History of creationism

The history of creationism is tied to the history of religions. In the 18th and 19th centuries, Christians found their accounts of creation to be in conflict with empirical observations of natural history from scientific inquiry. While the term creationism was not in common use before the late 19th century, creationists consider their primary source to be the ancient Hebrew text describing creation according to Genesis and see themselves as being the philosophical and religious offspring of the traditions that held that text sacred.

The biblical account of history, cosmology and natural history was believed by Jews, Christians and Muslims and its accuracy was largely unquestioned through the Medieval period, though some early Jewish and Christian thinkers considered the creation stories in Genesis to be allegory [1] [2]. Most people in Europe, the middle east and other areas of the Islamic world believed that a supreme being had existed and would exist eternally, and that everything else in existence had been created by this supreme being, known variously as God, Yahweh, or Allah. This belief was based on the authority of Genesis, the Qur'an, and other ancient histories, which were held to be historically accurate and no systematic or scientific inquiry was made into the validity of the text.

Islamic scholars preserved ancient Greek texts and developed their ideas, leading to the Renaissance which brought a questioning of biblical cosmology. With the Enlightenment a variety of scientific and philosophical movements challenged traditional viewpoints in Europe and the Americas. Natural history developed with the aim of understanding God's plan, but found contradictions which in revolutionary France were interpreted as science supporting evolution. Elsewhere, particularly in England, clerical naturalists sought explanations compatible with interpretations of biblical texts, anticipating many later creationist arguments.

While an ancient earth became widely accepted, Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection directly challenged belief in God's involvement in creating species, and in reaction Creationism arose as a distinct movement aiming to justify and reassert the literal accuracy of sacred texts, particularly the words of Genesis.

The history of creationism has relevance to the creation-evolution controversy. Proponents of creationism claim that it has a rich heritage grounded in ancient recorded histories and consistent with scientific observation, whereas opponents, particularly of what they regard as the pseudosciences of creation science and intelligent design, claim that those are a modern reactionary movement against science.

Early history

Biblical Creationism stems from the ancient Hebrew text of Genesis (see creation according to Genesis), purporting it to be a historical document recording God's creation of the World in six days, and resting on the seventh. According to the genealogies recorded in the Bible, this was calculated to have occurred approximately 4000 BC. With the Jewish diaspora, and the spread of Christianity throughout Europe between the 1st century and the 3rd century, creation beliefs displaced many Greco-Roman naturalistic philosophies such as Atomism and various pagan beliefs.

According to biblically-literal creation beliefs, 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.

Greek and Roman times

c. 45 BC – Cicero (106 BC – 43 BC) made a teleological argument, anticipating the watchmaker analogy, in De natura deorum, ii. 34

When you see a sundial or a water-clock, you see that it tells the time by design and not by chance. How then can you imagine that the universe as a whole is devoid of purpose and intelligence, when it embraces everything, including these artifacts themselves and their artificers? (Gjertsen 1989, p. 199, quoted by Dennett 1995, p. 29)

93 AD – Josephus completed Antiquities of the Jews, in which he gave an account of Creation, the Fall, Antediluvian civilization, the Deluge, the history of Israel, and Jesus based on a synthesis of a number of sources and traditions, including The Bible, ancient Egyptian and Greek writings, and other ancient traditions.

c. 170 – Theophilus of Antioch wrote in defense of creation beliefs and a relatively young Earth:

"There are not myriads of myriads of years, even though Plato said such a period had elapsed between the deluge and his own time, . . . The world is not uncreated nor is there spontaneous production of everything, as Pythagoras and the others have babbled; instead the world is created and is providentially governed by the God who made everything. And the whole period of time and the years can be demonstrated to those who wish to learn the truth. . . . The total number of years from the creation of the world is 5,695.29 ... If some period has escaped our notice, says 50 or 100 or even 200 years, at any rate it is not myriads, or thousands of years as it was for Plato . . . and the rest of those who wrote falsehoods. It may be that we do not know the exact total of all the years simply because the additional months and days are not recorded in the sacred books."

