The percentage of adults who believe God played a role in creating the first humans reached a 40-year low in Gallup polling released Monday.
Among those responding to the polling company’s latest survey, 37% said God alone created human beings fully evolved within the past 10,000 years. That’s a new low since Gallup first surveyed the issue in 1982, down 1 percentage point from 2017.
Gallup described participants holding this view, which is common among conservative Protestants without a college education, as “creationist purists.”
Another 24% of respondents embraced the strict evolutionary view that humans evolved from less advanced life forms over millions of years without God’s involvement. That’s up 2 percentage points to a new high since the company last surveyed the issue in 2019.
The remaining 34% believed that “humans evolved, but with God’s guidance” over millions of years. Gallup found the largest shares of college graduates and Catholics embraced this view, which is the position of the Catholic Church.
“As Americans have become less religious over the past four decades, their beliefs about the origin of humans have shifted, with fewer now saying God created human beings in their present form and more saying humans evolved without God’s help from less advanced forms of life over millions of years,” Megan Brenan, a Gallup research consultant, wrote in a summary.
Gallup noted that support for creationism and God-guided evolution “reached their peaks of 47% and 40%, respectively, in 1999 and have since trended downward.”
Over the same period, belief in evolution without divine intervention has almost tripled. As a result, majorities of adults now believe in both evolution and God’s involvement in creation.
Gallup conducted a randomized national telephone survey of 1,024 adults on May 1-23. The margin of error was plus or minus 4 percentage points at the 95% confidence level.
Correction: A previous version of the story misspelled Megan Brenan’s last name.
• Sean Salai can be reached at ssalai@washingtontimes.com.
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