Forty-six percent of Americans believe that God created humans in their present form within the last 10,000 years without the benefit of evolution, according to a new Gallup poll.
The view of almost half of the U.S. has risen slightly from when Gallup first asked the question 30 years ago, despite being at odds with substantial scientific evidence that humans evolved over millions of years.
The poll — based on telephone interviews of a random sample of 1,012 U.S. adults and weighted by gender, age, race, Hispanic ethnicity, education, region and adults in the household — has a "95% confidence that the maximum margin of sampling error is ±4 percentage points."
About a third of Americans believe that humans evolved "with God's guidance" while 15 percent said humans evolved and God had no part in the process, meaning that 78 percent of Americans believe that God has at least some part in guiding the process.
Gallup has asked Americans to choose among these three explanations for the origin and development of human beings 11 times since 1982.
Since the poll explicitly frames the three alternatives in terms of God's involvement in the process of human development, highly religious Americans were more likely to accept the creationist viewpoint.
Two out of three Americans who attend religious services weekly choose the creationist alternative, compared with 25 percent of those who seldom or never attend (with monthly churchgoers falling in between).
Nevertheless, "those who seldom or never attend church are more likely to believe that God guided the evolutionary process than to believe that humans evolved with no input from God."
The study notes that highly religious Americans "are more likely to be Republican than those who are less religious" as 58 percent of Republicans believe that God created humans in their present form within the last 10,000 years (compared to 39 percent of independents and 41 percent of Democrats).
Gallup researchers concluded that "there is no evidence in this trend of a substantial movement toward a secular viewpoint on human origins."