40% of Americans believe the Earth was created within the last 10k years (2019) | Hacker News Reader

40% of Americans believe the Earth was created within the last 10k years (2019)

news.gallup.com

53 pointsatwood22130 comments

The title of this post doesn't match what the article is reporting; the poll is about the timing and method of human creation, not planetary creation.

Not really: the title of this submission editorializes the original title changing the very concepts. The term 'Earth' does not even appear in the article body.

The original title is:

«40% of Americans Believe in Creationism»

Can any moderator fix it ASAP.

Is the term 'Creationism' something a non-expert in religion is supposed to know about? According to the survey it seems 40% of Americans willing to answer a survey happen to know this, but I'm not so sure the other 60% + error margin happen to know this definition, which the 'editorialization' might be clarifying to common language.

> supposed to know about

For that matter, none of the things we discuss are part of a universal preparatory course.

> the 'editorialization' might be clarifying

And yet potentially states a falsehood in more ways, on literal facts and possibly indirect. Pretty trivial, and a reason why the guidelines are very clear:

  Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.

It's also from 2019. For reference, the exact question Gallup polled:

> Which of the following statements comes closest to your views on the origin and development of human beings:

> 1) Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process;

> 2) Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God had no part in this process;

> 3) God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so.

Yeah the title is very misleading then. I expect that 40% refers to option 3, which is wrong, but is way less concerning than believing the entire earth was created 10k years ago.

Even option 2 implies that a god exists. Where's the "shit just happened" option?

I wish they hadn't phrased it as "less advanced forms of life", but rather "earlier forms of life". It's a common misunderstanding that evolution favours what we humans would consider improvements, when in reality evolution has no goal.

If you know anything about what creationists believe, you'd understand that this is a distinction without a difference. Anyone who believes the Earth is 10,000 years old believes that man was created in the same week as the creation of the Earth.

I strongly disagree.

I would consider myself a "creationist", in that I believe than human beings were created by God, for a purpose, and with intent. I also believe that the mechanism through which human beings came about is entirely understandable and is well-described through our current understanding of evolution via natural selection. My beliefs are not at all at odds with scientific understanding because they focus on "why" - not "how".

The people I believe you're referencing are usually called "Young Earth Creationists". They, as a group, reject the vast majority of mainstream understanding of biology, geology, and astrophysics.

>The people I believe you're referencing are usually called "Young Earth Creationists".

That's who I and GP were referring to.

Could you please elaborate a bit on how you see the coexistence of

- a god that creates humans

- and evolution?

Specifically, what is his role and actions to go from a cell billions years ago to the human we know since 100k years?

Has he programmed evolution so that it takes a specific path (so it is not evolution because it takes randomness), or created humans but let the rest of nature evolve (but that would probably fit the young earth creationism you mentioned)? Or something else?

God set up the conditions under which the Universe operates. Omniscience means that He was well aware of what would result, up to and including human beings.

It is an admittedly untestable assertion, which is why I don’t ask anyone else to believe it :).

> I would consider myself a "creationist", in that I believe than human beings were created by God [...]

How is this definition of "creationist" any different than that of "Christian"?

Why overload the word "creationist" with a meaning that is equivalent to "Christian"?

> The people I believe you're referencing are usually called "Young Earth Creationists".

Century Dictionary (1897) defines creationism in this sense as "The doctrine that matter and all things were created, substantially as they now exist, by the fiat of an omnipotent Creator, and not gradually evolved or developed." [...] Creationist (n.) in an "anti-Darwin" sense is attested by 1859 in a letter of Darwin's, and it is said to be used in Darwin's unpublished writings as far back as 1842.

https://www.etymonline.com/word/creationism

It seems "Old Earth Creationism" either predates Darwin, or it's a more recent attempt to namesquat.

'Belief' is a squirrely concept. How much of this is them professing to believe it vs actually believing it? I have a strong suspicion that people answer these sorts of questions by mapping "what kind of person I am" to "what would a person of that kind in good standing answer". But this is different than acting in accordance with the belief when there are material stakes.

Suppose we had a prediction market on these beliefs (ironically, I suppose it would have to be adjudicated by God himself), would 40% of Americans really bet significant sums on creationism? Again, assuming all they stood to gain or lose was material and none of their friends and family need known what stance they took?

