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History of creationism

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The creation beliefs of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam can be traced back to the creation stories in Genesis, the first book of the Bible. Up until the early 20th century, most Europeans and Americans believed that God had existed and would exist eternally, and that everything else had been created by God as described in the Bible. However, with the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, a variety of scientific and philosophical movements challenged the traditional viewpoint.

Early history

Biblical Creationism stems from the ancient Hebrew text of Genesis (see creation according to Genesis), and purporting to be a historical document recording God's creation of the World in six days, and resting on the seventh. According to the geneologies recorded in the Bible, this was calculated to have occured approximately 4,000 B.C. With the Jewish diaspora, and the spread of Christianity throughout Europe between the 1st century and the 3rd century, creationism displaced many Greco-Roman naturalistic philosophies such as Atomism and various pagan beliefs.

According to biblically-literal creationism, God created a number of "kinds" of animals that were able to change over time, but those changes may take place only within definite bounds. Essentially, while all dogs have common ancestors, dogs and cats do not have common ancestors. Approximately 4,500 years ago, God sent a world-wide flood to cover the Earth and wipe out all mankind, with the exception of the animals and eight people preserved in the ark. Before the flood, two of each unclean animal and seven of each clean animal were taken on board the ark. After the flood, those animals were released, and they differentiated and developed over time into the present variety of animals. Until the scientific revolution, the Creation account was simply taken on the authority of the Bible, and no systematic inquiry was made as to scientific evidence for its claims until the 19th century.

After the fall of the Roman Empire, there then followed the Dark Ages, with little advancement in science. However, in the midst of the social and political chaos, many of the written scientific works were maintained by Irish monks, and later disseminated onto the continent. (Cahill).

Renaissance to Darwin

The Renaissance starting in the 14th century saw the establishment of protoscience that eventually would lead to the development of modern science through the Scientific revolution. This period was period of great social change. Improvements in communications and economies (Industrial Revolution) lead to advances in science and improved education. European colonization of the Americas saw fleeing from religious persecution. In the United States, due to the Establishment Clause, no church was given government sanction, so Christianity evolved with relative freedom through a series of Great Awakenings.

Nicolaus Copernicus proposed the idea of Heliocentrism in the 16th century, and this was followed by work by Galileo Galilei and Johannes Kepler establishing this, followed by Newton. This overturned the Greek Ptolemaic system of geocentrism, which had been adopted as Church dogma with the fusion of Christianity with Greek Philosophy. in the first few centuries AD.

In 1650 the Achbishop of Armagh, James Ussher, (1581 — 1656) published a monumental history of the world from creation to 70 A.D., and for this used the recorded geneologies and ages in scripture to derive what is commonly known as the Ussher-Lightfoot Calendar which calculated a date for Creation from the Bible at 4004 BC. The calender was widely accepted.

Carolus Linnaeus (1707 — 1778) established a system of classification of species by similarity. At the time, the system of classification was seen as the plan of organization used by God in his creation. Later, the theory of evolution applied it as groundwork for the idea of common descent.

James Hutton (1726 — 1797) is often viewed as the first modern geologist. In 1785 he presented a paper entitled Theory of the Earth to the Royal Society of Edinburgh. In his paper, based on his presumption of uniformitarianism, he explained his theory that the Earth must be much older than had previously been supposed in order to allow enough time for mountains to be eroded and for sediment to form new rocks at the bottom of the sea, which in turn were raised up to become dry land. Those that accepted Hutton's arguments developed various forms of Old Earth creationism as a result.

David Hume (April 26, 1711 - August 25, 1776), a Scottish naturalist, empiricist, and skeptic, argued for naturalism and against belief in God. He argued that order stems from both design and natural processes, so it is not necessary to infer a designer when one sees order; that the design argument, even if it worked, would not support a robust or even moral God, that the argument begged the question of the origin of God, and that design was merely a human projection onto the forces of nature.

