Katashina, Gunma and History of creationism: Difference between pages

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Creationism stems from the ancient Hebrew text of Genesis (see creation according to Genesis), and purporting to be a historical document recording God's creation of the World in six days, and resting on the seventh.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. Those original animals (and the humans at that time, who Genesis states lived between 600 and 900 years) are believed to have had a significantly superior genetic makeup than current species. 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 species. Fossils are mostly explained as animals who lived before the flood and were buried by rapid sedimentation and liquefaction.

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.

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 assumption 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.

In 1802 William Paley (1743 — 1805), published Natural Theology, arguing for the existence of God from design.

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 assumption 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.

Post-Darwinian

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. 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, Darwin's self-appointed "bulldog", debated evolution with "Soapy Sam" Wilberforce, the Bishop of Oxford.

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 illusion of old age.

In 1901 the work of an Austrian monk Gregor Mendel was rediscovered, providing a basis for heredity. However in the period known as the Eclipse of Darwinism, the scientific community was in a muddle until the modern evolutionary synthesis of the 1930s. During this period, the theory of orthogenetic (or straight-line) evolution, was dominant within the scientific community. Orthogenesis held that small changes took place through Darwinian variation and natural selection, but large changes took place through the creative act of God.

In the late 1930s, orthogenesis was challenged by Theodosius Dobzhansky, who equated the large changes and small changes (in terms coined by his orthogenetic mentor, "microevolution" and "macroevolution," which Dobzhansky subsequently brought to the English language) into the modern evolutionary synthesis.

The modern evolutionary synthesis continued to gain ground, and by the time of the Williams Revolution in the 1960s, evolution had been accepted by the scientific community and most Europeans as the most reasonable, if not the only reasonable, explanation for the origins of life. Some creationists, however, object to the equation of microevolution and macroevolution, acknowledging the former but denying the latter, and continue to do so to this day.

In the late 1970s, Stephen 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.

Creationists viewed it as an unparsimonious and pseudoscientific attempt to explain the scarcity of transitional fossils by a mechanism even less reasonable than gradualism itself. The claim of creation was that microevolution took place, but macroevolution was both impossible and without evidence in the fossil record. They argued that punctuated equilibrium placed the disputed phenomenon of macroevolution outside the realm of empirical science by claiming it occured only sporadically, leaving few traces. Creationists also argued that Gould's proposed mechanism defeats itself, as it holds that large developments take place in limited gene pools, when in fact limited gene pools lead to inbreeding and the subsequent deterioration of a species, not its development. 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.

United States

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. Generally, the advent of evolution divided people into three camps:

• Atheists who ascribed to naturalistic evolution, concluded that belief in God was unreasonable, from the idea that the development of life could be explained naturalistically, amongsth other reasons.
• Evolutionary Creationists, who ascribed to naturalistic evolution, concluding that because evolution was essentially proven, the Bible contained factual, though not religious, errors.
• 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.

In reality, there is a continuum of creationist viewpoints from young Earth Creationist to scientific creationists, with each accepting and rejecting different aspects of science.

In particular, the original formulation of American fundamentalist creationist beliefs can be traced to the Niagara Bible Conference in 1878. In 1910, the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church distilled these into what were known as the "five fundamentals", one of which was the inerrancy of the Scriptures, including the Genesis account of creation.[1]

Atheists composed an analogous document in 1933, called the Humanist Manifesto, which spoke of humanism as a new "religion", meant to transcend and replace previous, deity-based religions. The document outlines 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]

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.

• Atheists looked back on the horrors of a thousand years of religious wars and inquisition in Europe, saw creationism as an unscientific attempt to force religious dogmatism on people, and saw evolution as a means by which science and reason could replace religious dogmatism.
• Creationists looked to the horrors of Nazism, Communism, and Nihilism, which were seen to be based on certain philosophical implications of evolution, saw evolution as an unscientific attempt to force atheism on people, and saw creation as a means by which faith in God might be preserved.

As a result of these deep feelings on the topic, some elements of both sides have had a tendency to attempt to exclude the other from scientific and educational discourse, and treat the issue as primarily ideological, rather than simply scientific.

20th century events

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."

In the United States, the 20th century was marked by controversy over the teaching of evolution and creationism public education. (see Creation and evolution in public education). The scientific community has come to ascribe overwhelmingly to evolution, and Creation science remains a small minority movement among scientists. However, creationism of one form or another remains prevalent among the general population.

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, but the case was later dismissed on a technicality.

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 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.

In 1987 in the US Supreme Court again ruled, this time in Edwards v. Aguillard, that requiring the teaching of creation everytime 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 1994, Answers in Genesis, another creationist research organization, was founded in Australia. [4]

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.

References

Cahill, Thomas, How the Irish Saved Civilization.

External links

• a discussion of some topics on the history of creationism
• A brief history of creationism from From the Middle Ages to "Creation Science" NCSE