History of creationism
Encyclopedia
The history of creationism relates to the history of thought based on a premise that the natural universe
had a beginning, and came into being
supernaturally. The term creationism
in its broad sense covers a wide range of views and interpretations, and was not in common use before the late 19th century.
Throughout recorded history, many people have viewed the universe as a created entity (see creation myths). Many ancient historical accounts from around the world refer to or imply a creation of the earth (and also the universe). Although specific historical understandings of creationism have used varying degrees of empirical
, spiritual and/or philosophical investigations, they are all based on the view that the universe was created, as opposed to not being created. This is essentially a cosmological
premise in metaphysics
, however popularity for and theories of creationism are related to the history of religions.
The most influential force on more recent Eastern history of creationism has been the Genesis creation narrative, which was accepted as a historical account until the advent of modern geology
. It has provided a basic framework for Jewish, Christian and Islamic epistemological understandings of how the universe came into being
- through the supernatural intervention of God
, Yahweh
, or Allah
. Historically, literal interpretations of this narrative have been more dominant than allegorical interpretations of Genesis
.
, in his book Creationism and Its Critics in Antiquity, traces creationist thought to the presocratic thinkers Anaxagoras
and Empedocles
, in the 5th century BCE. Sedley states that Anaxagoras was recognized by Plato
as "the first overt champion of a creative cosmic intelligence. Anaxagoras theory was that the original state of the world was a roughly even mixture of all opposites, and that it was the effect of the action of nous (intelligence or mind) that led to the partial separation of such opposites, hot from cold, land from water, rarefied from dense. Anaxagoras also developed the philosophical innovation of dualism
of mind from matter, diverging from the stringent monism
of his predecessor, Parmenides
. Empedocles proposed a system whereby two competing divine forces, Love (harmony and blending) and Strife (separation) had alternating dominion over the universe and the four elements, earth, water, air and fire.
Around 45 BC, Cicero
made a teleological argument
that anticipated the watchmaker analogy
, in De natura deorum, ii. 34
c. 170 – Theophilus of Antioch wrote in defense of creation beliefs and a relatively young Earth:
170 – Galen
, Stoic
Roman
physician
wrote against creation beliefs in On the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body, 11.14:
In the 5th century, 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.
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.
starting in the 14th century saw the establishment of protoscience
that eventually became modern science
. This was a period of great social change
.
The Protestant Reformation
introduced lay people reading the Bible in translation and more literal understandings, and led to a new belief that every biological species had been individually created by God.
introduced the empirical scientific method
. Natural theology
sought evidence in nature supporting Christianity.
Nicolaus Copernicus
's 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.
The English naturalist John Ray
(29 November 1627 - 17 January 1705) 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.
Carolus Linnaeus
, in the 18th century, 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
.
, 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 chronology. This calculated a date for creation at 4004 BC. The date was widely accepted in the English-speaking world.
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:
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 argument
s 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.
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.
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
. Based upon a detailed examination of what we now recognise as the lithosphere, hydrosphere and atmosphere he showed that the present forces seen on the earth were sufficient to explain all the phenomena observed. He wrote "The Mosaic history places this beginning of man at no great distance; and there has not been found, in natural history, any document by which a high antiquity can be attribted to the human race. But this is not the case with regard to the inferior species of animals, particularly those which inhabit the ocean and its shorees. We find in natural history monuments which prove that those animals had long existed; and thus we thus preocure a measure for the computation of time extremely remote though far from being precisely ascertained"(p8) Based upon these principles of uniformitarianism
, he demonstrated that the Earth is 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. The presumption that the world was only 6,000 years old was scientifically abandoned as a result of Hutton's work.
This development of the scientific discipline of geology, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and the discovery that the Earth was far older than a literal interpretation of the Book of Genesis could account for, led to the development, and popularity, of the Gap Theory (now known as gap creationism
) to accommodate these discoveries. Gap Theory assumes a recent six-day creation, but also that the Earth existed for many ages before this event, ending in cataclysm and a new creation (hence its alternative title 'ruin-restoration theory').
