When was creationism invented

Also important for the Adventists and for fellow travelers, that is people who think that Armageddon is on its way, is the balancing and complementary early phenomenon of a world-wide flood. This, as we shall see, was to become a major theme in twentieth-century Cold War times. Second, there was the released energy of evangelicals referring generically to Protestants whose faith was tied to the Bible, taken rather literally as they succeeded in their attempts to prohibit liquor in the United States.

Flushed from one victory, they looked for other fields to conquer. Third there was the spread of public education, and more children being exposed to evolutionary ideas, bringing on a Creationist reaction. Fourth, there were new evangelical currents afloat, especially the tracts the Fundamentals — a series of evangelical publications, conceived in by California businessman Lyman Stewart, the founder of Union Oil and a devout Presbyterian — that gave the literalist movement its name.

And fifth, there was the identification of evolution — Darwinism particularly — with the militaristic aspects of Social Darwinism, especially the Social Darwinism supposed embraced by the Germans in the First World War Larson ; Ruse a. Matters descended to the farcical when, denied the opportunity to introduce his own science witnesses, Darrow put on the stand the prosecutor Bryan.

This conviction was overturned on a technicality on appeal, but there were no more prosecutions, even though the Tennessee law remained on the books for another forty years. In the s, the Scopes trial became the basis of a famous play and then movie, Inherit the Wind.

In fact, Bryan in respects was an odd figure to be defending the Tennessee law. He thought that the days of Creation are long periods of time, and he had little sympathy for eschatological speculations about Armageddon and so forth. It is quite possible that, humans apart, he accepted some form of evolution. His objections to Darwinism were more social than theological.

The First World War, with many justifying violence in the name of evolutionary biology, confirmed his suspicions. It is generally agreed that Inherit the Wind is using history as a vehicle to explore and condemn McCarthy-like attacks on uncomfortably new or dissenting-type figures in American society. After the Scopes Trial, general agreement is that the Creationism movement had peaked and declined quite dramatically and quickly.

Yet, it and related anti-evolution activity did have its lasting effects. Text-book manufacturers increasingly took evolution — Darwinism especially — out of their books, so that schoolchildren got less and less exposure to the ideas anyway. Whatever battles the evolutionists may have thought they had won in the court of popular opinion, in the trenches of the classroom they were losing the war badly. Things started to move again in the late s. It was then that, thanks to Sputnik, the Russians so effectively demonstrated their superiority in rocketry with its implications for the arms race of the Cold War , and America realized with a shudder how ineffective was its science training of its young.

Characteristically, the country did something immediate and effective about this, namely pouring money into the production of new science texts.

In this way, with class adoption, the Federal Government could have a strong impact and yet get around the problem that education tends to be under the tight control of individual states. The new biology texts gave full scope to evolution — to Darwinism — and with this the Creationism controversy again flared right up.

Children were learning these dreadful doctrines in schools, and something had to be done Ruse ed. Fortunately for the literalist, help was at hand. A biblical scholar, John C. Whitcomb, and a hydraulic engineer, Henry M. Following in the tradition of earlier writers, especially those from Seventh-day Adventism, they argued that every bit of the Biblical story of creation given in the early chapters of Genesis is supported fully by the best of modern science. Six days of twenty-four hours, organisms arriving miraculously, humans last, and sometime thereafter a massive world-wide flood that wiped most organisms off the face of the earth — or rather, dumped their carcasses in the mud as the waters receded.

At the same time, Whitcomb and Morris argued that the case for evolution fails dismally. They introduced or revived a number of arguments that have become standard parts of the Creationist repertoire against evolution.

Let us look at a number of these arguments, together with the counter-arguments that evolutionists make in response. First, the Creationists argue that at best evolution is only a theory and not a fact, and that theories should never be taken as gospel if one might be permitted a metaphor. They claim that the very language of evolutionists themselves show that their ideas are on shaky grounds. There is nothing iffy about the Copernican heliocentric theory.

It is true. It is a fact. Evolutionists argue that the same is the case with evolution. When talking about the theory of evolution, one is talking about a body of laws. In particular, if one is following the ideas of Charles Darwin, one is arguing that population pressures lead to a struggle for existence, this then entails a natural selection of favored forms, and evolution through shared descent is the end result.

This is a body of general statements about life, since the s given in a formal version using mathematics with deductive inferences between steps. In other words, we have a body of laws, and hence a theory in the first sense just given.

