- Updated February 28, 2017 Infoplease Staff A look at the role religion and faith play in the race to be president In defending or condemning the idea of the separation of church and state, people on both sides of the debate have invoked the Bible, St. Augustine, Martin Luther, and Thomas Jefferson, among others.
- CBS News Poll.Aug. N=1,082 adults nationwide. 'There is a proposal to build a mosque and Islamic cultural center a few blocks from the site of the World Trade Center in New York City where the September 11th terrorist attacks occurred. Do you think it is app.
In our (admittedly unscientific) poll of Kveller readers, 60.7% say they believe in God. 18.6% say they do not believe in God, and 20.7% claim “it’s complicated.” The poll included responses from readers in the United States, Canada, and Israel, all the way to Oman, Czech Republic, and South Africa. God is using the coronavirus to tell us something, a new poll shows most religious Americans believe. Two-thirds of U.S. Residents who believe in God see the pandemic as a divine message urging us. The poll found that 31% of Americans who believe in God feel strongly that the virus is a sign of God telling humanity to change, with the same number feeling that somewhat.
'Drifting Away' from Scripture: 30 Percent of Evangelicals Say Jesus Was Not God, Poll Shows
A majority of Americans and nearly a third of evangelicals say Jesus was a “good teacher” but was not God, according to a new survey for Ligonier Ministries that was conducted by LifeWay Research.
All total, 52 percent of Americans say they believe Jesus was a “good teacher, but he was not God,” according to the survey. Although the poll’s finding about the general population may not be shocking, Ligonier said it is surprising that nearly a third of evangelicals (30 percent) affirm the statement and believe Jesus was a good teacher and nothing more. Sixty-six percent of evangelicals disagree with the statement.
“The confusion illustrated in these results suggests a dire need for Christians to be taught Christology, the doctrine of the person and work of Jesus Christ,” Ligonier said in a news release.
The question was part of Ligonier’s biennial State of Theology survey.
Meanwhile, 65 percent of evangelicals believe “Jesus is the first and greatest being created by God” – a statement that conflicts with the Bible.
Christ’s deity and eternality are taught in such passages as John 1:1, John 8:58, Romans 9:5 and Hebrews 1:1-4.
“Statistics like these from the State of Theology survey can give us quite a shock, but they also shed light on the concerns that many American Christians and churches have expressed for decades,” said Stephen Nichols, chief academic officer of Ligonier Ministries and president of Reformation Bible College. “As the culture around us increasingly abandons its moral compass, professing evangelicals are sadly drifting away from God's absolute standard in Scripture. It's clear that the church does not have the luxury of idly standing by. This is a time for Christians to study Scripture diligently, engage confidently with people in our culture, and witness fearlessly to the identity and saving work of Jesus Christ in the gospel.”
To help Christians understand and better articulate the Bible’s teachings about Jesus, Ligonier has formulated the “Ligonier Statement on Christology,” available at ChristologyStatement.com.
LifeWay defined “evangelicals” as those who strongly agree with four statements:
“The Bible is the highest authority for what I believe.”
“It is very important for me personally to encourage non-Christians to trust Jesus Christ as their Savior.”
“Jesus Christ's death on the cross is the only sacrifice that could remove the penalty of my sin.”
“Only those who trust in Jesus Christ alone as their Savior receive God's free gift of eternal salvation.”
The full results from the survey will be released Sept. 8 at TheStateofTheology.com. The survey was based on interviews in March with 3,002 U.S. adults.
Photo courtesy: Unsplash
Michael Foust has covered the intersection of faith and news for 20 years. His stories have appeared in Baptist Press, Christianity Today, The Christian Post, theLeaf-Chronicle, the Toronto Star andthe Knoxville News-Sentinel.
Scientists and Belief
When President Barack Obama announced on July 8, 2009, that he would nominate renowned geneticist Francis Collins to be the new director of the National Institutes of Health, a number of scientists and pundits publicly questioned whether the nominee’s devout religious faith should disqualify him from the position. In particular, some worried that an outspoken evangelical Christian who believes in miracles might not be the right person to fill what many consider to be the nation’s most visible job in science. Collins was unanimously confirmed by the U.S. Senate on Aug. 7, 2009, but the controversy over his nomination reflects a broader debate within the scientific community between those who believe religion and science each examine legitimate but different realms of knowledge and those who see science as the only true way of understanding the universe.
