I think you are missing a critical point—most people seriously don’t care about the age of the Earth, at all. So if you ask someone “did God create the Earth in its present form”, you are not identifying whether or not someone is a young Earth creationist, but simply giving the prompt “do you believe in God enough to say ‘yes’ on a random survey?”
One survey found that 25% of Americans don’t know that the Earth orbits the sun. This seems like a non-religious question to me, and thus I am willing to take it as a general indicator of ‘how much Americans care about basic science’. So I would split that 42% into two groups: ‘Americans who strongly believe that God created the Universe in its present form’ = 17% (ish), ‘Americans who guessed wrong and/or would like to weakly signal that they are Christians’ = 25% (ish).
Most people just don’t care enough to alieve about science. However, I suspect that more people do care enough to alieve about politics, and are willing to base their political ingroup on religion.
I think you are missing a critical point—most people seriously don’t care about the age of the Earth, at all. So if you ask someone “did God create the Earth in its present form”, you are not identifying whether or not someone is a young Earth creationist, but simply giving the prompt “do you believe in God enough to say ‘yes’ on a random survey?”
One survey found that 25% of Americans don’t know that the Earth orbits the sun. This seems like a non-religious question to me, and thus I am willing to take it as a general indicator of ‘how much Americans care about basic science’. So I would split that 42% into two groups: ‘Americans who strongly believe that God created the Universe in its present form’ = 17% (ish), ‘Americans who guessed wrong and/or would like to weakly signal that they are Christians’ = 25% (ish).
Most people just don’t care enough to alieve about science. However, I suspect that more people do care enough to alieve about politics, and are willing to base their political ingroup on religion.