There is no implication here that the theory is iffy, that is in the second sense just given. We are not necessarily talking about something inherently unreliable. Of course, there are going to be additions and revisions, for instance the possibility of much greater hybridization than someone like Darwin realized, but that is another matter Quammen They reply: Those that survive! Hence, natural selection reduces to the tautology that those that survive are those that survive.

Not a real claim of science at all. To which evolutionists respond that this is a sleight of hand, showing ignorance of what is genuinely at stake. Some of our would-be ancestors lived and had babies and others did not. There was a differential reproduction. This is certainly not a mere truism.

It could be that everyone had the same number of children. It could also be that there is no difference overall between the successful and the unsuccessful. This too is denied by natural selection. To say that something is the fitter or fittest is to say that it has certain characteristics what biologists call adaptations that other organisms do not have, and that on average one expects the fitter to succeed.

But there is no guarantee that this must be so or that it will always happen. An earthquake could wipe out everyone, fit and unfit. Before discussing the third argument Creationists level against evolution, it is worth pausing over this second one.

Most if not all professional evolutionists argue that sometimes natural selection is not a significant causal factor. In this sense, it is false that selection is something that by definition is and always is the reason for lasting change. The fittest do not always win. It cannot be a tautology. Although, at first, this was embraced enthusiastically Dobzhansky , it soon became clear that at the gross physical phenotypic level it is at most minor Coyne, Barton, and Turelli However at the level of the gene genotype , it is still thought very important.

Indeed, it is a powerful tool in discovering the exact dates of key evolutionary events, especially those involving speciation Ayala Moreover, as we shall see in a moment, somewhat paradoxically, as Creationism has evolved!

Thus can one explain the diversity of life on earth — it evolved since leaving the Ark, which contained only generic kinds.

For all its supposed faults, there is a better discussion of natural selection at the Creationist museum in Kentucky than in the Field Museum in Chicago, miles north.

The bar on macroevolution remains absolute. Third, Creationists point out that modern evolutionary theory asserts that the raw building blocks of evolution, the genetic mutations, are random. But this means that there are minimal chances of evolution producing something that works as well and efficiently as an organism, with all of the functioning parts in place.

A monkey typing letters does so randomly. It could never in a million years in a billion, billion, billion… years type the works of Shakespeare. The Creationists say that same is true of evolution and organisms, given the randomness of mutation.

To which evolutionists reply that this may all be well and true of the monkey, but in the case of evolution things are rather different. If a mutation works, then it is kept and then built upon, until the next good mutation comes along. This shrinks considerably the odds of evolution producing organisms, even though the appearance of mutation is random.

Suppose you take just one phrase from Shakespeare. Twenty-six the number of letters, more if you include capitals and gaps and punctuation to the power of the number of spaces.

Dawkins has a good discussion of these issues. Rather is meant that mutations do not occur according to need. Suppose a new disease appears. Evolutionary theory does not guarantee that a new, life-protecting mutation will occur to order. Fourth in the litany of Creationist complaints, there is a perennial favourite based on paleontology. Creationists agree that the fossil record is sequential, fish to primates moving upwards, but argue that this is the result of the sorting effect of the Flood.

Primates are above dinosaurs, for example, because primates are more agile and moved further up the mountain before being caught and drowning.

They also argue, however, that the fossil record ought to be continuous if evolution occurred, but in real life there are many gaps between different form — jumps from one kind of organism to another. Apes to humans would be a case in point. This spells Creation not evolution.

To which the response comes that on the one hand one expects such gaps. Fossilization is an uncommon occurrence — most dead bodies get eaten straight away or just rot — and the wonder is that we have what we do have. On the other hand argue evolutionists, the record is not that gappy.

There are lots of good sequences — lines of fossils with little difference between adjacent forms, from the amphibians to the mammals for example, or in more detail the evolution of the horse from Eohippus on five toes to the modern horse on one toe. Moreover, in refutation of Creationism, we do not find fossils out of order as you might expect after a flood.

For all that Creationists sometimes claim otherwise, humans are never found down with the dinosaurs. Those brutes of old expired long before we appeared on the scene and the fossil record confirms this.

Fifth, Creationists argue that physics disproves evolution. The second law of thermodynamics claims that things always run down — entropy increases, to use the technical language.

Energy gets used and converted eventually into heat, and cannot be of further service. But organisms clearly keep going and seem to defy the law.

This would be impossible simply given evolution. The second law rules out the blind evolution meaning change without direct divine guidance of organisms from the initial simple blobs up to the complex higher organisms like humans. There must therefore have been a non-natural, miraculous intervention to produce functioning life.