In the early 19th century, "a heterogeneous group of writers," known as scriptural geologists, arose to oppose these discoveries, and the Gap Theory. Their views were marginalised and ignored by the scientific community
of their time. They "had much the same relationship to 'philosophical' (or scientific) geologists as their indirect descendants, the twentieth-century creationists." Paul Wood describes them as "mostly Anglican evangelicals" with "no institutional focus and little sense of commonality." They generally lacked any background in geology, and had little influence even in church circles.
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.
In 1857, Philip Henry Gosse
published 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.
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."
Advances in paleontology
, led by William Smith
saw the recording of the first fossil records that 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.
In 1802, William Paley
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.
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 a thesis that God had the omnipotence and foresight to create as a divine legislator, making laws (or programs) that 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.
Late in 1844 the anonymous publication of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation
popularised the idea of divinely ordered development of everything from stellar evolution
to transmutation of species
. It quickly gained fashionable success in court circles and aroused interest in all sections of society. It also aroused religious controversy, and after initially being slow to respond, the scientific establishment attacked the book. It continued to be a best seller to around the end of the century.
Herbert Spencer
was a 19th century 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 so-called "social Darwinism" or its derivative philosophies such as eugenics
.
The decades following Charles Darwin
's publication of The Origin of Species
, in 1859, saw the overwhelming majority of North American and British naturalists accept some form of evolution, with many liberal and educated churchmen following their example, and thereby rejecting a biblically literalist
interpretation of Genesis. Although Darwin's work rejected "the dogma of separate creations," he invoked creation as the probable source of the first lifeforms ("into which life was first breathed"). This led Asa Gray
, who was both religiously orthodox, and Darwin's most prominent American supporter, to suggest that Darwin had accepted "a supernatural beginning of life on earth" and that he should therefore allow a second "special origination" for humanity. Darwin however rejected this view, and used uncompromisingly naturalistic language in place of biblical idiom, starting with The Descent of Man in 1871.
Darwin's book caused less controversy than he had feared, as the idea of evolution had been widely popularized in Victorian
Britain
by the 1844 publication of Vestiges of Creation. However, 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 — continued 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, Darwin's self-appointed "bulldog," debate
d evolution with Samuel Wilberforce
, 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, bringing to a head arguments in the Church of England
between liberal theologians
supporting higher criticism, and conservative Evangelicals
. The essays were described by their opponents as heretical
, and the essayists were called "The Seven Against Christ."
In 1862, the Glaswegian
physicist William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin)
published calculations, based on his presumption of uniformitarianism
, and that the heat of the sun was caused by its gravitational shrinkage, 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 that showed that the sun was in fact heated by nuclear fusion
that demonstrated the present estimated 4.567 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 13.73 billion years or some ~2,000,000 times Ussher's value.
The Swiss-American paleontologist Louis Agassiz
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. Though uniformitarianism dominated ideas from the 1840s onwards, Catastrophism
remained a major paradigm in geology
until replaced by new models that allowed for both cataclysms (such as meteor strikes) and gradualist patterns (such as ice age
s) to explain observed geologic phenomena.
In 1878, American Presbyterians held the first annual Niagara Bible Conference
, founding the Christian fundamentalist movement, which took its name from the "Five Fundamentals" of 1910, and came to be concerned about the implications of evolution for the accuracy of the Bible. But by no means all orthodox Presbyterians were opposed to evolution as a possible method of the Divine procedure. Dr Charles Hodge
of Princeton Seminary objected in 1874 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, and most churchmen sought to reconcile Darwinism with Christianity.
Darwin died in 1882. In 1915, Lady Elizabeth Hope
spread rumors that he had repented and accepted God on his deathbed. Lady Hope's story is almost certainly false, and it is unlikely that she visited Darwin as she claimed.
movement opposed to the idea of human evolution
, which succeeded in getting teaching of evolution
banned in United States public schools. From the mid 1960s young Earth creationism
proposed "scientific creationism" using "Flood geology
" as support for a literal reading of Genesis. After legal judgements that teaching this in public schools contravened constitutional separation of Church and State
, it was stripped of biblical references and called creation science
, then when this was ruled unacceptable, intelligent design
was coined.
