History of creationism
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
Christianity spread and established through Europe between the 1st century and the 3rd century, displacing Greco-Roman naturalistic philosophies such as Atomism, and various pagan beliefs. The creation belief of that religion was derived from the book of Genesis (see creation according to Genesis), an ancient Hebrew document purporting to be historical which holds that God created the World in six days, and rested on the seventh.
According to 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. Before the Flood, two of each unclean animal and seven of each clean animal were taken on board the ark. After the flood, those original animals were released, and they differentiated and developed over time into the present variety of species. Fossils are explained as animals who lived before the flood and were buried by rapid sedimentation, and either died out before the flood, or soon after.
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. [Nicolaus Copernicus]] proposed the idea of heliocentricism in the 16th century.
In 1650 James Ussher, Achbishop of Armagh, published a work and thus derived the Ussher-Lightfoot Calendar which calculated a date for Creation from the Bible at 4004 BC. His contemporaries more-or-less agreed with him.
Carolus Linnaeus (1707 — 1778) established a system of classification of species by similarity and thus laid the groundwork for the idea of common descent.
In 1802 William Paley published Natural Theology or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity collected from the Appearances of Nature, arguing for the existence of God through design.
Advances in palaeontology, led by William Smith saw the recording of the first fossil records which showed the transmutation of species. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744 — 1829) proposed a theory of evolution by the inheritance of acquired characteristics that were "needed".
In 1862, the Glaswegian physicist William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin) published calculations 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
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In the 1860s, the concept of variation and natural selection came to be first understood. Charles Darwin 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.
In 1901 the work of an Austrian monk Gregor Mendel was rediscovered and eventually this led to the modern evolutionary synthesis of Mendelian genetics and natural selection in the 1930s. 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.
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
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 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 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, a second 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.
References
Cahill, Thomas, How the Irish Saved Civilization.