To which argument the response of evolutionists is that the second law does indeed say that things are running down, but it does not deny that isolated pockets of the universe might reverse the trend for a short while by using energy from elsewhere.

And this is what happens on planet Earth. We use the energy from the sun to keep evolving for a while. Eventually the sun will go out and life will become extinct. The second law will win eventually, but not just yet. Sixth, and let us make this the final Creationist objection, it is said that humans simply cannot be explained by blind law that is, unguided law , especially not by blind evolutionary laws.

They must have been created. To which the response is that it is mere arbitrary supposition to believe that humans are that exceptional. In fact, today the fossil record for humans is strong — we evolved over the past four million years from small creatures of half our height, who had small brains and who walked upright but not as well as we.

There is lots of fossil proof of these beings known as Australopithecus afarensis. Perhaps it is true that we humans are special, in that as Christians claim we uniquely have immortal souls, but this is a religious claim. It is not a claim of science, and hence evolution should not be faulted for not explaining souls.

There is of course a lot more to be found out about human evolution, but this is the nature of science. No branch of science has all of the answers. The real question is whether the branch of science keeps the answers coming in, and evolutionists claim that this is certainly true of their branch of science.

Before moving on historically, it is worthwhile to stop for a moment and consider aspects of Creationism, in what one might term the cultural context.

First, as a populist movement, driven as much by social factors — a sense of alienation from the modern world — one would expect to find that cultural changes in society would be reflected in Creationist beliefs. This is indeed so. Take, above all, the question of racial issues and relationships. In the middle of the nineteenth century in the South, biblical literalism was very popular because it was thought to justify slavery Noll Even though one can read the Christian message as being strongly against slavery — the Sermon on the Mount hardly recommends making people into the property of others — the Bible elsewhere seems to endorse slavery.

Remember, when the escaped slave came to Saint Paul, the apostle told him to return to his master and to obey him. Remnants of this kind of thinking persisted in Creationist circles well into the twentieth century. Price, for instance, was quite convinced that blacks are degenerate whites. By the time of Genesis Flood , however, the civil rights movement was in full flower, and Whitcomb and Morris trod very carefully.

They explained in detail that the Bible gives no justification for treating blacks as inferior. The story of the son and grandson of Noah being banished to a dark-skinned future was not part of their reading of the Holy Scriptures. Literalism may be the unvarnished word of God, but literalism is as open to interpretation as scholarly readings of Plato or Aristotle.

Second, as noted above, both for internal and external reasons, Creationists realized that they needed to tread carefully in outright opposition to evolution of all kinds. We find in fact then that although Creationists were and are adamantly opposed to unified common descent and to the idea of natural change being adequate for all the forms we see today, from early on they were accepting huge amounts of what can only truly be called evolution! This said, Creationists were convinced that this change occurs much more rapidly than most conventional evolutionists would allow.

Macroevolution is what makes reptiles reptiles, and mammals mammals. This cannot be a natural process but required miracles during the days of Creation. Third, and perhaps most significant of all, never think that Creationism is purely an epistemological matter — a matter of facts and their understanding. Moral claims have always been absolutely fundamental. Nearly all Creationists in the Christian camp are what is known theologically as premillennialists, believing that Jesus will come soon and reign over the world before the Last Judgement.

They are opposed to postmillennialists who think that Jesus will come later, and amillennialists who are inclined to think that perhaps we are already living in a Jesus-dominated era. Postmillennialists put a premium on our getting things ready for Jesus — hence, we should engage in social action and the like. Premillennialists think there is nothing we ourselves can do to better the world, so we had best get ourselves and others in a state ready for Jesus. This means individual behavior and conversion of others.

For premillennialists therefore, and this includes almost all Creationists, the great moral drives are to things like family sanctity which today encompasses anti-abortion , sexual orthodoxy especially anti-homosexuality , biblically sanctioned punishments very pro-capital punishment , strong support for Israel because of claims in Revelation about the Jews returning to Israel before End Times , and so forth.

It is absolutely vital to see how this moral agenda is an integral part of American Creationism, as much as Floods and Arks. Ruse discusses these matters in much detail.

Genesis Flood enjoyed massive popularity among the faithful, and led to a thriving Creation Science Movement, where Morris particularly and his coworkers and believers — notably Duane T.

Particularly effective was their challenging of evolutionists to debate, where they would employ every rhetorical trick in the book, reducing the scientists to fury and impotence, with bold statements provocatively made most often by Gish about the supposed nature of the universe Gilkey ; Ruse ed.