The decades before the start of the 20th century, and the first decades of that century, have been described as the eclipse of Darwinism. Darwin's work had quickly established scientific consensus that evolution occurred, but there was considerable disagreement about the mechanisms involved, and few gave as much significance to natural selection as Darwin himself. 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. The term Darwinism
had covered a wide range of ideas, many of which differed from Darwin's views, but it became associated with the minority view of August Weismann
who went further than Darwin by rejecting inheritance of acquired characters
and attributing all evolution to natural selection, a view also called neo-Darwinism
. By the first decades of the 20th century, the debate had become generally one between continuous-variation biometricians and discontinuous-variety Mendelians. In the 1930s and 1940s, though, they were combined with natural selection into the modern evolutionary synthesis
, which soon became the dominant model in the scientific community. This model has also been called Darwinism and neo-Darwinism.
George McCready Price
was important in developing flood geology
, and while he had limited influence at a time when all geologists had long accepted an ancient earth, many of his ideas that a young earth could be deduced from science were taken up later. Price was a Seventh-day Adventist
, and followed one of the founders of the church, Ellen White, in seeing fossils as evidence of the Great Flood. In 1906, Price published Illogical Geology: The Weakest Point in the Evolution Theory in which he offered $1000 "to any one who will, in the face of the facts here presented, show me how to prove that one kind of fossil is older than another."
, including the Genesis account of creation. The Fundamentals
were published as a series of essays. Its authors accepted ancient earth geology, while holding different ideas about how this was reconciled with biblical accounts. The views expressed on evolution were mixed: two short articles were anti evolution, one anonymous and one by the little known Henry Beach. Their focus was on human evolution, as were attacks made on evolution by Dyson Hague
. Major figures were explicitly open to the possibility that God created through a Lamarckian form of evolution: long articles by James Orr
and George Frederick Wright
expressed this openness, and Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield
and A H Strong shared this view.
After the First World War (1914–1918), the teaching of creation and evolution in public education
grew as a public controversy. By this time, many texts taught the theory of evolution as scientific fact. Many Christians in the U.S.A. and later Jews and Muslims, expressed concern that in teaching evolution as fact, the State was unconstitutionally infringing on their right to the free exercise of religion, as in their opinion this taught their children that the Bible had been proven false.
For example, the Democratic Party politician William Jennings Bryan
"became convinced that the teaching of Evolution as a fact 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."
During the First World War, reports of horrors committed by Germans, who were citizens of one of the most scientifically advanced countries in the World, led 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 published in 1917 by Stanford University professor and entomologist Vernon L. Kellogg
entitled Headquarters Nights, drew a direct association between German war ideology and Darwinian description of nature as a struggle. Kellogg was a leading authority on evolution of insects, and had published Darwinism Today in 1907. His anti-Darwinian and anti-German rhetoric in Headquarters Nights influenced biologists who tried to play down the negative implications of "survival of the fittest
."
Benjamin Kidd
's 1918 book Science of Power, claimed that there were historical and philosophical connections between Darwinism and German militarism. This book and others around this time had an effect on many people.
In 1922, William Jennings Bryan published In His Image, 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 policy that directly contradicts the Christian doctrine of charity to the helpless.
In 1923, fundamentalist preacher and evangelist William Bell Riley
, known as "The Grand Old Man of Fundamentalism," founded the Anti-Evolution League of Minnesota, which, in 1924, became the Anti-Evolution League of America
. The organization was behind anti-evolution legislation in Kentucky
, where its efforts were supported by William Jennings Bryan.
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 the 1920s and 1930s, Harry Rimmer
was one of the most prominent American creationists. Known as the "noisiest evangelist in America," he published many creationist tracts, debated other creationists and was involved in a famous trial known as the "Floyd-Rimmer trial" against the atheist William Floyd.