It depends on how the betting markets were organized. People have spent a great deal more money on sillier social signaling with smaller stakes, so if your bets were public, yes, I think people would continue to make bets that are in accordance with what they think their tribe wants, and would count on the bet-adjudicators to side with their tribe's pressure should they stand to lose.

> On the same poll, 13% of Americans claimed to believe Barack Obama was the Anti-Christ. […] Some pollsters are starting to consider these sorts of things symptomatic of what they term symbolic belief, which seems to be kind of what the Less Wrong sequences call Professing and Cheering or Belief As Attire. Basically, people are being emotivists rather than realists about belief. “Obama is the Anti-Christ” is another way of just saying “Boo Obama!”, rather than expressing some sort of proposition about the world.

I'm related to the sort of people who are likely to respond that they think Obama is the anti-christ in a poll and I'm here to tell you that, for a good portion of them, it's a genuinely held belief. If you spend a significant amount of time with these sorts of people, these sorts of benign explanations don't really hold any sway. Is it possible I've been exposed to a biased slice of America that's not representative? Sure, but there's literally zero evidence that the benign view Scott Alexander is putting forth here is true. It's nothing more than a hope.

It's a literal example of "trying to be holier than the Pope" saying, as (at least outside of USA) the official position of all the major, conservative churches is that God created stuff and mankind, but the Big Bang (answering "what was before that?" question) and evolution (divinely inspired) is part of how He did it, not a literal 7 days 10k years ago, so there's no conflict with science.

At least from Wikipedia, it seems that the only churches supporting Young Earth Creationism as theology are from USA - e.g. Seventh-day Adventist church, which have branches around the world but are (anecdotally, from my experience) seen like a weird fringe denomination; and the local Lutheran churches also see their USA counterparts as more towards radical/"extremist" side and it's not uncommon to see policy conflict between USA Lutheran churches and the rest of the world.

> ...the official position of all the major, conservative churches...

Isn't there a massive long tail of unaffiliated or "nondenominational" churches in the US? You'd miss that if you're only looking at surveys of official denominational positions.

> and the local Lutheran churches also see their USA counterparts as more towards radical/"extremist"

Which counterparts? Aren't there like three biggish Lutheran denominations in the US? IIRC, one is quite liberal.

That's not picking up up churches, that's picking up denominations. Southern Baptists are creationist and a fairly large denomination, too.

That's 140 million people. That's 140 million potential voters. It's amazing how well democracies work considering this. I mean that's a pretty drastic example. Imagine for something more obscure and nuanced. It goes to show the power that media, social media, etc. can have on controlling thought. I doubt all those people were born with this opinion.

Believing something about the far past does not mean they’re unaware everyone else today is keeping them fed.

Only 4% of the US population hunts for themselves anymore. There are only 800,000 sworn LEO in the US (including Feds). Only 13% of adults have an advanced degree while the population response to polls is 30% or more possess such a degree.

Even today our daily beliefs of our society are off from “truth”. But direct collaboration is easy to see. It calls into question the value of social story and theories, imo.

The beliefs they implant are always “wrong” and yet society keeps on going.

> That's 140 million people. That's 140 million potential voters. It's amazing how well democracies work considering this.

Why is it amazing to you? The question is literally totally irrelevant to any practical modern-day political question or decision.

Remember James Watt as Secretary of the Interior: why should we preserve the lands for future generations when there won't be future generations? If you believe the superstitious nonsense from one angle, you are much more likely to believe in the Rapture claptrap as well.

> Remember James Watt as Secretary of the Interior: why should we preserve the lands for future generations when there won't be future generations? If you believe the superstitious nonsense from one angle, you are much more likely to believe in the Rapture claptrap as well.

It's not like that's the only way to get to anti-environmentalism (e.g. "Why should we preserve lands for future generations, when I'll be dead by then?"). IMHO, indifference (of which I gave only one example) is a far bigger problem than any belief in the possibility of a deus ex machina solution (e.g. "Don't worry, we'll technology our way out of it. We always have before.").

Oh, of course. The problem wasn't that he thought HE would be dead by then, but that everyone would either be in hell or heaven and the Earth would be irrelevant, that he wouldn't need to worry about his own great-grandchildren or anyone else's.

I just wrote one quick example of the effects that belief in creationism roughly correlate with. The idea that mankind can't damage the Earth because it's God's creation is another one.