In 1802 William Paley (1743 — 1805), published Natural Theology in response to naturalists such as Hume, refining the ancient teleological argument (or argument from design) to argue for the existence of God. He argued that life was so intricately designed and interconnected as to be analogous to a watch. Just as when one finds a watch, one reasonable infers that it was designed and constructed by an intelligent being, although one has never seen the designer, when one observes the complexity and intricacy of life, one may reasonably infer that it was designed and constructed by God, although one has never seen God.

Advances in palaeontology, led by William Smith (1769 — 1839) saw the recording of the first fossil records which showed the transmutation of species. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744 — 1829) proposed a theory of evolution, later known as Lamarckism, by which traits that were "needed" were passed on.

In 1862, the Glaswegian physicist William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin) (1824 — 1907) published calculations, based on his presumption of uniformitarianism, that fixed the age of the Earth at between 20 million and 400 million years, i.e. between ~3,000 and ~70,000 times Ussher's value. The idea of an ancient Earth was generally accepted without much controversy, though it would take further advances in geology and the discovery of radioactivity to recalculate it to the present estimated 4 billion years, or ~700,000 times Ussher's value.

Philip Henry Gosse, (1810 — 1888) published in 1857 his book Omphalos: Untying the Geological Knot. The Omphalos hypothesis argued that the World had been created by God recently but with the appearance of old age. This was largely ignored, and some considered it blasphemous because it accused the Creator of deceit. Some young Earth creationists would later incoporate parts of his arguments.

Darwin

Publication of Charles Darwin's theories was met with derision. Cartoons of Darwin charicatured as an ape were common.

In the 1860s, the concept of variation and natural selection came to be first understood. Charles Darwin (1809 — 1882) published the The Origin of Species in 1859 suggesting that species had evolved by the process of natural selection. The theory of evolution would later develop through the 20th century; see history of evolutionary thought.

Darwin's book ignited a furious controversy in Victorian Britain, as it posed fundamental questions about the relationship between religion and science. His subsequent book The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871), in which he applied his theory to humankind and proposed common descent, stoked the controversy further, because of its implication that man was simply an animal who had evolved a particular set of characteristics, rather than a spiritual being created by God. One of the most famous disputes was the Oxford Debate of 1860, in which T.H. Huxley (1825 — 1895), Darwin's self-appointed "bulldog", debated evolution with "Soapy Sam" Wilberforce (1805 — 1873), the Bishop of Oxford.

Others in the scientific élite of the day were not as quick as Huxley to accept naturalistic evolution. Alfred Russel Wallace (1823 — 1913; with whom Darwin had first published on natural selection in 1858), and the American Asa Gray (1810 — 1888; with whom Darwin had corresponded before and after publication of The Origin) both argued for special roles for a creator.

The Swiss-American palaeontologist Louis Agassiz (1807 — 1873) opposed evolution. He believed that there had been a seris of catastrophes with divine re-creations, evidence of which could be seen in rock fossils.

In 1878, American Presbyterians concerned about the implications of evolution for the accuracy of the Bible held the first annual Niagara Bible Conference, and thus founding the Christian fundamentalist movement.

Differing beliefs

By now, the main positions regarding evolution had been established. Generally, the advent of evolution divided people into four camps:

  • Young Earth creationists, who believed that evolution was scientifically untenable, and merely an attempt to justify atheism, reacted by asserting Biblical inerrancy and a biblically literal creation.
  • Old Earth creationists
  • Evolutionary creationists, who accepted evolution, but also believed that the process was guided by God. Though they varied as to which parts were specially created and how.
  • Atheists who ascribed to naturalistic evolution, concluded that belief in God was unreasonable, from, amongst other reasons, the idea that the development of life could be explained naturalistically.

In reality, there is a continuum of creationist viewpoints from young Earth Creationist to evolutionary creationists, with each accepting and rejecting different aspects. How common each of the positions are has varied over time. Mainstream churches tended to subscribe to an intermediate position and missions tended to focus on other aspects of religion.

While opinion in the scientific community and public opinion in Europe came to almost universally accept evolution, the situation in the United States was different.

Although on the surface, the debate was primarily of a scientific nature, it also tapped into the deep philosophical and religious beliefs of creationists and atheists, and led to a great deal of controversy.