In 1925, G. K. Chesterton
published The Everlasting Man, in which he developed and articulated many creationist ideas and criticisms of the philosophical underpinnings and perceived logical flaws of evolution.
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
. Clarence Darrow
was the defense counsel, and William Jennings Bryan was the prosecutor. Bryan appealed for assistance to George McCready Price
, Johns Hopkins University
physician Howard A. Kelly, physicist Louis T. More, and Alfred W. McCann, all of who had written books supporting creationism. Price was away in England, Kelly and More told Bryan they considered themselves more convinced by evolution, and McCann was not interested because of Bryan's stance on prohibition
. Nevertheless, a schoolteacher named John T. Scopes
was found guilty of teaching evolution and fined, although the case was later dismissed on a technicality.
Following up on the Butler Act
, antievolutionary laws were passed in Mississippi
in 1926, and then in Arkansas
in 1928. However, the 1928 election and the onset of the Depression
changed the playing field. Creationists shifted their attention from state legislatures to local school boards, having substantial success. They set themselves to the tasks of "the emasculation of textbooks, the 'purging' of libraries, and above all the, continued hounding of teachers." Discussions of evolution vanished from almost all schoolbooks. By 1941, about one third of American teachers were afraid of being accused of supporting evolution.
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 soul
s 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." 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.
In 1935, the "Religion and Science Association" was formed by a small group of creationists, led by a Wheaton College professor, to form a "a unified front against the theory of evolution." There were three main schools of creationist thought, represented by Price, Rimmer, and tidal expert William Bell Dawson. However, since Dawson was a proponent of day-age creationism
and Rimmer was ardently convinced that gap creationism
was correct, the staunch supporters of a literal 6 day creation and 6000 year old earth
were incensed, and the organization fell apart.
Price and his supporters retreated to California, and with several doctors working at the College of Medical Evangelists (now Loma Linda University), formed the "Deluge Geology Society." The "Deluge Geology Society" published the Bulletin of Deluge Geology and Related Science from 1941 to 1945. They made secret plans to unveil discoveries of fossils of human footprints that were in rock that was purportedly older than accounted for in evolutionary theory. However, again the organization foundered over disagreements about a 6000 year old earth
.
Price was particularly strident in his attacks against fellow creationists. His friend and former student Harold W. Clark
had earned a masters degree in biology from the Berkeley
, and felt that Price's book New Geology was "entirely out of date and inadequate." Unfortunately, Price responded angrily when he found out, accusing Clark of suffering from "the modern mental disease of universityitis" and of falling in with the "tobacco-smoking, Sabbath-breaking. God-defying" evolutionists. Clark pleaded with Price that he still believed in a 6 day creation and a young earth and a universal flood, but Price responded with a vitriolic publication entitled Theories of Satanic Origin about Clark and his views.
The American George Gaylord Simpson
argued that the paleontological record supported evolution
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.
, 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.
Fissures within the creationist community, which had always been present, continued to deepen as fundamentalists received advanced training in the sciences. Geochemist J. Laurence Kulp
had gone to the evangelical school Wheaton College
for his undergraduate degree and was a Plymouth Brother. He obtained a PhD from Princeton
before taking a faculty position at Columbia. He felt it was his duty to warn fellow Christians in the evangelical scientific organization the American Scientific Affiliation
(ASA) of the problems with Price's claims. Kulp wrote a review of Price's work, in which he stated that "major propositions of the theory are contradicted by established physical and chemical laws" in 1950. This caused substantial consternation among his fellow members of the American Scientific Affiliation
(ASA), an affiliation of Christians who are also scientists, causing many to claim that Kulp had been contaminated with "the orthodox geological viewpoint" and this was responsible for his faith in the Bible being badly shaken. Kulp's influence, however, continues today within the American Scientific Affiliation
, which continues to support old earth creationism
.
