How Many Americans are Young Earth Creationists?

As near as I can tell (by reading the StraightDope website), Gallup polling from 1982 to 2006 puts 44% to 47% of Americans as Young Earth Creationists, the number that choose this answer to a question about human origins:

"God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so."

It's likely that this question inflates the number of people who would, in an essay, let's say (I'll make the joke about whether half of Americans know what one is or could write the essay, please, and we'll move on), describe human origins in this way. I'm not a pollster, but I think that is a leading question, and inflates the Young Earth respondents. Nevertheless, that's still a higher figure than I would have expected. I'd have thought that almost nobody outside of fundamentalist Christian denominations would answer that question that way, and that a good percentage of fundamentalists would answer it differently. I expected a figure of about ten percent, inflated by leading polling to perhaps twenty percent. It looks like I was wrong.

Do Creationists Make Good Science Teachers?

A recent conversation with friend Alex Bertland, a Philosophy prof at Niagara University, converged nicely with some surfing I was doing regarding young earth creationism. By chance, I found a doctoral dissertation by one David Van Dyke, which Google returned under the heading "Do Creationists make good science teachers?" Mr. Van Dyke performed his research at Andrews University, a Seventh-Day Adventist school in Michigan that I attended myself during my freshman year. Van Dyke, apparently not a Creationist, exchanged views with readers of Roger Ebert's review of the movie "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed," and as a result of the exchange, Ebert invited Van Dyke to introduce his dissertation on his blog site.

Van Dyke's result? Children taught Creationism turn into perfectly fine doctors, musicians, architects, and even teachers and scientists. They're wrong about origins, but so what? The encroachment of Creationism into public schools gives rise to vitriolic arguments about science and religion, and church and state. Questions of public schooling aside (if the local school board elects to teach Creationism, the effect that has on families who do not believe in Creationism), the teaching of Creationism to children simply isn't a big deal.