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I wrote a much better comment a few minutes ago, but one of the cats I'm fostering because my girlfriend foisted them upon me jumped on my keyboard and deleted it. So I apologize in advance if this is a low effort comment.
I think that the distrust of experts on this site goes way too far. 99% of the topics experts agree on or are on places like Wikipedia are true. If you look up something like the Central Limit Theorem on Wikipedia the answer will be more or less correct. But most things are boring. The ideas we focus on that are controversial and we don't trust them on are ones that cause the experts to lose their minds over and lose the ability to be impartial. Some examples are HBD and Covid. But if you open up a biology textbook, you can take most of that knowledge to the bank.
I want to give an example of this guy I know who worked at Best Buy with me in college. He is a Muslim guy and the elusive moderate Muslim. He is more or less progressive on every topic. I saw him recently at a tech meetup in Austin and he more or less sounded like a straight up Jihadist. And I helped this guy get his job at a major networking company after he got his law degree as a project manager, so I can confirm I thought he was a rational and trustworthy person. Which he is, except on the Israel-Palestine issue. He literally can't be rational. I thin for "experts", this is the same thing. They literally can't be rational on a few issues and it causes them to act insane and make people lose trust in institutions.
I'll give a less controversial example. I have a CS degree and I worked for this company that sold software that helped people automate things. We'd get this guy on a call with potential customers after the sales people and sales engineers did their thing and he would just shit on Azure and AWS and how he could do this and that if they switched to Linux and open source and the customers hated it. I had to pull him aside I was like dude we make software that works with Azure wtf are you doing. He was incapable of putting that hammer and nail away. It was like who gives a shit if a company uses Microsoft but he literally couldn't be rational about it.
I think a lot of people default to something similar to Foucault's theories on knowledge and power where knowledge and power are so linked that they end up essentially being the same thing. I completely agree with him, and I think power and knowledge combine to influence, manipulate and create NPCs that don't think. But in the case of experts, I think it is their biases causing this top down gas lighting instead of anything from the regime. The simplest and most likely answer is these people just believe this stuff due to ideology and are incredibly biased on hot culture war issues. It's not a conspiracy, they literally just can't think about these issues rationally.
Every Muslim I have met in the US, and I have met a fair number, has been moderate. Though only one has been from the Middle East.
I bet you don't know any young earth creationists either, despite them being 46% of Americans. Filter bubbles are crazy.
The equivalent claim would not be "There are no YECs", it would be "there are no Christians that are not YECs".
Okay? 62% Christian - 46% YEC = 16% Christian nonYEC (very very roughly).
I didn't expect that to be a smaller subset of Americans and I'm still not confident in the calculation, but filter bubbles are salient because they break your intuition.
It's a common failure mode to take poll results literally.
People are using polls to "vote" a certain way based on their feels. For example, during the pandemic, a significant percentage of Democrats said they wanted to jail people for not taking the Covid vaccine and even take away their kids. Was this really how they felt? Would they really want to embark on this reign of terror which would make Hitler blush?
Of course not. The respondents were just "voting" based on their feels. They were scared and angry, and didn't have to face any consequences for their vote.
Unless there is skin in the game, or the poll is a literal vote, then these polls should be entirely discarded.
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Where are you getting the numbers? If we go back to the poll Scott cited, it would show 46 % answering "God created humans in present form" and 32 % with "Humans evolved with God guiding", which would probably correspond to YEC and OEC.
Of course, this poll is over 10 years old, and the American society has, to put it mildly, gone through quite a bit of change since then.
More to the point neither one directly states support for YEC claims other than the narrow point about human evolution, so reading either one as "X% support for YEC" is running ahead of the evidence. (Even if we assume these polls directly measure people's literal beliefs, which per jeroboam, they probably don't.) Elsewhere in the thread, results from polls that did directly ask about the age of the Earth have been mentioned that got much lower numbers (30% at most, less if you change the wording of the question a little).
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62% from one part of the "Religion in US" wikipedia page (they have other numbers elsewhere), and 46% from the linked post. I don't think the actual calculation is important, as I would've made the same argument if it was 40% or 4%.
But it's an apples to oranges comparison. The Wikipedia page gives current numbers, the poll gives numbers from ten years ago. There's been quite a considerable process of secularization since then.
You're quibbling with the numbers, when the bigger issue is that polls of this sort are complete garbage and should be discarded immediately.
The poll might as well have asked "Are atheists correct about God?". Because that's how people will view the question.
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