It could be that the evolution of life has been orchestrated over billions of years by some sentient thing. But a 10,000-year old simulation of a detailed reality that appears to stretch back 13 or so billion years, vs the actual reality itself, boy does the simulation seem so much less believable.

> I just wrote one quick example of the effects that belief in creationism roughly correlate with.

Do you think that "burn down all the trees because Jesus is coming," is a common attitude among creationists?

If you do, it seems like an unwarranted leap without more data. IMHO, there's nothing about believing that the world was created 10,000 years ago that implies the end of the world is very imminent, and the kind attitudes you describe only make sense that context.

In any case, my intuition says that various kinds of quotidian short-term thinking and unwillingness to make personal sacrifices would be much bigger cause for rejecting environmentalism than any kind of hard ideological reasoning (like religion).

And in this case, the imminent doomsday argument for anti-environmentalism really feels like a backwards justification for policy preferences chosen for other reasons.

One highly-placed creationist can do more damage than all the atheists in the world. You probably don't remember the concerns over an evangelical president realizing he could be the instrument of prophesy in pushing the big red button.

But no, it's an example of one thing that I believe is more common among creationists than non-creationists, because creationists overlap with nutbags who are evangelical more than non-creationists do. How do you otherwise arrive at the belief in the 10,000 year span?

I was raised Christian so even though you learn that Earth was billions of years ago, when I was asked by my friends or teacher I would answer sometime in the last 10k years. A part of me was signaling and another part of me was trying to balance facts vs. faith.

That's exactly it. Polls like this can say a lot of things but whatever the wording what a large number of people read is "do you believe in God?" and they think the question is not being asked by some neutral questioner.

The title matches the first paragraph of the report pretty closely imo:

  “Forty percent of U.S. adults ascribe to a strictly creationist view of human origins, believing that God created them in their present form within roughly the past 10,000 years.”

Me fail english, where in that line does it mention earth?

I'd say it was implied by "a strictly creationist view".

Qualified with "of human origins".

As opposed to some other "strictly creationist view"?

As opposed to holding the view that earth was also created 10.000 years ago. You can believe in one part without having to believe in the other and this study explicitly only checked for human origins. Someone made a family tree for everyone mentioned in the Bible once, so people may consider that time span fixed while considering the seven days of creation a lot more flexible.

I agree the survey questions were badly formed and that the HN thread title isn't an exact representation of what the survey revealed - but it does strike me as a pretty minor quibble compared to what the survey results do actually imply.

The editorialized submission title doesn't match the actual article title:

"40% of Americans Believe in Creationism"

Much less sensational.

the actual article title does not convey all of the information in the article, which says 40% believe in a strictly creationist view that humans were created in their current form around 10,000 years ago

Maybe true, but without explanation it'll get flagged anytime it gets popular.

Pretty much any religious-related posts on HN typically get flag-murdered, regardless. Too controversial of a topic and unlikely any headway will be made discussing these matters here, so it's not interesting.

Every individual has their own view and theory on the matter, and tends to be pretty sure "the other side" is wrong; such close-mindedness predictably leads to boring flame wars and nothing interesting emerges or changes.

This is the question with available responses, definitely not editorialized:

Which of the following statements comes closest to your views on the origin and development of human beings -- [ROTATE 1-3/3-1: 1) Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process, 2) Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God had no part in this process, 3) God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so]?

This survey questions seems poorly designed. All three answers have strong opinions tied to them and a multitude of possibilities are not covered. E.G. evolution happened, but there's no proof of any direction || belief there's no god || aliens visited earth || a supernatural being (god) nudged things || god did it all at once.

If you believe in Creationism, you believe the Earth was created 10,000 years ago. The two beliefs go hand in hand.

Why do people post this nonsense? Are you hoping to gawk at your outgroup and their silly ideas? You learn nothing by doing that. You'd be better off looking at yourself and questioning what equally silly ideas you hold.

Because it sheds light on the American political situation by highlighting a surprising set of facts that many people in educated tech circles may not be aware of.

We want an enlightened society. Education is something we should be working to improve.

I'm a working class guy in North Dakota. Very conservative, Trumpy, and Jesusy around here. I know plenty of Trump supporters and churchgoers. I don't think any of them believe that the earth is only 10,000 years old.

Here you go: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creation_and_evolution_in_publ...