170 – Galen, Stoic Roman physician wrote against creation beliefs in On the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body, 11.14:

It is precisely this point in which our own opinion and that of Plato and of the other Greeks who follow the right method in natural science differ from the position taken up by Moses. For the latter it seems enough to say that God simply willed the arrangement of matter and it was presently arranged in due order; for he believes everything to be possible with God, even should he wish to make a bull or a horse out of ashes. We, however, do not hold this; we say that certain things are impossible by nature and that God does not even attempt such things at all but that he [sic] chooses the best out of the possibility of becoming.

St. Augustine of Hippo

415 – Saint Augustine wrote The Literal Meaning of Genesis in which he argued that Genesis should be interpreted as God forming the Earth and life from pre-existing matter and allowed for an allegorical interpretation of the first chapter of Genesis. For example: he argues that the six-day structure of creation presented in the book of Genesis represents a logical framework, rather than the passage of time in a physical way. On the other hand, Augustine called for a historical view of the remainder of the history recorded in Genesis, including the creation of Adam and Eve, and the Flood. Apart from his specific views, Augustine recognizes that the interpretation of the creation story is difficult, and remarks that Christians should be willing to change their minds about it as new information comes up. He also warned believers not to rashly interpret things literally that might be allegorical, as it would discredit the faith. [3]

c. 426 – Augustine completes City of God, in which he wrote:

"Some hold the same opinion regarding men that they hold regarding the world itself, that they have always been . . . . And when they are asked, how, . . . they reply that most, if not all lands, were so desolated at intervals by fire and flood, that men were greatly reduced in numbers, and . . . thus there was at intervals a new beginning made. . . . But they say what they think, not what they know. They are deceived . . . by those highly mendacious documents which profess to give the history of many thousand years, though reckoning by the sacred writings, we find that not 6,000 years have yet passed."

610 - 632 – Muhammad reports receiving the Qur'an by divine revelation. The Qur'an holds many of the core concepts of creationism, including a 6-day creation, Adam and Eve, Enoch, and Noah's ark, but also provides some details absent from Genesis, including reference to a fourth son of Noah who chose not to enter the ark. Through Islam, creation beliefs and monotheism replace paganism among the Arabs.

Renaissance to Darwin

The Renaissance starting in the 14th century saw the establishment of protoscience that eventually became modern science. This was a period of great social change. European colonization of the Americas was driven by people fleeing from religious persecution. The later Enlightenment (beginning in the 17th century) saw improvements in communications and economics (see Industrial Revolution) lead to advances in science and improved education. 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 idea of Heliocentrism was proposed in the 16th century and established by Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler and 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 Archbishop of Armagh, James Ussher, (1581 - 1656) published a monumental history of the world from creation to 70 A.D. He used the recorded genealogies and ages in the bible to derive what is commonly known as the Ussher-Lightfoot Calendar. This calculated a date for Creation at 4004 BC. The calendar was widely accepted.

The English naturalist John Ray (29 November 1627 - 17 January 1705), who wrote his name as John Wray until 1670, is sometimes referred to as the father of English natural history. As well as collecting and classifying plants, he wrote two books entitled The Wisdom of God manifested in the Works of the Creation (1691), and Miscellaneous Discourses concerning the Dissolution and Changes of the World (1692) which included essays on The Primitive Chaos and Creation of the World, The General Deluge, its Causes and Effects, and The Dissolution of the World and Future Conflagrations. In The Wisdom of God he included many of the familiar examples of purposive adaptation and design in nature (the teleological argument), such as the structure of the eye, the hollowness of the bones, the camel's stomach and the hedgehog's armor.

In 1696, William Whiston published A New Theory of the Earth, in which he proposed an account of the creation of the world. He grounded his argument in the following three Postulata:

1) The obvious or literal sense of scripture is the true and real one, where no evidence can be given to the contrary.

2) That which is clearly accountable in a natural way, is not, without reason to be ascribed to a miraculous power.

3) What ancient tradition asserts of the constitution of nature, or of the origin and primitive states of the world, is to be allowed for true, where ‘tis fully agreeable to scripture, reason, and philosophy.

