Sixty-three percent of physicians believe that the theory of evolution is more correct than belief in intelligent design, according to a recent poll, though the responses vary significantly by religion.
The survey was conducted by the Louis Finkelstein Institute for Social and Religious Research, a division of Jewish Theological Seminary, an educational and religious center of Conservative Judaism, in New York City, and HCD Research Inc., a Flemington, N.J.-based marketing and communications company.
Results of the physicians poll are available from HCD Research.
Eighty-eight percent of Jewish doctors agreed more with evolution than with intelligent design. While 60 percent of Catholic doctors supported the evolutionary view, 54 percent of Protestant doctors agreed more with intelligent design—the general view that an unidentified creator is likely to have influenced some aspects of the natural world’s development.
The e-mail survey of 1,472 physicians, conducted May 13-15, has a margin of error of 3 percentage points.
