Michael Patrick Leahy , author of Letter to an Atheist

Weekly Column for April 22, 2007

Sam Harris' Big Lie

Author and atheist Sam Harris keeps telling a big lie. Perhaps he thinks repetition will prevent his lie from being exposed. First stated in his best selling book Letter to a Christian Nation, he repeated the lie in a December 5, 2006 Letter to the Editor of the New York Times when he stated

“ Half of the American population believes that the universe is 6,000 years old.”

The evidence suggests that, at a maximum, only 18% of Americans, not 50% as Harris recklessly claims, might arguably be said to believe the universe is only 6,000 years old. And even that 18% might not completely agree with the 6,000 year figure.

Seven Gallup polls taken between 1982 and 2006 showed that between 44 and 47% of Americans agreed with the following statement:

God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so

Note that this question makes no reference to the age of other species of animals, the age of the earth, the solar system, or the universe. It refers to the creation of human beings “in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so.”

Among those who agreed with this statement are intelligent design proponents, Old Earth creationists, Young Earth creationists, and probably even a few theistic evolutionists. Among these four schools of thought, only Young Earth Creationists might agree with the assertion that the entire universe is only 6,000 years old. Old Earth Creationists, intelligent design proponents, and theistic evolutionists would all be expected to agree with the current scientific consensus that the earth itself is about 4.5 billion years old.

In 2004, Sociologists Otis Dudley Duncan of UC Santa Barbara and Claudia Geist of Indiana State University undertook a research project to learn more about creationists.Here’s what they concluded:

Hence we estimate that only one third of adult Americans are creationists in the strict sense of "evolution denial" whereas the Gallup question yields an estimate of 46% who implicitly rely solely on Genesis.

Examining 25 years of Gallup polling data, in addition to 1993, 1994, and 2000 data from the General Social Survey, Duncan and Geist concluded that among these 33% of Americans who are creationists:

We see that 18% are both literalists and creationists, 14% are creationists who take a more liberal view of the Bible, and 1% are creationists who are outright biblical skeptics. Thus, even though biblical literalism and creationism are clearly associated, only a little more than half of all creationists (18/33 = 55%) are literalists. The 14% of the population who are creationists that take a more liberal view of the Bible are much more likely to be Old Earth Creationists than Young Earth Creationists. And yet, even these 18% who are both literalists and creationists currently believe that the 7 days of Genesis may have occurred anywhere from 20,000 to 6,000 years ago.

So how did Mr. Harris create such a big lie ?

1. He misrepresented the results of a September 2005 Gallup Poll

2. He assumed all creationists agreed with Bishop Ussher’s famous calculation made in 1650 that the earth was created in 4004, B.C.

In September, 2005, Gallup changed the wording of the three statements associated with the evolution question they had asked in six earlier polls between 1982 and 2004. The question itself remained the same:

Which of the following statements comes closest to your views on the origin and development of human beings ?

But compare how the three subsequent statements in the 2005 poll differed from the three subsequent statements in the seven other polls on evolution conducted by Gallup between 1982 and 2006:

Statement 1: 1982-2006 (excluding 2005)
Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process.
Statement 1: 2005 only
Human beings have evolved over millions of years from other forms of life and God guided this process.

Statement 2: 1982-2006 (excluding 2005)
Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God had no part in this process.

Statement 2: 2005 only
Human beings have evolved over millions of years from other forms of life but God had no part in this process.

Statement 3: 1982-2006 (excluding 2005)
God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so.
Statement 3: 2005 only
God created human beings in their present form exactly the way the Bible describes it.

53 % of the respondents to the 2005 Gallup Poll agreed with Statement 3. Among these 53% were proponents of intelligent design, Old Earth creationists, Young Earth creationists, and respondents who considered it “closest to their views” but were not full fledged creationists. Harris blithely lumped all 53% into the “Young Earth creationist” camp, when clearly, as Dudley and Geist’s 2004 study showed, only a maximum of 1/3 of these respondents – the 18% cited by Dudley and Geist as both “literalists” and “creationists” could arguably be said to belong there. Even among this 18%, there is not universal agreement to the 6,000 year figure.

The two leading Young Earth creationist organizations in the United States---The Institute for Creation Research and Creation Ministries International-both accept the 6,000 year figure. In 2003, the Institute for Creation Research’s President, John Morris, stated:

"Up until fairly recently, nearly all printings of the King James Bible included dates in the marginal notes which helped place Biblical events in their chronological context. Using this as a guide we can see that "God created the heaven and the earth" in 4004 b.c.The chronology was derived by Archbishop James Ussher, and first published in a.d. 1650. Born in Ireland, he rose rapidly in the ranks of the Anglican Church, renowned for his scholarship, mastery of Semitic and classical languages, and voluminous knowledge of history. While Ussher had access to documents we no longer have, numerous discoveries have come to light since Ussher, which enhance our understanding. But none of them change his conclusions to any great extent. There have been over 100 attempts to establish a chronology since Ussher, and each one is slightly different, but all are fairly close to his."

But among Young Earth creationists, others place the date of creation 10,000 to 25,000 years in the past. A small point, perhaps, but one that suggests that even the 18% figure cited by Dudley and Geist overstates the number of Americans who believe that the universe is only 6,000 years old.

If this one big lie by Mr. Harris was a unique exception, we might be willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. Unfortunately, it is merely one of many misrepresentations, exaggerations, and outright fabrications made by Harris. Indeed, his slim 91 page book Letter to a Christian Nation contains an additional 19 factual errors as blatant as this one. Interested readers can see the documentation of these errors at Twenty Factual Errors in Sam Harris' Letter to a Christian Nation

Copyright 2007 by Michael Patrick Leahy

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