Creationism

Creationism (from the Latin creatio "creation") refers to the religious view that the universe, life, and human beings literally came into being as described in the sacred scriptures of the Abrahamic religions and especially in the Old Testament book of Genesis. Creationism emerged as a significant current in the early 20th century in the field of evangelicalism in the USA, where it is still most widespread today. In its strictest form it postulates an age of the earth of several thousand years and assumes the existence of a Flood in which most humans and animals perished. Also characteristic is the rejection of the theory of evolution.

Creationism finds supporters above all among the religious right. The latter partly advocates making its teachings the content of biology lessons. However, since the U.S. Constitution provides for a ban on religious content in school instruction, creationism is called a scientific theory by some of its proponents. This is to avoid conflict with the Constitution. U.S. jurisprudence, however, has not subscribed to this interpretation. In its various forms, creationism moves between religious doctrine and pseudoscience.

In Islam today Harun Yahya, among others, represents creationism, in Judaism it is mainly the followers of orthodox schools of thought.

Delimitation

Creationism in its modern, today influential form goes back to American authors of the early 20th century. They took up views of authors of the 17th to 19th centuries, which had previously played no role in both scientific and theological debates. George McCready Price's The New Geology, published in 1923, and, popularizing it, John C. Whitcomb and Henry M. Morris's The Genesis Flood: The Biblical Record and Its Scientific Implications (1961) are considered fundamental. An independent tradition in Europe existed only in the Netherlands in neo-Calvinism going back to Abraham Kuyper. The rest of modern European creationism goes back to the American authors. The anti-evolutionists who rejected Charles Darwin's theory of evolution in the 19th century did not call themselves creationists. At most, the term occasionally appears as a pejorative attribution in private correspondence from the period.

Many people who hold creationism see it as part of their religious faith and as compatible with, or fundamentally independent of, natural science. This includes many major denominations, including the Catholic and many Protestant churches, as well as some Islamic faith communities. They fundamentally reject the consistently literal interpretation of Scripture and the creation story it describes. It is understood as a text that must be read critically in the historical context of its authors (historical-critical method). Many religious people also understand it as metaphor, which has a meaning only outside of natural science.

Such viewpoints are sometimes included in a broader definition of creationism, but are better included under the heading of theistic evolution. Creationism in the narrow sense, however, holds that scientific aspects argue for a literal interpretation of the account of creation described in the Book of Genesis (for Christians and Jews) or the Qur'an (for Muslims). This view of inerrancy and literal interpretation of the Bible (evangelical exegesis, fundamentalist hermeneutics) is found primarily in evangelical and fundamentalist movements in Christianity and sometimes in Islam.

Although the original Hebrew text can be interpreted as implicitly denying creation out of nothing (creatio ex nihilo), some Jews and Christians see Genesis as supporting the claim of absoluteness of their faith in creation. They assume that Scripture contains factually accurate statements from God's perspective and is an eyewitness account of the origin of things.

However, natural scientific knowledge (as an empirical source of information about natural history) is largely at odds with this literal interpretation of the Bible. Some creationists therefore believe that the view of natural science and its basic assumptions are incompatible with religious faith and should be subordinate to it. Creationists often reject the view of natural science in general and certain scientific theories in particular. This refers especially to the Darwinian theory of evolution and its relevance to modern evolutionary biology. Most creationists also dispute the scientific theories of the origin of life and the human species, the geological history of the earth, the history of evolution, the evolution of the solar system, and the origin of the universe.

Creationism in the broader sense runs through the entire history of religion. Generally, however, it refers to the time from the first contradictions between the findings of modern natural scientists and representatives of a literal interpretation of the Bible in dating the magnitude of the age of the earth, in a more explicit form then with the establishment of the theory of evolution by Charles Darwin. Other definitions, however, refer to the introduction of the theory of evolution in the school curriculum.

