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The wording on that is kind of ambiguous. One could perfectly well read it as, “God brought about civilised man (through his control of natural processes) about 10,000 years ago when the first civilisations started appearing” and I would agree despite definitely not being a creationist.
Not really. That would be option 1.
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Wouldn't their alternative option of "Humans have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process" have been a better fit for your position?
What is the meaningful distinction between "this simulation was set up according to deterministic laws and then allowed to run for a trillion years to generate the current state" versus "this simulation instantiated the current state by simulating a trillion years of deterministic evolution in two seconds"?
If your reasoning accepts that we are not living in the base reality, as both Materialism and Theism appear to do, then a lot of the old arguments seem to lose their meaning. If one observes how these arguments evolved, this should not be surprising: both the theists and the atheists very clearly expected and even demanded a clockwork universe. Both were wrong.
In general? Hard to say; possibly none. But I'd also think both would fit pretty well into the "developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process" category, especially if the answer is "none". If there's no distinction between a Creator spending millions of years of time on hominids versus a Creator spending millions of years of simulation-time on hominids, and if the former would clearly qualify for that poll response, then Q.E.D.
In a philosophy where there is a duality between brains which obey material laws and immortal souls which are above them, though, wouldn't the simulation case be weird? The hundreds of thousands of people who just started existing mid-adulthood have a full life's worth of memories of things that never happened? If you're facing away from your kid when you start existing, you feel love for someone you've never really met?
Regardless, although I love a Simulationist thought experiment as much as the next nerd, but the "in their present form" answerers are probably not picturing a Great Programmer here, and when you get into specifics then there are meaningful distinctions. The deterministic-laws-running case led to a state where, by 8000BC, large human subpopulations were on every continent; the in-their-present-form case, to about half of people who answered that, the story of a single pair of humans molded from the dust of the ground in the Garden of Eden is literally true.
I admit I'm surprised that fraction isn't higher. 20% of Americans are people who, despite thinking that there's a bunch of non-literal stuff in the Bible (presumably more than just the stories explicitly defined as parables), don't think the non-literal parts might include the bit about humanity being 6000ish years old?
The converse situation is even weirder, though. 6% of Americans don't identify as Christians and yet think the Christian Bible is "the actual word of God, to be taken literally"? Are they old-fashioned (mythical?) Satanists who believe in God but don't worship him? Are they Gnostics who think the Biblical God is real but is actually not the Supreme Being? I'm not aware of a ton of other options here. Maybe I just expect too much consistency from polling results in general.
This is probably just noise, lizardman's constant.
But there is a segment of evangelicals who don't identify with the "Christian" label, as silly as it may sound. When I was growing up, the cool thing to be was "a Christ follower" not "a Christian." The best steelman for the phrase is that it stresses the humility of the speaker and not their moral authority -- but a more realistic interpretation is that it served as a means of trying to escape stigma against Christianity in a world increasingly neutral, if not hostile, towards the Christian faith. "I'm not like those judgmental Christians."
In the seeker-sensitive movement, there was a big shift towards that kind of instrumental humility, where everyone's seen as -- to give you a direct sermon quote, no I'm not kidding -- "just trying to figure out this whole Jesus thing." Essentially the main source of growth for many, if not most, non-denominational megachurches is from people with some level of Christian belief but who had negative experiences in smaller churches in the past. Distancing from the "Christian" term serves as a signal of "we're not like those judgy people who gave you dirty looks for being divorced or having a shoulder tattoo." In other words -- it's memetically fit, in a certain context.
This group is also thoroughly evangelical, though unreflectively, without reference to the alternatives. If you tell them many Presbyterians don't believe the Bible is the inspired Word of God or that Episcopal bishops have openly doubted the resurrection of Christ, they struggle to believe you (I've done it). The idea that following Jesus is separable from Biblical inspiration wouldn't even strike them as possible, just like the practice of infant Baptism is a bizarre medieval Catholic innovation and not also the practice of many Protestant churches. In this culture "I'm a Christ follower not a Christian" can feel as subversive as 18th-century Deism, though my own experience is that the internet has taken a sledgehammer to that sort of monoculture and most with doubts or institutional grievances run straight for atheism.
In particular, the "Jesus was just a heckin' good guy who wanted everyone to love each other, he would have been a big fan of gay marriage" seems to be the apostatized, post-Obergefell evolution of the original concept. And many evangelicals even from traditional backgrounds are very suceptible to it, because they often have no grounding in the broader historical and theological place of their tradition and thus have no antibodies to counterarguments. Especially ones that appeal to concerns about "holier than thou" attitudes and Christian judgmentalism (because the Gospel is reduced to non-judgment instead of right-judgment).
There are also the "all the churches are money laundering fronts who spend all their money on fancy sound systems, my church is my household" prepper dad energy folks, at the very epicenter of Scots-Irish obstinance and skepticism of authority. These people feel a firm connection to Christian culture (though mostly in a reactionary way) and would affirm Biblical inspiration if you asked them, though they couldn't give you a verse any longer than a bumper sticker. Yes, this is incoherent.
It's a fairly small group, and the general tenor of American Christianity in recent years is toward greater traditionalism -- I know southern baptists who are endorsing structured liturgical prayer -- but if someone told me "the Bible is the literal Word of God, but I'm not like those Christians," well, this is what pops into my head.
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The simulation theory is unfalsifiable - due to the way we model brains we know memories can be altered and the emotions attached to them too (thank fuck for propafol) and they have even been able to implant a false sense of fear in mice by reactivating specific neurons activated in response to a shock without the shock, which implies our memories are mere playthings for a sufficiently advanced being. Once you accept that premise everything else falls into place.
It's a great irony that an atheist materialist would be more susceptible to that argument than a theist, due to the theist's believing we are more than just flesh and neurons.
I have to say though, I am now more interested in those 6% of people who I assume must be insanely depressed. Or just insane.
Maybe Lizardman's constant is less constant than thought.
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