Whiston was the first to propose that the global flood was caused by the water in the tail of a comet.

The English divine William Derham (26 November 1657 - 5 April 1735) published his Artificial Clockmaker in 1696 and Physico-Theology in 1713. These books were teleological arguments for the being and attributes of God, and were used by Paley nearly a century later.

The Watchmaker analogy was put by Bernard Nieuwentyt (1730) and referred to several times by Paley. A charge of wholesale plagiarism from this book was brought against Paley in the Athenaeum for 1848, but the famous illustration of the watch was not peculiar to Nieuwentyt, and had been appropriated by many others before Paley.

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 what later became Old Earth creationism as a result.

David Hume (26 April 1711 - 25 August 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.

Erasmus Darwin published his Zoönomia between 1794 and 1796 foreshadowing Lamarck's ideas on evolution, and even suggesting "that all warm-blooded animals have arisen from one living filament, which the great First Cause endued with animality ... possessing the faculty of continuing to improve by its own inherent activity, and of delivering down these improvements by generation to its posterity".

William Paley (1743 - 1805) proponent of the Watchmaker analogy, a variant of the teleological argument

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 paleontology, led by William Smith (1769 - 1839) saw the recording of the first fossil records which showed the transmutation of species. Then Jean-Baptiste Lamarck proposed in his Philosophie Zoologique of 1809 a theory of evolution, later known as Lamarckism, by which traits that were "needed" were passed on.

From 1830 to 1833, the geologist and clergyman Sir Charles Lyell released a three volume publication called Principles of Geology which developed Hutton's ideas of uniformitarianism, and in the second volume set out a gradualist variation of creation beliefs in which each species had its "centre of creation" and was designed for the habitat, but would go extinct when the habitat changed. John Herschel supported this gradualist view and wrote to Lyell urging a search for natural laws underlying the "mystery of mysteries" of how species formed.

The official eight Bridgewater Treatises "On the Power, Wisdom and Goodness of God, as manifested in the Creation" included the Reverend William Buckland's 1836 Geology and Mineralogy considered with reference to Natural Theology setting out the logic of day-age, gap theory, and theistic evolution. The computing pioneer Charles Babbage then published his unofficial Ninth Bridgewater Treatise in 1837, putting forward the thesis that God had the omnipotence and foresight to create as a divine legislator, making laws (or programs) which then produced species at the appropriate times, rather than continually interfering with ad hoc miracles each time a new species was required.

By 1836 the anatomist Richard Owen had theories influenced by Johannes Peter Müller that living matter had an "organising energy", a life-force that directed the growth of tissues and also determined the lifespan of the individual and of the species. In the 1850s Owen developed ideas of "archetypes" in the Divine mind producing a sequence of species in "ordained continuous becoming" in which new species appeared at birth.

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 incorporate parts of his arguments.

Herbert Spencer, (1820 - 1903) was an English philosopher who developed ideas about the unifying concept of evolution across the natural and social sciences. Spencer is the first to develop a theory of cultural evolution and is considered by some to be the father of Social Darwinism. It is also he and not Darwin who coined the phrase survival of the fittest. Much of the positivist ideas of progress that dominated the social science philosophy of Spencer and subsequent Social Darwinists has been criticized by present-day sociologists, but such ideas continue to be one of the major critiques made by creationists against evolution in general, even though strict biological evolution does not depend on it nor offer any type of endorsement of it or its derivative philosophies such as eugenics.

Darwin

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

In the 1860s, the concept of variation through natural selection first came to be widely understood. Charles Darwin (1809 - 1882) published 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. Even in his unpublished 1842 "pencil sketch" of his theory Darwin was conscious of explaining commonplace mysteries that "can only be viewed by the Creationist as ultimate and inexplicable facts", and anticipated the satire of Intelligent Falling by comparing Creationist belief in separate creation of every species with belief that "the planets revolve in their present courses not from one law of gravity but from distinct volition of Creator."

