The polling results presented here, together with those in Figure 1, tell rather different stories about what Americans believe regarding how human beings came to be; indeed, they are, as we say, “polls apart.” Consider the results of the July 2005 Religion and Public Life Survey conducted by the Pew Research Center (Figure 2).

Unlike the Gallup Organization’s standard question on human origins, which many respondents might well interpret implicitly as a question about their belief in God, the questions asked in the Pew poll did not explicitly mention God. First of all, respondents simply had to indicate whether they thought that “humans and other living things have evolved over time,” or whether they believed that they “have existed in their present form since the beginning of time.” If they thought humans evolved over time, they were then asked to say whether they thought this was due to “natural processes such as natural selection” or because “a supreme being guided the evolution of living things for the purpose of creating humans and other life in the form it exists today.”

Asked in this way, 42 percent of respondents said they believed humans and other living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time, a figure not that different from what Gallup reported in response to its standard question in 2004 and 2006 (45 percent and 46 percent, respectively), in which the wording of the creationist option was somewhat similar. But the Pew estimate of those choosing the biblical creationist position (42 percent) differed notably from that discovered in the Gallup poll of September 2005 (53 percent), in which Gallup reworded its description of the creationist alternative to link it more exactly to “the way the Bible describes it.”

The Pew Center questions also produced rather different estimates of those believing in the alternatives to the creationist position. Approximately twice as many respondents in the Pew survey endorsed the naturalistic or Darwinist option as did those given the godless-evolution alternative in the Gallup polls. Even more striking, less than one out of five respondents in the Pew poll chose the theistic-evolutionist position of human beings evolving under the guidance of God, as compared to nearly a third (31 percent) in the September 2005 Gallup survey and 36-38 percent in the 2004 and 2006 Gallup polls.  

A journalist, politician, or public policymaker looking at one or the other of these conflicting poll results would thus reach a rather different conclusion about what Americans really believed about the origins of human life. Examining the Gallup results of September 2005, for example, he or she would most likely think a clear majority of Americans subscribed to the traditional Christian, biblical version of the creation of human beings, that roughly another third believed God had a major role in the process, and that only a very small minority thought humans evolved without any kind of God involved in the process.

In contrast, the same observer spotting the results of the Pew survey might well conclude that, while a definite plurality of Americans appeared to accept the conventional biblical position on human origins, this figure is somewhat lower than what the Gallup Organization has been reporting for the past couple of decades. More importantly, he or she would most likely notice from the Pew survey that the American public has evidently become much more receptive to the idea that human evolution has occurred through the Darwinian process of natural selection, with over a fourth of Americans now choosing that option, as compared to just 10-12 percent selecting the naturalistic position in previous Gallup polls. Like so many other experiments with the wording of survey questions, the two polls create two different looking publics; two different social realities.