The movement seems a little weaker nowadays, but goofball trends tend to come in waves. See, for example, social conservatives replaying the 80s and 90s anti-gay playbook adapted to target gender nonconformity in general and trans people in particular after a decade or so where they seemed to have given up. Majority comments on the Roe vs. Wade reversal about other progressive rulings that depended on the same case gave them new energy.

it is easier to solve a problem when you can grasp the magnitude of it

Creationists are constantly trying to force science classes to waste scarce resources "teaching the controversy." The reality revealed in the poll is consequential.

The Old Testament nearly didn't make it into the Bible at all. It seems that a lot of Christians have decided that the Bible as put together hundreds of years after Christ needs to be taken as a homogeneous whole and that it needs to be considered as infallible. None of that makes much sense unless you are trying to fit in to someone else's definition of what being a Christian is.

I am far from convinced that the two (different) accounts of the creation story in Genesis were meant to be taken as absolute fact. Them being true or false has absolutely no impact on my Christian beliefs. Why would it?

What are these two accounts?

In broad terms Genesis 1 and Genesis 2. The style of writing and name for God in each is distinctly different. God creates man in both. Both, as I understand it, stand apart in style from the remainder of Genesis having a stronger poetic feel to them. Genesis 2:4 could make a alternative start to the Bible. This is just stuff I have picked up - I am no expert.

If a person "believes" something, but there is zero effect of that belief on any meaningful aspect of their or anyone else's lives, then what relevance does it have? If I "believe" the Earth is flat, but still fly on airplanes, and use a cell phone empowered by satellites, etc. then who really cares what I say I "believe"?

It might affect how likely they are to accept other science. Which might have a direct effect on how they vote.

...versus < 1% for HN members, I suspect.

I have a hard time understanding how anyone can believe such a thing.

To be fair, it is actually logical possible that the universe was only booted into existence with a 13+ billion year backstory some 10 thousand years ago, just as eventually we might construct such a universe simulation running on our own technology at some point in the future (making us the Gods of said universe's inhabitants).

Are you familiar with "Last Thursdayism"?

I was, but you inspired me to look up the origin of why it was Thursday - for some reason I had it my head as a Douglas Adams concept ("I could never get the hang of Thursdays"), but despite his various other parodies of creation myths, surprisingly it seems he never mentioned that one!

I imagine for most people it's a total non-issue. Unless you're a scientist or you breed plants/animals, believing in creationism instead of evolution makes pretty much no difference.

Give them time...by the the they reach their !I'd sixties, almost all of them will find psychological solace in the bible..or whatever afterlife scenario their culture offers...literally no atheists in foxholes

Amazing how the Cambrian Explosion can be shoehorned into that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambrian_explosion

“well, they have really heavy boots!”

http://www.phys.ufl.edu/~det/phy2060/heavyboots.html

Hindu texts are the few religious texts which date the universe into the millions of year, time in Hinduism is an interesting concept off four Yuga's or ages that are cyclic

Seems a little high to me, but really, so what? Let people believe in whatever religion they wanna believe as long as they don't hurt anybody.

> ...as long as they don't hurt anybody.

And that's the problem. A lot of wield these beliefs like weapons and go out of their way to cause pain.

>A lot of wield these beliefs like weapons and go out of their way to cause pain.

Again, so what? People who aren't religious do the same thing.

If your teenage son still believed in Santa claus or the tooth fairy it wouldn't concern you?

Yes, but if yours still did, it wouldn't bother me. See the difference?

But if the concerns you have for your own son are justifiable, surely you should be at least somewhat concerned about the 100 million+ other tooth-fairy-believers among whom your son will have to live? As for what should/can be done for those millions, I only wish I knew.

No, I have no insight into their lives or experiences to presume I'm living life the correct way and they are not, nor to further presume to correct them.

Also comparing the belief in Santa Clause and the Tooth Fairy with religious beliefs isn't a very good comparison. The former was created by corporations to hock goods, the latter has kept societies together for several millennia.

If history has taught us anything, presuming to tell people how they should or shouldn't worship never ends well.

Completely agree on your last point. It doesn't change the fact I'm still genuinely concerned by the fact so many people hold on to dangerous delusions. And yeah, I do think they're dangerous, when they begin motivating people in positions of power to make decisions that affect all of us.