Darwin's book ignited a furious controversy in Victorian Britain, as it posed fundamental questions about the relationship between religion and science. Though Origin did not explicitly deal with human evolution, the jump was one both supporters and opponents of the theory immediately made, and the idea that man was simply an animal (common descent) who had evolved a particular set of characteristics — rather than a spiritual being created by God — proved to be one of the most divisive notions of the 19th century. 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. Both sides claimed victory, then the controversy was overshadowed by the even greater theological furore over the publication of Essays and Reviews questioning whether miracles were atheistic.

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) later both argued for special roles for a creator when applying the theory to humans.

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 and the solar system at between 20 million and 400 million years, i.e. between ~3,000 and ~70,000 times Ussher's value. This came as a blow to Darwin's anticipated timescale, though the idea of an ancient Earth was generally accepted without much controversy. Darwin and Huxley, while not accepting the timing, said it merely implied faster evolution. 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. A way to measure the age of the universe would be discovered by Edwin Hubble in the 1930s, but due to observational constraints, an accurate measurement of the Hubble constant would not be forthcoming until the late 1990s, giving an age of the universe of approximately 14 billion years or some ~2,000,000 times Ussher's value.

The Swiss-American paleontologist Louis Agassiz (1807 - 1873) opposed evolution. He believed that there had been a series of catastrophes with divine re-creations, evidence of which could be seen in rock fossils. Catastrophism would remain a major paradigm in geology until it was replaced by new models which allowed for both cataclysms (such as meteor strikes) and gradualist patterns (such as ice ages) to explain observed geologic phenomena.

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. But by no means all orthodox Presbyterians were opposed to evolution as a possible method of the Divine procedure. DrCharles Hodge of Princeton Seminary objected to the atheism he considered inplied in the naturalistic explanation but both he and Dr B.B.Warfield were open to its possibility/probability within limits.

Darwin died in 1882, and immediately there were rumors that he had repented and accepted God on his deathbed, spread by Lady Elizabeth Hope (1842 - 1922). The Lady Hope story is almost certainly false, and it is unlikely that she visited Darwin as she claimed.

It was during the debates of the 1870s and 1880s that the term "creationism" and "creationist" began to be widely used for the first time to refer to those who believed that God had some direct role in the creation of the different species of the Earth (the term had been used previously for the belief that God had created each person with a soul).

Differing beliefs

By now, the main positions regarding evolution had been established. Generally, the advent of evolution theory divided people into two main camps: those who opposed theories of evolution, and those who accepted or promoted such theories.

Those opposed to theories of evolution:

• 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, who accepted the uniformitarian age of the Earth and interpreted Genesis in various ways such as Catastrophism in order to account for that.
• Progressive Creationists, who accepted that species had changed or evolved and also believed that the process was continuously guided by God, although they varied as to how the process operated. Early examples include Richard Owen's "continuous ordained becoming" and Charles Lyell's "centres of creation" (though Lyell came to support Darwin, he never completely lost his faith in continuing divine intervention).

Those accepting or promoting theories of evolution, whether through Darwinian natural selection or through Lamarckian acquired characteristics:

• Evolutionary creationists/Theistic evolutionists who accepted or promoted naturalistic evolution while continuing to believe in God (or Gods). This group included some liberal Anglicans (see Essays and Reviews), Unitarians, Quakers and Deists, who took the approach that God laid down laws which allowed species to evolve naturally.
• Agnostics who accepted or promoted naturalistic evolution without believing or disbelieving in God (or Gods). The term was coined by Huxley in the context of arguments about evolution, and Darwin took this position.
• Atheists who considered that belief in God was unreasonable and 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 tend to subscribe to an intermediate position and tend not to be dogmatic.

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 the debate may include scientific arguments, the controversy involves deep philosophical and religious beliefs.