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Antiquity: The Holy Books

One of the roots of creationism lies in the cosmogonies, the explanatory models of the origin of the world written down since ancient times. The writings on creation in the book religions were collected in the Torah, the Bible and the Koran and fixed by the written form. All three works process the views of the Abrahamic religions on world and natural history. Arab and Muslim scholars, respectively, continued to supplement their views on creation by using Greek texts. In antiquity itself, a worldview comparable to creationism is virtually unknown. The ancient philosophers of the schools of the Platonists and Neoplatonists, the Stoa, and the Epicureans unanimously regarded the doctrine of the gods as a dark and difficult problem about which man had little certain knowledge. The task of the philosophers was to penetrate to the core of the problems through reflection. The mythical tales of the origin of the world and of the gods were taken seriously to varying degrees, but were usually dismissed as allegorical fables for the uneducated people. Even the Church Fathers, on the threshold of the Middle Ages, largely rejected word-inspired readings of the books. Augustine, who remained immensely influential into modern times, possessed a profound philosophical education and was heavily influenced by Plotinus' Neoplatonism. In his view, ancient philosophy had discovered by pure reflection most (though not all) of the truths of faith in the Bible independent of God's revelation. For him, however, the essential truths about man and the world were internal. Too much preoccupation with the affairs of the world, while not considered outright sinful, tended to distract from the things that really mattered. Augustine, at various ages, wrote five treatises on the book of Genesis without coming to a final judgment. He warns, however, against taking the statements of Scripture too literally and pitting them against the texts of the philosophers, since all truth in nature ultimately comes from God as well. The meaning of much in the texts, he says, must be unraveled through allegorical interpretation. A direct, literal faith could never harm the soul, but it was permissible for theological thinkers to explore beyond it.

Medieval

In the Middle Ages (ca. 600 A.D. to 1500 A.D.), since al-Ghazālī (died 1111), the study of the philosophers' works on nature was considered unnecessary and tended to be harmful in the Islamic cultural area; it was no longer taught in the madrasas. In the preceding philosophical heyday, however, it was primarily the work of Aristotle that had been received and comprehensively interpreted. It was only through Islamic thinkers (and Jewish thinkers living in the Islamic cultural sphere) that this became accessible again in the Occident, which had lost all knowledge of it. Before that, the early Middle Ages in the Occident had only had access to anecdotal, mostly strongly allegorical, natural history works in the broadest sense, called bestiaries. High medieval scholasticism strove for a synthesis between this now newly accessible (ancient) natural philosophy and theology (which was only now, through Petrus Abaelardus newly founded). The teachings of Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274) were considered most authoritative at the newly emerging universities. In Thomism there is no fundamental contradiction between faith and reason. Man, supported by his senses and his (always fallible) reason, can read in creation as in a book. In comparison with faith, which is instilled by God, it is a lesser virtue, which nevertheless remains a virtue. Man is able to discover natural truths about the world by means of the methods of Aristotelian logic, but reason fails in the face of supernatural truths that only faith can grasp. Despite the absolute primacy of the truths of faith, scholastic teaching made possible a natural philosophy independent of revealed knowledge, which ultimately became the root of the modern natural sciences. The prohibition (at least outside of the detached academic spheres) to speculate about truths that contradicted revealed knowledge, which was regarded as unquestionably correct, initially prevented any open conflict. Since John Cassianus, however, every biblical passage had to be interpreted, apart from the literal statement (literal sense), already in the allegorical, moral (or tropological) and anagogical sense, and contradictions and ambiguities had to be cleared up, whereby a naively literal exegesis was never promoted.

early modern period

It was not until the modern era that modern, empirical natural science developed out of medieval natural philosophy, initially exclusively in the Occident. For a long time, however, this was not seen as a problem or even as competition for the religious worldview. Classical authors such as Newton and Galileo still pointed out, in the medieval tradition, that unravelling the mechanisms of God's creation would only enhance his glory. Scientists such as Robert Boyle viewed their research as a quasi-theological exploration of God's workings in nature; he donated funds from his estate for a series of lectures (the Boyle lectures) specifically designed to show how science refuted atheism and confirmed Christian truths. Many philosophical writers pointed to the harmony and purposefulness of nature, which for writers like William Paley established a "natural theology." God had created nature in such a way that it could be comprehended by the human mind. For the mainly English deists, the study of nature on purely intellectual grounds, even without any revelation, necessarily pointed to the work of a benevolent creator God. Conflicts, for example over atomism or the heliocentric view of the world, arose less between faith and science than between the modern, empirical methods and the Aristotelian, scholastic view of the world, which was based more on explaining the world through abstract, logical thought. Ecclesiastical and secular authorities viewed the development with suspicion because they generally rejected change and feared a link between free thought and social demands, but the scientific and philosophical controversies almost did not reach the wider public. This did not change until the early 19th century, especially with the new teachings of geology and evolutionary research within biology.