I kinda lump it in with flat Earth-ers, moon landing deniers, UFO people, astrologists, natural medicine people, ion bracelet people, quartz people, etc. Lots of people believe in weird stuff, it's not a huge deal to me.

>motivating people in positions of power to make decisions that affect all of us.

Ya I'm a default-liberty kinda guy. Keep your weird beliefs out of our law books. I'm pretty sure I'm losing that fight though.

My main take away from this is that both the opponents and proponents of CRT have way too much faith in the education system.

I'm still waiting for some definition of "god" to inform these conversations. What is this thing we are talking about?

A good brief intro in the subject, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zMf_8hkCdc, largely following Thomas Aquinas definition. For modern sensibilities it may be hard to stomach that a XIII century monk might have had deeper insights than the reductionist materialist drivel we are soaking in. Alas, I can't help with that.

"God is not a Being in the World, God is Ipsum Esse Subsistens". In English, "God is the subsistent act of 'to be' itself".

a being than which no greater can be conceived

Two categories of confusion most likely: 1. Divine creation 2. Misunderstanding about written history vs all history.

I am not a fan of elitism shown by the millennials and Gen Z calling out religious people. Although the age of organized religion is probably over, religion by faith will have its place for a while.

So you're a fan of having laws enacted by representative elected by these religious fanatics? I'd much prefer a little elitism as an alternative.

My surprise is more that “40% believing that God created them”. Religions…one of the biggest troubles of the world, and 4 on 10 Americans believe that God “”created”” them.

> one of the biggest troubles of the world

No Giulio, that's humans with their pretexts. If chemistry poisoned many, that's not an inherent necessity from chemistry.

Humans created the religions, so yes, the culprits are humans. Like everything, we (humans) created everything, with tech and science, not God. But the point that 4 in 10 Americans believe it’s God the “creator”, is absurd to me.

What I said was different, and I quoted that «one of the biggest troubles of the world»: those "«troubles»" are not inherent in disciplines: they are inherent to human faults and «pretext[ual]» instances behind façades. You can normally leave disciplines alone.

If you find demographics "unbelievable" you probably have only moderate acquaintance with those distributions. Do not forget Pareto and Gini on the one hand, transversality on the other.

> those "«troubles»" are not inherent in disciplines: they are inherent to human faults and «pretext[ual]» instances behind façades. You can normally leave disciplines alone

Okay, then I've only misunderstood your reply, I didn't mean to say that religion itself is to blame, obviously. I agree with you, I just want to say that the trouble for me, is people who need to believe in something without thinking or using rationality.

> without thinking or using rationality

Check the OECD studies on adult literacy. Education is very terribly weak all around the world on average.

Success stories involve Japan and Finland, little else - and yet they are quite relative, and exceptions to aggregate success can be found (and other conflicting aggregates). The studies are carried on by Canada - and yet you can find recordings in which Canadian students sub-intellectually act like hooligans during university seminars, carried on by professor that patently /act/ human while being factually bestial.

And education gets hindered and hampered in social contexts affected by past faults (you need well educated educators): it is another organic contexts which takes time and care to develop - nothing really easy and fast.

50% of people are dumber than average.

Median.

Intelligence is pretty close to a normal distribution making mean and median equivalent.

Not even close, IQ is defined in a way to produce a normal distribution, but it's raw test scores for example do not look remotely like normal.

> defined in a way to produce a normal distribution, but it's raw test scores for example do not look remotely like normal

You surprised me with this - quite interesting and conflicting with absorbed informal models: may you have any pointer to further information?

The mental gymnastics are outstanding.

It's easy to avoid mental gymnastics if you just turn off your brain...

Especially in this thread. Last thing I expected of HN.

5G is a govt project to control people, earth is flat and vaccines have embedded chips and cause autism. TRUMP is the chosen one, and he will deliver us all. If these crazy things are wild in America I guess existence of earth since 10K years is not a big deal. While we all are busy with this BS, the capitalists and lobbyists silently push their hidden agendas and we loose.

40% of Americans believe they can move a mountain with a mustard seed worth of belief

Do not play with anagogies.

Definitely fake. I've never met anyone who believes this and I'm willing to bet you haven't either. We're supposed to believe that what 150 million people believe that? I know tons of devout religious people and have not heard them say that they believe that to be a fact.