Early 20th century

The period immediately after Darwin's death in 1882 is known as the Eclipse of Darwinism, where Darwinian natural selection was considered inadequate by the scientific community. Evolution itself was assumed, but the mechanism of how it happened was in considerable debate, and none had anything near to a consensus. Among these theories were neo-Lamarckism (which merged certain aspects of Lamarck's theory of acquired characteristics with certain aspects of Darwinian evolution), orthogenesis ("straight-line" evolution, which talked about evolution towards a specific goal by forces within the organism), and the discontinuous variation of Mendelism and Hugo De Vries' mutation theory. Some of these alternative theories, in particular neo-Lamarckism and orthogenesis, allowed more easily for an interpretation of the intervention of God, which appealed to many scientists at the time. By the first decades of the 20th century, the debate had become generally one between continuous-variation biometricians and discontinuous-variety Mendelians. By the 1930s and 1940s, though, they were combined into the modern evolutionary synthesis, which soon became the dominant model in the scientific community.

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 principles 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. [4] Yet not all conservatives held that a proper reading of Genesis required belief in a young earth.

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." (Source needed)

During the First World War, horrors committed by Germans, who were citizens of one of the most scientifically advanced countries in the World, caused Bryan to state "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.

In 1922, William Jennings Bryan published In His Image[5], in which he argued that Darwinism was both irrational and immoral. On the former point, he pointed to examples such as the eye, which he argued could not be explained by Darwinian evolution. On the latter point, he argued that Darwinism advocated the policy of "scientific breeding" or eugenics, by which the strong were to weed out the weak, a belief which directly contradicts the Christian doctrine of charity to the helpless.

In 1924, Clarence Darrow defended Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb on the charge of kidnapping and killing Bobby Franks; his defense included an argument that "this terrible crime was inherent in his organism, and it came from some ancestor".

In 1925, G.K. Chesterton published The Everlasting Man[6], in which he developed and articulated many creationist ideas and criticisms of the philosophical underpinnings and perceived logical flaws of evolution.

H. L. Mencken, whose nationally published coverage of the Scopes Trial referred to the town's creationist inhabitants as "yokels" and "morons", referred to assisting counsel for the prosecution as a "buffoon" and his speeches as "theologic bilge," while referring to the defense as "eloquent" and "magnificent."]]

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 replace 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." [7] 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 paleontology in the 1940s. Some creationists, however, objected to his supposed 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 creationist explanation for the Holocaust is that it 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 cultural evolutionary theory, though many biologists had long opposed it. Although eugenics was rejected by other nations after the war, the memory of it did not quickly fade, and professional scientists sought to distance themselves from it and other racial ideologies associated with the Nazis. After the war, the United States entered the Cold War with the communist Soviet Union. Communism had as one of its principles atheism (though most atheists did not support communism). 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.

1959 saw the hundredth anniversary of the publication of The Origin of Species and this sparked renewed public interest in evolutionary biology. Since it takes about 20 years for ideas to go from the forefront of science to being taught in science classes, the modern evolutionary synthesis was first properly introduced into the classroom.

The Genesis Flood

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. This clause lays out the Separation of church and state in the United States and states that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or restricting the free exercise thereof."

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." [8].

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 that evolution was not incompatible with a belief in God nor a belief in the accuracy of scriptures.

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

In 1975 in Daniel v. Waters, the U.S. Sixth Circuit of Appeals struck down Tennessee's "equal time" bill.

In 1978 the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy developed the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy which denies "that scientific hypotheses about earth history may properly be used to overturn the teaching of Scripture on creation and the flood."

In 1980, Walt Brown became director of the Center for Scientific Creation.

In 1981 the San Diego based fundamentalist group the Creation Science Research Centre claimed, in a trial dubbed the "Monkey Trial Replay", that teaching evolution as the sole theory of development violated the rights of children who believed in biblical creation. In his opening statement for the group lawyer Richard Turner argued:

It is not a showdown at high noon between creation and evolution. It is not religion versus science. We are not trying to sneak the Bible into the classroom, or any other religious doctrine. The real issue here is that of religious freedom under the United States Constitution.

Turner went on to explain that the plaintiffs were seeking protection for the belief that "God created man as man, not as a blob". The Times of 7 March, 1981 reported that some were of the opinion that the case was "a signal of things to come, with more and more fundamentalist groups trying to flex their not inconsiderable influence in schools across the country". At the same time Frank D. White, the Governor of Arkansas signed a Bill requiring that creation science and the theory of evolution be given equal weight in schools. Although fifteen states attempted to introduce such Bills around this time, only that in Arkansas made it into law. Following hearings in Little Rock the law was overturned by Judge William Overton early in 1982, just as a similar (and equally unsuccessful) Bills were approved by legislators in Mississippi and Louisiana.

