Representative, that is, of most American evangelicals who follow the issues.
Further to “Evolutionary creation vs. young Earth creation at Scopes Trial courthouse?” featuring Todd Wood vs. Darrel Falk, sources write to say that both debaters are well-known to close observers in their respective camps, and that young Earth creationism (YEC) and theistic evolution and evolutionary creationism (TE/EC) are the two largest sets of opinion on origins (humans, life, and universe) among American evanelicals, if not among Christians as a group. They point to Pew polls, noting however that Pew’s numbers tend to be high on evolution and low on YEC compared to Gallup long term (using similar questions).
I wonder because—just for example—in Gallup 2012, 46% say “God created humans in present form.” Put that way, it raises the question: In what other form could humans as we recognize them exist?
Shades of Vercors’ Ye Shall Know Them:
Very early one morning a doctor is called out to attend the corpse of a newborn baby who has been killed, the father freely admits, by a shot of strychnine chlorhydrate which he himself has administered. The police are called, but where is the mother? ‘She was taken back to the Zoo yesterday.’ ‘The Zoo? Does she work there?’ ‘No, she lives there … The mother is not a woman, properly speaking. She is a female of the species Paranthropus erectus.’ So begins Vercors’ classic novel raising the question: What is man? Murder or not? The Paranthropus (“tropi” for short) are a large tribe of New Guinea cliff-dwellers who smoke their meat and bury their dead. Simian in many of their physical characteristics, they are normally erect in stance though happy to drop to all fours at a moment’s notice. Australian wool interests hope that the “tropis” will prove to be a dream come true – workers who can be trained to operate a loom without benefit of paycheck. Newspaperman Douglas Templemore, an idealist, considers the tropis a fine chance for a test case. By killing his son (bred by artificial insemination of a female tropi), Douglas hopes to cause a riot in the realm of race relations. Is he a murderer or merely an owner of a pet, which he has “put to sleep”? As Templemore comes up for trial the scientific experts file into the witness box; …