Early 20th Century

The period immediately after Darwin's death in 1888 is known as the Eclipse of Darwinism, as it was considered either insufficient to explain life's full diversity. During this period, the theory of orthogenetic (or straight-line) evolution, was dominant within the scientific community. Orthogenesis held that small variations in species took place through the Mendelian mechanism of heredity, but the development of species over time was merely the completion of Creation in the mind of God. In 1901 the work of an Austrian monk Gregor Mendel was rediscovered, providing a basis for a theory of heredity. This development appeared to make Darwinism redundant, as the laws of heredity were shown to lead to stability within species, rather than instability.

During the 1920s, the highly mathematical discipline of population genetics began to explore the development of populations over time, and gradually other areas of biology were brought into the modern evolutionary synthesis in the 1930s and 1940s.

George McCready Price (1870 — 1963) was important in establishing "flood geology", and many of his ideas that a young earth could be deduced from science would be taken up later.

In 1910, the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church distilled the princples of Christian fundamentalism into what were known as the "five fundamentals", one of which was the inerrancy of the Scriptures, including the Genesis account of creation.[1]

After the First World War (1914 — 1918, the teaching of evolution and creation in public education grew as a public controversy. (see Creation and evolution in public education). Many texts began to teach the theory of evolution as scientific fact. Many Christians, Jews, and Muslims came to believe that in teaching evolution as fact, the State was unconstitutionally infringing on their right to the free exercise of religion, as it effectively taught their children that the Bible had been proven false.

For example, the Democratic Party politician William Jennings Bryan (1860 — 1925) "became convinced that the teaching of Evolution as a fact instead of a theory caused the students to lose faith in the Bible, first, in the story of creation, and later in other doctrines, which underlie the Christian religion."

During the First World War, horrors committed by Germans, then the most scientifically advanced country in the World, Bryan noting "The same science that manufactured poisonous gases to suffocate soldiers is preaching that man has a brute ancestry and eliminating the miraculous and the supernatural from the Bible."

A popular book from 1917 by Vernon L. Kellogg entitled Headquarters Nights, reported through first hand evidence German officers discussing Darwinism leading to the declaration of war. Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, were convicted of kidnapping and killing Bobby Franks.

The Scopes Trial of 1925 is perhaps the most famous court case of its kind. The Butler Act had prohibited the teaching of evolution in public schools in Tennessee. The schoolteacher John T. Scopes was found guilty of teaching evolution and fined, although the case was later dismissed on a technicality.

In 1929 a book by one of George McCready Price's former students, Harold W. Clark described Price’s catastrophism as "creationism" in Back to Creationism. Previously anti-evolutionists had described themselves as being "Christian fundamentalists" "Anti-evolution" or "Anti-false science". The term creationism had previously referred to the creation of souls for each new person, as opposed to traducianism, where souls were said to have been inherited from one's parents.

In 1933, a group of atheists seeking to develop a "new religion" to replaced previous, deity-based religions, composed the Humanist Manifesto, which outlined a fifteen-point belief system, the first two points of which provided that "Religious humanists regard the universe as self-existing and not created" and "Humanism believes that man is a part of nature and that he has emerged as a result of a continuous process." [2] This document exacerbated the ideological tone of the discussion in many circles, as many creationists came to see evolution as a doctrine of the "religion" of atheism.

The American George Gaylord Simpson (1902 — 1984) was particularly instrumental in the incorporation of palaeontology in the 1940s. Some creationists, however, objected to the equation of microevolution and macroevolution, acknowledging the former but denying the latter, and continue to do so to this day.

Post-war

The Second World War (1939 — 1945) saw the horrors of the Holocaust. The Holocaust had been driven in part by eugenics, or the principle that individuals with "undesirable" genetic characteristics should be removed from the gene pool. Eugenics was based in part on principles of evolutionary theory. Although eugenics was rejected by other nations after the war, the memory of it did not quickly fade. After the war, the United States entered the Cold War and conflict with the communist Soviet Union. Communism had as one of its principles atheism, (see opium of the people). Americans divided over the issues of Communism and Atheism, but with the Great Purge, Cultural Revolution and 1956 Hungarian Uprising, many became concerned about the implications of Communism and Atheism. At the same time, the scientific community was making great strides in developing the theory of evolution, which seemed to make belief in God unreasonable under Occam's razor. As a result of all these unanswered questions, the Fourth Great Awakening found creationists asserting themselves with new vigor.