Carl Baugh established the Creation Evidence Museum in Glen Rose, Texas in 1984. Kent Hovind's Young Earth Creationist ministry was founded in 1989.

Answers In Creation was established in 2003 to provide answers to young earth creation organizations. They claim that the young earth position is unscientific, and through their website they claim to provide proof against young earth creation science. Although they are anti-young earth, they promote Christianity by endorsing old earth creationism.

Intelligent design

The 1990s saw the rise of intelligent design, an approach which looks for evidence that intelligent intervention was necessary for evolution and in other ways seeks to create doubt about the validity and feasibility of naturalistic, unguided evolution.

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. The court further ruled that so-called "creation science" was simply creationism.

The reaction of part of the creationist movement was to argue that there was scientific evidence of an unspecified "intelligent designer". A creationist textbook Of Pandas and People which critiqued evolutionary biology without mentioning God, appeared in 1989.

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 and New Zealand to the United States. [9] It subsequently expanded into the United Kingdom, Canada, and South Africa, but remains a small movement in the latter three nations.

1994 in Peloza v. Capistrano School District another court case was decided against a teacher who claimed that his First Amendment right to free exercise of religion was violated by the school district's requirement to teach evolution.

Darwin's Black Box

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. Aguillard. The Discovery Institute rejects the term creationism. [10]

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." [11]

In October 1999 the Michael Polanyi Center was founded in the science faculty of Baylor University, a Baptist college, to study intelligent design. A year later was disbanded amidst faculty complaints that the center had been established without consulting them, and would cause the school to be associated with pseudoscience.

In December 2001, the United States Congress passed the No Child Left Behind Act, which contained the following statement of policy, called the Santorum Amendment, authored by Johnson:

"The Conferees recognize that a quality scientific education should prepare students to distinguish the data and testable theories of science from religious or philosophical claims that are made in the name of science. Where topics are taught that may generate controversy (such as biological evolution), the curriculum should help students to understand the full range of scientific views that exist, why such topics may generate controversy, and how scientific discoveries can profoundly affect society." [12]

In December 2001, Dembski established the International Society for Complexity, Information and Design.

In 2004 Ohio adopted education standards sympathetic to Intelligent Design.

In May 2005, the Kansas school board held the Kansas evolution hearings. The court-style hearings were attended by Intelligent Design advocates but not by mainstream scientists, who accused it of being a kangaroo court. The hearings concluded that evolution is "an unproven, often disproven theory".

In 2005, the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania ruled on the case of Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District that the school board's policy promoting Intelligent Design violated the state constitution and that Intelligent Design is not scientific. As such, the ruling barred the teaching of Intelligent Design in public school science classrooms.

Around the same time as the Kiztmiller ruling, many state legislators considered bills supporting the teaching of Intelligent Design.

References

• Behe, M.J. (1996) Darwin's Black Box ISBN 0-684-83493-6
• Bowler, P.J. (1989) Evolution: The History of an Idea, esp. chapter 9, "The Eclipse of Darwinism".
• Clark, H.W. (1929) Back to Creationism.
• Darwin, C.R. (1859) The Origin of Species
• Darwin, C.R. (1871) The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex
• Dobzhansky, T.G. (1973) Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution
• Gosse, P.H. (1857) Omphalos: Untying the Geological Knot
• Hutton, J. (1785) Theory of the Earth
• Johnson, P.E. (1991) Darwin on Trial ISBN 0-8308-1758-1
• Paley, Wm (1802) Natural Theology
• Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield Evolution, Science & Scripture (Baker 2000) ed. Mark Noll & David N. Livingstone

External links

• A simple page examining the origin of the Doctrine of Creation within the Christian church
• a discussion of some topics on the history of creationism
• A brief history of creationism from the Middle Ages to "Creation Science" NCSE
• Church of the FSM - Open letter to kansas school board
• History of creationism on talk.origins