This all culminated eventually in a court case in Arkansas. By the end of the s, Creationists were passing around draft bills, intended for state legislatures, that would allow — insist on — the teaching of Creationism in state-supported public schools. In the biology classes of such schools, that is. By this time it was realized that, thanks to Supreme Court rulings on the First Amendment to the Constitution that which prohibits the establishment of state religion , it was not possible to exclude the teaching of evolution from such schools.

The trick was to get Creationism — something that prima facie rides straight through the separation of church and state — into such schools. The idea of Creation Science is to do this.

The claim is that, although the science parallels Genesis, as a matter of scientific fact, it stands alone as good science.

In , these drafts found a taker in Arkansas, where such a bill was passed and signed into law — as it happens, by a legislature and governor that thought little of what they were doing until the consequences were drawn to their attention. Hugh Ross , an outspoken advocate of the day-age view whose views have already been discussed, is probably the most obvious example of such an author today, although many other examples could be given.

Thirty-five years ago, when Scientific Creationism was still relatively new, an influential group of evangelical authors very actively pushed progressive creationist interpretations with both eyes on YEC readers. Perhaps its most useful feature is the detailed account of scientific evidence unrelated to the radioactive processes that are so often criticized by YEC authors, undermining their credibility for many conservative Christian readers.

A revised edition is available here. I recommend that interested parties examine these sources and place comments below. Newman and a scientifically-trained pastor, Herman J. Eckelmann, Jr. The revised edition of this book is also available on the internet. That should not be surprising. Indeed, to some extent the OEC view has been subsumed within ID, though covertly rather than overtly. I will say more about this in my upcoming columns about ID. Simultaneously with the books by Wonderley and Newman, geologist Davis A.

However, his scholarship is impeccable and everything he writes is well worth reading, whether or not it advances a concordist model. Rabbitt History of Geology Award in Reed responds to Young and several other conservative Reformed geologists who accept an old earth here.

Incidentally, I met all three of these men Wonderley, Newman, and Young not too long after their books came out. We were all involved with the American Scientific Affiliation. Readers who are very serious about Christianity and science should join that excellent organization: there simply is no substitute for the kind of live human interaction they foster. No blog or list-serve can come close to matching it.

OECs not only accept the geological evidence for antiquity, they also accept its implications for interpreting Genesis—including its implications for theodicy. OECs today still talk about death before the fall, partly because the absence of animal suffering prior to the fall is absolutely crucial to the YEC view of God and the Bible.

OECs hold similar views about God and the Bible, alongside different views about natural history, so pardon the pun they take great pains to explain pain in a manner consistent with their OEC stance. A nice contemporary example is physicist David Snoke, who is also a licensed preacher in a very conservative denomination, the Presbyterian Church in America. A recent concordist book about theodicy by William Dembski has drawn substantial attention—partly because the author is a leading advocate of ID, and partly because when he wrote it he was teaching at a seminary owned by the Southern Baptist Convention, a denomination in which the YEC view has many influential advocates especially R.

Albert Mohler, Jr. Entitled The End of Christianity: Finding a Good God in an Evil World , Dembski states that this particular book, unlike his others, is not about ID, even though the problem of evil is highly relevant to the nature of an intelligent designer. Hugh Ross apparently thinks that millions of creatures were created separately. Of course, the crucial issue is human origins: whatever a given OEC thinks about how many other creatures were separately created, God created Adam and Eve ex nihilo!

Courtesy of Edward B. During the Reformation and the 17th century, the literal view received very strong support. Allegorical readings that had been viable alternatives in earlier centuries became increasingly unpopular among both Protestant and Catholic scholars. This language was grounded in the interpretation provided almost a century earlier by the greatest theologian of the 16th century, John Calvin.

In his Commentary on Genesis , originally published in Latin in , Calvin said concerning Genesis ,. Here the error of those is manifestly refuted, who maintain that the world was made in a moment. For it is too violent a cavil to contend that Moses distributes the work which God perfected at once into six days, for the mere purpose of conveying instruction. Let us rather conclude that God himself took the space of six days, for the purpose of accommodating his works to the capacity of men… [God] distributed the creation of the world into successive portions, that he might fix our attention, and compel us, as if he had laid his hand upon us, to pause and to reflect.

In this pithy paragraph, Calvin juxtaposed the two main alternatives available to pre-modern interpreters of Genesis. The option Calvin defended, the literal creation week, was strongly favored by the early reformers and rooted in the earliest Christian commentaries.

