humans and other living things have evolved, while a median of just 21% think humans and other living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time.
The 21% echoes a Biologos poll commissioned in 2013 that shows just 19% of Christian pastors believe the creation story ‘Answers-in-Genesis style.’