In 1961 Henry M. Morris (1918-) and John C. Whitcomb, Jr published a book entitled The Genesis Flood, in an effort to provide a scientific basis for Young Earth Creationism and Flood geology. This resulted in ten like-minded scientists forming the Creation Research Society in 1963.

In 1968 the US Supreme Court ruled in Epperson vs. Arkansas that forbidding the teaching of evolution violated the Establishment Clause of the US constitution.

In 1970, creationists in California established the Institute for Creation Research, to "meet the need for an organization devoted to research, publication, and teaching in those fields of science particularly relevant to the study of origins." [3].

In 1973, a famous anti-Young Earth Creationist essay by the evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky (1900 — 1975) was published in the American Biology Teacher entitled Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution. He argued for scientific creationism, that belief in God and evolution are compatible.

In the late 1970s, Answers in Genesis, another creationist research organization, was founded in Australia.

In the late 1970s, Stephen Jay Gould proposed a refinement of the theory of evolution, known as Punctuated equilibrium, which held that species stayed at equilibrium for large amounts of time, but went through major changes quickly, as a result of major catastrophes or climate changes. The scientific community viewed this development as a refinement of the theory of evolution, and incorporated it into the synthesis.

Punctuated equilibrium asserted that major changes in species occured relatively quickly, because major changes in certain individuals would lead to reproductive isolation.[4] Due to that reproductive isolation, the normal effects of gene flow, genetic homeostasis, and large population sizes, in which selection prefers species stability over species change would be overcome, leading to "canalization," or the rapid development of that species within that limited and isolated gene pool.

Creationists argued that while Gould's proposed mechanism could explain speciation, it could not explain macroevolution. Insofar as punctuated equilibrium was used to explain macroevolution, they viewed it as an unparsimonious and pseudoscientific attempt to explain the scarcity of transitional fossils by a mechanism even less reasonable than gradualism itself: a mechanism which went against the basic laws of genetics and "conveniently" left no traces.[5]

With the advent of punctuated equilibrium, creationists grew more vehement, and began to compose creationist textbooks as an alternative to mainstream biology textbooks, and propose that their theories be taught in public schools alongside evolution.

In 1980, Dr. Walt Brown became director of the Center for Scientific Creation, researching theories of flood geology, such as liquefaction, the origin of ocean trenches, and the hydroplate theory.

The rise of intelligent design

The 1990s saw the rise of intelligent design.

In 1987 in the US Supreme Court again ruled, this time in Edwards v. Aguillard, that requiring the teaching of creation every time evolution was taught illegally advanced a particular religion, although a variety of views on origins could be taught in public schools if shown to have a basis in science.

In 1991, law professor Phillip E. Johnson brought out a book entitled Darwin on Trial, challenging the principles of naturalism and uniformitarianism in contemporary scientific philosophy, and coining the phrase intelligent design.

In 1994 Answers in Genesis expanded from Australia to the United States. [6] It also subsequently expanded to the United Kingdom, Canada, and South Africa. It had already opened in New Zealand.

In 1996, the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture (CSC), formerly known as the Center for Renewal of Science and Culture, was founded to promote Intelligent Design, and entered public discourse with the publication of Darwin's Black Box by Michael Behe, arguing for evidence of Irreducible complexity. Critics claimed that this was a thinly-veiled attempt to promote creationism, particularly in light of Edwards v. Aguilard. The Discovery Institute rejects the term creationism. [7]

In 1996, Pope John Paul II stated that "new findings lead us toward the recognition of evolution as more than a hypothesis," but, referring to previous papal writings, concluded that "if the origin of the human body comes through living matter which existed previously, the spiritual soul is created directly by God." [8]

References

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