Over half of Americans question the idea that the Big Bang created the universe 13.8 billion years ago.
Researchers conducted a survey asking participants to ask their level of agreement with certain statements regarding science and medicine, an AP-GfK Poll news release reported.
In the poll four percent of the participants doubted that smoking caused cancer; six percent questioned if mental illness was really a medical condition; eight percent doubted if there was a genetic code written inside of human cells; and 15 percent questioned the safety and efficiency of vaccines.
The poll also found four in 10 participants doubted global warming was a result of man-made gases trapping heat inside the atmosphere; the same was true for the idea that the Earth is 4.5 billion years old and developed through a process of natural selection. Fifty-one percent of participants admitted to doubting the Big Bang theory.
Many of America's top scientists were disappointed to learn about these statistics.
"Science ignorance is pervasive in our society, and these attitudes are reinforced when some of our leaders are openly antagonistic to established facts," 2013 Nobel Prize in medicine winner Randy Schekman of the University of California, Berkeley said in the news release.
The poll found a political tie between belief tendencies; democrats were more likely to have confidence in ideas such as natural selection, climate change, and the Big Bang. Religion also had a significant effect on which way the participant leaned on these issues.
"When you are putting up facts against faith, facts can't argue against faith," 2012 Nobel Prize winning biochemistry professor Robert Lefkowitz of Duke University, said in the news releae. "It makes sense now that science would have made no headway because faith is untestable."
"Evolution, the age of the Earth and the Big Bang" can all be compatible with religious beliefs, unless one is a Bible literalist, the news release reported.
"The story of the cosmos and the Big Bang of creation is not inconsistent with the message of Genesis 1, and there is much profound biblical scholarship to demonstrate this," Francisco Ayala, a former priest and professor of biology, philosophy and logic at the University of California, Irvine. And Darrel Falk, a biology professor at Point Loma Nazarene University, the news release reported.