The option he rejected, in which all things were created instantaneously sometimes based on Ecclesiasticus , as Calvin indicated with evident disagreement , fell out of favor in early modern times, but it, too, was rooted in the earliest Christian commentaries—to say nothing of the great Jewish scholar, Philo of Alexandria, a contemporary of Jesus. Indeed, commitment to a young earth and Flood Geology remained on the periphery of fundamentalism until the publication of The Genesis Flood , by John C.

Whitcomb and Henry Morris, in Why has Scientific Creationism been so successful? This makes sense to large numbers of ordinary Christians, who look to the Bible for guidance in all aspects of their lives and try to take it as literally as possible: why should scientific matters be treated any differently? Just as surely, another reason is the presence of certain social factors weighing heavily on American Christians.

The Genesis Flood appeared in , early in a decade that might have seen more unrest and social change than any other in the last century. The s witnessed the sexual revolution, a great expansion in the use of hallucinogenic drugs, the civil rights movement, Supreme Court decisions against Bible reading and prayer in public schools, hard rock music, Woodstock , and opposition to the Vietnam War.

At the same time, evolution was returning to center stage in high school biology texts, after having been effectively removed by publishers after the Scopes trial. For many conservative Christians, too much was changing too quickly—and in the wrong directions. While most Christian scientists today are not young-earth creationists, tens of millions of Christians are. While no period was more stressful than the s when Scientific Creationism rose to prominence, Christians today are no less concerned about the pressures contemporary postmodern culture is putting on the traditional values they rightly hold so dear; and they are just as eager as their 20th-century predecessors to identify the sources of cultural decline, and find ways to respond.

Join us to receive the latest articles, podcasts, videos, and more, and help us show how science and faith work hand in hand. Ted Davis presents five core tenets of Theistic Evolution, discusses some conclusions that follow from these assumptions, and offers an overview of Theistic Evolution's history. Ted Davis offers an overview of four core tenets of Concordism, discusses the conclusions that follow from these assumptions, and presents a short history of Concordism.

Instead of rejecting his faith or turning away from science, Garrett kept digging into science and the Word.

Part Six in the Uniquely Unique mini-series. We take stock of one more distinguishing feature of humans—the image of God. In the final part of his four-part series, J.

In this excerpt from their new book, geologist Gregg Davidson and theologian Ken Turner shine a spotlight on Genesis One as theologically rich literature first and foremost. Historical Comments From the mid-nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth century roughly to , most conservative Protestant writers in the United States accepted the validity of an old earth and universe. What is BioLogos? Subscribe Now What is BioLogos?

Previous in Series. By Ted Davis. Next in Series. If what naturalists found had been consistent with traditional beliefs, fossils found in every layer should not have looked different from those that living species would leave if fossilized.

Clearly, tradition al belief had to be modified to explain the succession of fossil types seen in the fossil record. But the fossil record undeniably showed that older forms were going extinct while newer forms appeared.

Extinction was itself disturbing to many traditionalists. However, the evidence of extinction of ancient forms was indisputable. Extinction of ancient varieties had indeed occurred, and modern forms were explained as being the result of more recent creations.

This view is now referred to as "progressive creation. It had become the dominant view of natural historians even before Charles Darwin boarded the Beagle in There was also a pattern of geographic clustering of species. For example, all kangaroo-like fossils and all living kangaroos are native to Australia and a few neighboring islands.

This pattern of geographic isolation is repeated around the world over and over again for other species. The fossils that most closely resemble living forms are found in the same geographic area where older types that resemble them are found.

Traditional belief could not explain this clustering of more recent forms with earlier forms that looked like them. Having already given up the idea of a single creation week, natural historians were also forced to give up the traditional belief that all forms had been created in one geographical location, the Garden of Eden.

The geographic clustering of look-alike fossil forms eventually forced a reluctant change that supposed at least six centers of creation. This second compromise with traditional belief had been as difficult to make as the first, but it was the only view that seemed consistent with the facts of natural history, even in So, by the time Darwin boarded the Beagle, traditional belief already had been significantly modified.

Gone were both the single creation week and the Garden of Eden as the sole locus of creation. The study of natural history had forced a new understanding.

In this new view, God had periodically created species at one center of creation or another. And at each new center, he would create new organisms according to his pattern for that particular place.

Such a view had little in common with the traditional account of creation given in the Book of Genesis. And why would a Creator always go back to Australia, for example, to make the next kind of kangaroo? Kangaroos could certainly live on other continents with similar climatic conditions. Could it be that the newer kind was actually just a modified descendent of the preexisting version?