In the 1950s the United States
slid into a Cold War
with the communist
Soviet Union
, its former ally. Communism had as one of its principles atheism
. 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
. The American shock and panic about the 1957 Sputnik
launch lead to passage of the National Defense Education Act
in 1958 to reform American science curricula. This resulted in the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study, also begun in 1958 and with the goal of writing new up-to-date biology textbooks. These new biology textbooks included a discussion of the theory of evolution. Within a few years, half of American schools were using the new BSCS biology textbooks. In addition, the hundredth anniversary of the publication of The Origin of Species
was in 1959, and this sparked renewed public interest in evolutionary biology. The creationist fervor of the past seemed like ancient history. A historian at Oklahoma
's Northeastern State University
, R. Halliburton, even made a prediction in 1964 that "a renaissance of the [creationist] movement is most unlikely."
In 1961, Henry M. Morris
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
. Morris had published several books previously, but none had the impact that The Genesis Flood did. Its publication resulted in ten like-minded creationists forming the Creation Research Society
in 1963, and the Institute for Creation Research
in 1972.
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."
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 that evolution
was not incompatible with a belief in God
nor a belief in the accuracy of scriptures.
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 Center 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:
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.
In 1986, another creationist organization called "Reasons to Believe" was established. Unlike most current creationist organizations, RTB supports Old Earth creationism
.
In 1987, the US Supreme Court again ruled, this time in Edwards v. Aguillard
, that requiring the teaching of "creation science
" 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 gave a clear definition of science, and further ruled that so-called "creation science" was simply creationism wrongly using a contrived dualism to assert that any evidence against evolution would prove Creation. Later that year, drafts of the creation science school textbook Of Pandas and People
were revised to change all references to "creation" to relate to "intelligent design
."
In 1989, the Foundation for Thought and Ethics
published Of Pandas and People
by Percival Davis
and Dean H. Kenyon
, editor Charles Thaxton
, with the definition that "Intelligent design means that various forms of life began abruptly through an intelligent agency, with their distinctive features already intact. Fish with fins and scales, birds with feathers, beaks, wings, etc." The publisher got church groups and Christian radio to campaign for state textbook approval, with a petition in Alabama
urging that "Intelligent Design" be presented as an alternative to evolution, and their attorney arguing that it did not compel belief in the supernatural and was not a creationist text. After setbacks it focussed efforts "outside the schools" to prompt grass-roots activity from local school boards, teacher's groups and parents.
In 1990, law professor Phillip E. Johnson
set out his argument that the ground rules of science
as presented at Edwards v. Aguillard unfairly disqualified creationist explanations by excluding the supernatural, and in 1991, he brought out a book entitled Darwin on Trial
, challenging the principles of naturalism
and uniformitarianism
in contemporary scientific philosophy.
In March, 1992, a symposium at Southern Methodist University
in Dallas provided the public debut for a small group that included Phillip Johnson, Steven Meyer, William Dembski, and Michael Behe
, initiating the wedge strategy
that Johnson claims to have worked out by 1991.
The 1993 second edition of the school textbook Of Pandas and People
added a section by Michael Behe making the argument he later called irreducible complexity
.
The 1990s saw the rise of intelligent design
, which maintains that intelligent intervention was necessary for evolution and in other ways seeks to create doubt about the validity and feasibility of evolution
, and to change the scientific method
so that supernatural explanations are accepted.
In 1994, the court case Peloza v. Capistrano School District
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.
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, which it defines narrowly as meaning young earth creationism
, though in court intelligent design was found to be creationism.
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:
In December 2001, Dembski established the International Society for Complexity, Information and Design
.
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. They are anti-young earth, and promote Christianity by endorsing old earth creationism.
In 2004 Ohio adopted education standards sympathetic to intelligent design promoted by the Discovery Institute. In February 2006 the Ohio Board of Education voted to drop the Discovery Institute's "Critical Analysis of Evolution
" intelligent design lesson plan after the 2005 ruling against intelligent design in Kitzmiller v. Dover and revelations that the lesson plan was adopted despite warnings from the Ohio Department of Education, whose experts described it as wrong and misleading.