In college, I went to a church and one day we discussed this topic. I put forward the idea that maybe evolution and creation weren't really in conflict. That maybe evolution did happen but under God's guidance.

Several of the people in the room reacted with loud boos and hisses. Not the jocular kind you get with friendly disagreement, but the angry, aggressive kind that mean you were wrong to even say what you did.

It definitely exists. Not everybody has been exposed to it, but it's there.

But about whether 150 million people "truly" believe this, that's a reasonable thing to be skeptical about. Do they believe it in the sense that they'd literally bet their life on it? Or just believe it in the sense that it's part of the set of beliefs prescribed by their flavor of faith and that maintaining orthodoxy is important to them? I think some of the both, and probably more of the latter. People can compartmentalize, keeping their everyday understanding of the world somewhat separate from the beliefs that go with their ideology.

Consider that perhaps you live in a bubble.

Believe in creationism not the 10k years bit

Title has been editorialized

edit: It's a very simple hacker news rule people. Submit the original <title> or article headline. The 10k bit is NOT present there. Regardless of the question.

The 10K years bit is in the question Gallup asks. However, it's posed about humans in their current form, not the Earth.

Note: as I'm commenting, the post title reads "40% of Americans believe the Earth was created within the last 10k years".

> not the 10k years bit

What do you mean? The question they asked included ‘within 10,000 years’.

Same, when I’ve had conversations with friends and family I’ve boiled my stance down to “I believe God created us, but I don’t know when or how long ago it was.”

> “I believe God created us, but I don’t know when or how long ago it was.”

But that’s a separate option in the poll - they could have picked that if that’s what they believe.

It isn’t, though. There is no “god created us in our current form more than 10000 years ago” option on the poll. It was either ‘humans evolved and god exists’, ‘humans evolved and god doesn’t exist’, or ‘humans didn’t evolve and were created by god within the last 10000 years’

No option for creationists who believe humans were created more than 10000 years ago.

> No option for creationists who believe humans were created more than 10000 years ago.

Why doesn’t ‘God guided but happened over millions of years’ cover that?

A God entity snapping its fingers 10,001 years ago fits neither "guided" nor "over millions of years" nor "less than 10,000 years ago".

But 10,000 is closest, so why wouldn't they pick that option?

Because "guided" isn't obviously compatible with the "act of special creation" for humans that is an inherent part of many religions. Definitely agree that the survey results are likely to be skewed because of the lack of an option that suits those who believe in special creation but not the "10 thousand year" timeline. Especially if they think 100s of millions of years is wrong (anatomically modern humans haven't been around anything like that long!).

Because that isn’t what creationists believe.

They believe God created man in his image, and humans have not changed at all over time.

‘Young Earth creationists’ believe that happened like 6000 years ago. Other creationists say it happened before that. Either way, the key is that humans have not evolved at all.

> ‘Young Earth creationists’ believe that happened like 6000 years ago. Other creationists say it happened before that. Either way, the key is that humans have not evolved at all.

But that's all already covered by option 3 - they can pick that option.

Sure, but then you have no way of distinguishing which type of creationist they are, which will lead to concluding more people believe the earth is under 10k years old, which is exactly the problem we are talking about. There should be either a separate option for creationists who believe the earth is older than 10k years, or remove the earth age part from the question.

> which will lead to concluding more people believe the earth is under 10k years old

You'd only conclude that if you haven't actually read the study. It says to select the closest option to your opinion.

The whole point of this thread is that the title said 40% believe the earth is under 10000 years old. We were commenting on why the title is incorrect.

Completely unnecessary assumption to hold. It creates more problems than it explains. Try this thought experiment: Assume there is no God. Everything makes a lot more sense, and you have a simpler theory.

Many people, including HNers, find it challenging to find purpose in life without a belief in a higher power. What's stopping us from just going on murder rampages or acting good towards each other if we have there is no promise of a holy afterlife?

> What's stopping us

Simple good sense and possibly a bit of intellectual progress.

I've personally tried it, and there are things that end up unconvincing.

Mostly surrounding cellular life bridging to complex lifeforms. Now I know there are "explanations" for all of it, but it's not convincing and not very well backed up. I believe in parts of evolution and creationism.

Well, the question doesn’t give an option to pick “created by God exactly as we are today more than 10000 years ago”. Creationists are forced to pick the ‘less than 10000 years ago’ option.

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