A very interesting poll, Mellie.
Personally I think it's a good thing to be careful before you say that you know that something is true. Yes, there are some things that are so overwhelmingly probable that it is quite all right to say that we know that they are true. It is, for example, overwhelmingly probable that the Earth is round. The members of the Flat Earth Society are fighting an uphill battle if they want to change school books so that schools teach children that the roundness of the Earth is an unproven theory.
Other things are harder to know, and various religious statements definitely belong among those. I have an old relative who once said, when I was a kid, that even if she had grown up among heathens who had never even heard about God or Jesus or the Bible, she herself would nevertheless have been not only a Christian but a Pentecostalist, because God would have spoken to her heart and revealed the truth of Pentecostalism to her. I remembered thinking that that was a bold statement of hers, because she had grown up surrounded by Pentecostalists who had taught her that Pentecostalism was the only revealed truth of God. To herself my relative is a Pentecostalist because Pentecostalism is the revealed and hallowed truth, but to me she is a Pentecostalist because she has been brought up to believe that way, and she has lived in a massively Pentecostalist small town all her life.
But while it is easy to poke fun at some religious beliefs, I also think that many people are too uncritical when it comes to various claims made in the name of science. For example, what exactly do you mean if you say that you know that the Big Bang really happened? A point I tried to make in my recent "The Big Bang and the Universe" series in the Off Topic folder here is that astronomers themselves don't fully understand the Big Bang and can't fully describe it. Astronomers themselves don't really know what the Big Bang truly was. So if you answered that you know that the Big Bang really happened, are you sure that you know what the Big Bang really was?
I want to underscore, however, that I personally haven't heard of a single astronomer who rejects what I would call "a Big Bang universe". Such a universe is one that came into existence at a certain time in the past and has been changing and evolving ever since. The way I understand astronomy, there is a massive amount of evidence that the universe is between ten and twenty billion years old (the current best estimate is 13.75 billion years) and that it has been expanding and cooling ever since it was "born".
Similarly, there is a massive amount of evidence that life on Earth has changed and diversified because of evolution. However, in the same way that astronomers don't understand the details of the Big Bang, biologists don't know how life on Earth actually came into existence.
As a non-religious person, I don't think that God has anything to do with either the emergence of life on Earth or the beginning of our universe. But I don't know that God wasn't involved, and I won't claim that I have such knowledge. I will, however, definitely say that I believe that no God was involved.
And of course, since I grew up close to people who said that only Pentecostalism was the only revealed word of God, so that, by extension, God himself was really a Pentecostalist God, I will always ask, "Which God?", when people say that they believe that God created the universe. I will always wonder if they mean the Jewish God or the Muslim God or a Hindu God or the Baptist God or the Mormon God or another God, maybe even the Pentecostalist God, and then I always want to know how they can know that it was their own God and no other God who created the universe.
Ann