In May 2005, the Kansas
school board held the Kansas evolution hearings
. The court-style hearings were promoted by the Discovery Institute and attended by its Fellows and other intelligent design advocates but not by mainstream scientists, who accused it of being a kangaroo court
. The result of the hearings was the adoption by the Republican-dominated board of new science standards that relied upon the Discovery Institute's Critical Analysis of Evolution lesson plan employing the institute's Teach the Controversy
approach, despite these having been rejected by the State Board Science Hearing Committee. With the 2006 ouster of the majority of the conservative board members, the Kansas State Board of Education approved a new curriculum that removed any reference to Intelligent Design as part of science in February 2007.
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 intelligent design was religious in nature, a form of creationism, not scientific and thus violated the First Amendment to the United States Constitution
. The ruling barred the teaching of intelligent design in public school science classrooms for that district, but the 'Dover trial' as it came to be known, has had far-reaching effects. Around the same time as the Kiztmiller ruling, many state legislators were considering bills promoted by the Discovery Institute supporting the teaching of intelligent design. Most were rejected in the light of the ruling in Dover trial out of what has been called the "Dover-effect."
Universe
The Universe is commonly defined as the totality of everything that exists, including all matter and energy, the planets, stars, galaxies, and the contents of intergalactic space. Definitions and usage vary and similar terms include the cosmos, the world and nature...
had a beginning, and came into being
Being
Being , is an English word used for conceptualizing subjective and objective aspects of reality, including those fundamental to the self —related to and somewhat interchangeable with terms like "existence" and "living".In its objective usage —as in "a being," or "[a] human being" —it...
supernaturally. The term creationism
Creationism
Creationism is the religious beliefthat humanity, life, the Earth, and the universe are the creation of a supernatural being, most often referring to the Abrahamic god. As science developed from the 18th century onwards, various views developed which aimed to reconcile science with the Genesis...
in its broad sense covers a wide range of views and interpretations, and was not in common use before the late 19th century.
Throughout recorded history, many people have viewed the universe as a created entity (see creation myths). Many ancient historical accounts from around the world refer to or imply a creation of the earth (and also the universe). Although specific historical understandings of creationism have used varying degrees of empirical
Empirical
The word empirical denotes information gained by means of observation or experimentation. Empirical data are data produced by an experiment or observation....
, spiritual and/or philosophical investigations, they are all based on the view that the universe was created, as opposed to not being created. This is essentially a cosmological
Cosmology
Cosmology is the discipline that deals with the nature of the Universe as a whole. Cosmologists seek to understand the origin, evolution, structure, and ultimate fate of the Universe at large, as well as the natural laws that keep it in order...
premise in metaphysics
Metaphysics
Metaphysics is a branch of philosophy concerned with explaining the fundamental nature of being and the world, although the term is not easily defined. Traditionally, metaphysics attempts to answer two basic questions in the broadest possible terms:...
, however popularity for and theories of creationism are related to the history of religions.
The most influential force on more recent Eastern history of creationism has been the Genesis creation narrative, which was accepted as a historical account until the advent of modern geology
Geology
Geology is the science comprising the study of solid Earth, the rocks of which it is composed, and the processes by which it evolves. Geology gives insight into the history of the Earth, as it provides the primary evidence for plate tectonics, the evolutionary history of life, and past climates...
. It has provided a basic framework for Jewish, Christian and Islamic epistemological understandings of how the universe came into being
Being
Being , is an English word used for conceptualizing subjective and objective aspects of reality, including those fundamental to the self —related to and somewhat interchangeable with terms like "existence" and "living".In its objective usage —as in "a being," or "[a] human being" —it...
- through the supernatural intervention of God
God
God is the English name given to a singular being in theistic and deistic religions who is either the sole deity in monotheism, or a single deity in polytheism....
