Illustration by Pablo Carlos Budassi. CC BY-SA 4.0.
A survey conducted by the University of Birmingham and YouGov examined the views of people in seven countries — Argentina, Australia, Canada, Germany, Spain, the United States, and the United Kingdom — about evolution, religion, and science.
The report summarized (PDF, p. 10), "There is high awareness of evolutionary science as a concept across the countries surveyed, although self-reported knowledge of evolutionary science is much lower. The majority in all countries surveyed find evolution easy to accept with regards to their personal beliefs. This ease in acceptance of evolution is the most common view for those who are both non-religious/spiritual or religious/spiritual. Further, in all countries surveyed 'creationism' is a minority position."
Asked "Which of the following statements come closest to your view about the origin and development of life on Earth?" 24 percent of Americans preferred "Humans and other living things were created by God and have always existed in their current form," 29 percent preferred "Humans and other living things evolved over time, in a process guided by God," 27 percent preferred "Humans and other living things evolved over time as a result of natural selection, in which God had no part," 9 percent indicated that they had a different view and 12 percent indicated that they didn't know or had no view.
The survey posed a number of further questions involving evolution, including a set about the explanatory reach of evolution, how difficult or easy respondents find it to accept evolution given their personal views, how important or unimportant evolution is to the respondents' self-image, a set about to what extent it is possible for different types of people to have religious faith while accepting evolution, whether the media overstates or understates conflict between evolution and faith, and how reliable experts on evolution are considered to be.
The survey was conducted in May and June 2023 using samples (of at least 2000 people per country) from nationally representative panels; the data was demographically weighted. No information about confidence levels or margins of error was reported.