18th and 19th century

Geology

The British explorers William Smith, James Hutton and Charles Lyell began estimating the age of the earth in the 18th century. They founded a new science, geology. Their conclusions were completely unproblematic for many contemporary theologians who, because of other philosophical and theological elements, already rejected chronology based on literal interpretation of biblical texts (famously, Bishop James Ussher back-calculated the date of creation to October 23, 4004 BC). Other theologians, but even more so the educated general public, saw this as a challenge to the authority of the Bible. In the 1790s, the Royal Society warned its member John Hunter that his public omissions about the great age of the earth might irritate the public's "understandable" prejudices. The poet and free spirit Lord Byron's drama "Cain," in which the age of the earth and fossils play a prominent role, provoked a flood of scornful criticism. Opponents who called themselves "geologists of Scripture" (scriptural) or "Mosaic geologists" argued against the novel views, with many sympathies among the general public. However, these opponents did not form a united front (many wrote completely independently) or a school like the later creationists (who did, however, build on their works). The controversy over the biblical Flood became famous. The geologist and clergyman William Buckland, in his work Reliquiae Diluvianae, claimed that his research clearly confirmed the truth of the biblical account; that the fossils of large, extinct vertebrates discovered at the time were primeval beasts that had drowned in the flood. Other authors, prominent in their day, such as Granville Penn and Andrew Ure, including many traditional upper-class amateur researchers (gentlemen of science) in addition to some clergymen, wrote works to confirm the literal truth of the biblical accounts.

Biology

Charles Darwin's theory of evolution was immediately bitterly opposed by conservative Christians since the publication of his major work On the Origin of Species in 1859. While the previous controversies concerned the world as a whole, the theory of evolution was taken as a frontal attack on the nature and dignity of man; here it was not a question of incidental details, but centrally of the conception of man, which makes the harshness of the dispute explicable. Although Darwin himself, anticipating the criticism, was initially reluctant to apply his theory to man at all, this point was clearly seen by his critics from the beginning and was always at the center of the debate (Darwin later realized his mistake and published The Descent of Man and Sexual Selection in 1871). Evolutionary theory postulated an ascension of man from animal ancestors (which could also be read as enabling further progress), while theology classically postulated a descent of originally perfect man due to original sin. The contradiction to the fall of Adam, and thus implicitly to Christ as the "second Adam," was theologically more difficult to accept than the non-literal interpretation of the book of Genesis, with which most more enlightened churchmen had no problem even in the 19th century. Moreover, the doctrine eliminated the deep rift that had previously separated man from other creatures. Now what about the immortal soul that belonged only to man? In what sense was man now still the image of God? What were the moral values based on, if everything was decided in the struggle for existence? Where was the divine plan in the play of chance that guided development? The resistance to this challenge, perceived as a degradation of man as the crown of creation, went far beyond ecclesiastical circles; it ultimately dealt a death blow to natural theology and deism. It was perceived as a transgression of boundaries by which science interfered in matters that were none of its business. Although Darwin remained hesitant in public statements throughout his life, his supporters spoke openly. It was his most important supporter, "Darwin's bulldog" Thomas Henry Huxley, who coined the term agnosticism. Herbert Spencer, in First Principles (1862), unhesitatingly applied the new concept of evolution to the development of human society as well, founding Social Darwinism. (In the 20th century, researchers such as Edward Tylor, and later Robert N. Bellah, then applied the idea of evolution to religion itself, establishing evolutionism primarily in the field of religious anthropology).

Darwin's opponents included clergymen such as the Anglican bishop Samuel Wilberforce, but also numerous eminent scientists such as the English anatomist and zoologist Richard Owen and the leading American naturalist Louis Agassiz. The Catholic zoologist St. George Mivart (later excommunicated for unorthodox views) argued that even if the human body was of natural origin, its soul traced back to God alone. In Genesis of Species, he argued for evolution that proceeded under divine control. Even Alfred Russel Wallace, who had discovered the theory of evolution independently of Darwin, still assumed that an intervention of the Creator remained necessary, since the special position of man could not be explained otherwise. Influential thinkers such as the writer Samuel Butler, but also many biologists, resorted to the competing theory of evolution of Lamarckism, which seemed to them more compatible with a divine plan in nature. As Darwin's selection theory in particular came under sharp attack within the scientific community at the end of the 19th century and at times found itself on the defensive, religious critics could feel vindicated that it was a short-term aberration that would soon be overcome. In Germany in particular, leading anthropologists such as Rudolf Virchow and Adolf Bastian expressed disapproval. This could be traced back in part to the position of leading German Darwinists such as Ernst Haeckel, who used human descent as an argument for "inferior" human races and thus racism. (Evolutionary theory as a justification for racism was also later singled out as a reason for rejection by leading American creationists such as Henry M. Morris). With the acceptance of evolutionary theory within science by the beginning of the 20th century, the debate initially seemed settled. Conservative Protestant Christians, especially in the USA, continued to reject it, but found no more scientific supporters, so that the battle seemed already decided.

The Creation of Light by Gustave Doré


The Creator God Separates Light and Darkness (Sun and Moon) by Michelangelo. A literal understanding of the creation story has always inspired art.