A number of people (mostly on the left, although not exclusively) have an issue with the relative levels of people who believe in evolution in this country--specifically, the number of Republicans who say they don't. I'm not sure if they just don't like the man from monkeys idea (which is something that I'm not wild about, but willing to accept) or if they believe that God created all the species on the Earth as they are now, and that none of them have evolved at all (which is crazy and plainly contradicted by Darwin, with fairly incontrovertible evidence). In any event, if evolution is wholly false, it is difficult to explain away all the biological advancements of the past 150 years, which all build upon evolution.
Anyway, the ratio of average Republicans who believe in evolution is inverse among the GOP Presidential candidates. I'm actually amazed that that many Republicans do believe in evolution, although obviously the GOP isn't all evangelical, and many of the more business-oriented conservatives (and some other groups like Mormons) would not likely have a problem with evolution. I find this encouraging, actually: having grown up among evangelicals, I know that disbelief in evolution is virtually an article of faith among them, hence the 68%. However, being that about half of the people out there believe in evolution (which seems higher than it used to be) and that the GOP goal is not the elimination of evolution from the classroom, but rather just the teaching of intelligent design alongside it, I'm not too worried. One of the good things about my generation is that we're less tied to orthodoxy than the boomers. I'm actually encouraged by this poll, to be honest, and I'm not too afraid of creationists in general. The stakes for that argument are low--not so much when one talks about the neocons.
I'm not sure I like the either/or question with faith and science. We're supposed to believe in science, but not to accept it as fact. Nothing is ever proven in science, there's just evidence for or against the proposition. Faith, on the other hand, is inherently unprovable (regardless of what Kirk Cameron says). One of the things I really loathe, though, is that evolution is dismissed for just being a theory. Folks, a scientific theory is not the same thing as one of Cliff Claven's bar-room theories--it's a hypothesis backed up by all available evidence. No amount of proof turns a theory into a law. As for me, if science says something is true, I generally believe it. There's too much uncertainty in this world, and I'm not going to throw away the little fact that we have. I'd just as soon start with the facts and reconcile them to my faith, rather than going vice versa.