A survey of scientists who are members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press in May and June 2009, finds that members of this group are, on the whole, much less religious than the general public.1 Indeed, the survey shows that scientists are roughly half as likely as the general public to believe in God or a higher power. According to the poll, just over half of scientists (51%) believe in some form of deity or higher power; specifically, 33% of scientists say they believe in God, while 18% believe in a universal spirit or higher power. By contrast, 95% of Americans believe in some form of deity or higher power, according to a survey of the general public conducted by the Pew Research Center in July 2006. Specifically, more than eight-in-ten Americans (83%) say they believe in God and 12% believe in a universal spirit or higher power. Finally, the poll of scientists finds that four-in-ten scientists (41%) say they do not believe in God or a higher power, while the poll of the public finds that only 4% of Americans share this view.
Source: Scientists data from Pew Research Center for the People & the Press survey, conducted in May and June 2009; for complete question wording, see survey topline. General public data from Pew Research Center survey conducted in July 2006; for complete question wording, see survey topline. Numbers may not sum to 100 due to rounding.
Source: Scientists data from Pew Research Center for the People & the Press survey, conducted in May and June 2009; for complete question wording, see survey topline. General public data from Pew Research Center survey conducted in July 2006; for complete question wording, see survey topline. Numbers may not sum to 100 due to rounding.
The recent survey of scientists tracks fairly closely with earlier polls that gauged scientists’ views on religion. The first of these was conducted in 1914 by Swiss-American psychologist James Leuba, who surveyed about 1,000 scientists in the United States to ask them about their views on God. Leuba found the scientific community equally divided, with 42% saying that they believed in a personal God and the same number saying they did not.
More than 80 years later, Edward Larson, a historian of science then teaching at the University of Georgia, recreated Leuba’s survey, asking the same number of scientists the exact same questions. To the surprise of many, Larson’s 1996 poll came up with similar results, finding that 40% of scientists believed in a personal God, while 45% said they did not. Other surveys of scientists have yielded roughly similar results.
Given their much lower levels of belief in God or a higher power, it is not surprising that the percentage of scientists who are unaffiliated with any religion is much higher than among the general public. Nearly half of all scientists in the 2009 Pew Research Center poll (48%) say they have no religious affiliation (meaning they describe themselves as atheist, agnostic or nothing in particular), compared with only 17% of the public. Thus, it follows that most faith traditions are represented in smaller numbers in the scientific community than in the public as a whole. For instance, the scientific community is far less Protestant (21%) and Catholic (10%) than the general public, which is 51% Protestant and 24% Catholic. And while evangelical Protestants make up more than a fourth of the general population (28%), they make up only a small slice (4%) of the scientific community. One notable exception is Jews, who make up a larger proportion of the scientific community (8%) than the general population (2%).
Source: Scientists data from Pew Research Center for the People & the Press survey, conducted in May and June 2009; for complete question wording, see survey topline. General public data from Pew Research Center surveys conducted between January and June 2009. Numbers may not sum to 100 due to rounding.
The Pew Research Center poll of scientists also found that levels of religious faith vary according to scientific specialty and age. For instance, chemists are more likely to believe in God (41%) than those who work in the other major scientific fields. Meanwhile, younger scientists (ages 18-34) are more likely to believe in God or a higher power than those who are older.
Nbc Do You Believe In God Poll
Source: Pew Research Center for the People & the Press survey, conducted in May and June 2009. For complete question wording, see survey topline. Numbers may not sum to 100 due to rounding.
This report was written by David Masci, Senior Researcher, Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life.
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- Discussion of the beliefs of scientists is based on a survey of members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), which partnered with the Pew Research Center on the survey. AAAS is the world’s largest general scientific society and includes members representing all scientific fields. However, the survey of AAAS members may not be representative of all scientists in the U.S. ↩