, Yahweh
Yahweh
Yahweh is the name of God in the Bible, the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Jews and Christians.The word Yahweh is a modern scholarly convention for the Hebrew , transcribed into Roman letters as YHWH and known as the Tetragrammaton, for which the original pronunciation is unknown...
, or Allah
Allah
Allah is a word for God used in the context of Islam. In Arabic, the word means simply "God". It is used primarily by Muslims and Bahá'ís, and often, albeit not exclusively, used by Arabic-speaking Eastern Catholic Christians, Maltese Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox Christians, Mizrahi Jews and...
. Historically, literal interpretations of this narrative have been more dominant than allegorical interpretations of Genesis
Allegorical interpretations of Genesis
An allegorical interpretation of Genesis is a reading of the biblical Book of Genesis that treats elements of the narrative as symbols or types. For example, Genesis 3 introduces a talking serpent, which many Christians understand to be Satan in disguise. This symbolism is accepted even by...
.
Early history
David SedleyDavid Sedley
David Neil Sedley is the seventh Laurence Professor of Ancient Philosophy at Cambridge University.Sedley was educated at Trinity College, Oxford where he was awarded a first class honours degree in Literae Humaniores in 1969...
, in his book Creationism and Its Critics in Antiquity, traces creationist thought to the presocratic thinkers Anaxagoras
Anaxagoras
Anaxagoras was a Pre-Socratic Greek philosopher. Born in Clazomenae in Asia Minor, Anaxagoras was the first philosopher to bring philosophy from Ionia to Athens. He attempted to give a scientific account of eclipses, meteors, rainbows, and the sun, which he described as a fiery mass larger than...
and Empedocles
Empedocles
Empedocles was a Greek pre-Socratic philosopher and a citizen of Agrigentum, a Greek city in Sicily. Empedocles' philosophy is best known for being the originator of the cosmogenic theory of the four Classical elements...
, in the 5th century BCE. Sedley states that Anaxagoras was recognized by Plato
Plato
Plato , was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the...
as "the first overt champion of a creative cosmic intelligence. Anaxagoras theory was that the original state of the world was a roughly even mixture of all opposites, and that it was the effect of the action of nous (intelligence or mind) that led to the partial separation of such opposites, hot from cold, land from water, rarefied from dense. Anaxagoras also developed the philosophical innovation of dualism
Dualism (philosophy of mind)
In philosophy of mind, dualism is a set of views about the relationship between mind and matter, which begins with the claim that mental phenomena are, in some respects, non-physical....
of mind from matter, diverging from the stringent monism
Monism
Monism is any philosophical view which holds that there is unity in a given field of inquiry. Accordingly, some philosophers may hold that the universe is one rather than dualistic or pluralistic...
of his predecessor, Parmenides
Parmenides
Parmenides of Elea was an ancient Greek philosopher born in Elea, a Greek city on the southern coast of Italy. He was the founder of the Eleatic school of philosophy. The single known work of Parmenides is a poem, On Nature, which has survived only in fragmentary form. In this poem, Parmenides...
. Empedocles proposed a system whereby two competing divine forces, Love (harmony and blending) and Strife (separation) had alternating dominion over the universe and the four elements, earth, water, air and fire.
Around 45 BC, Cicero
Cicero
Marcus Tullius Cicero , was a Roman philosopher, statesman, lawyer, political theorist, and Roman constitutionalist. He came from a wealthy municipal family of the equestrian order, and is widely considered one of Rome's greatest orators and prose stylists.He introduced the Romans to the chief...
made a teleological argument
Teleological argument
A teleological or design argument is an a posteriori argument for the existence of God based on apparent design and purpose in the universe. The argument is based on an interpretation of teleology wherein purpose and intelligent design appear to exist in nature beyond the scope of any such human...
that anticipated the watchmaker analogy
Watchmaker analogy
The watchmaker analogy, or watchmaker argument, is a teleological argument for the existence of God. By way of an analogy, the argument states that design implies a designer...
, 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)
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
Galen
Aelius Galenus or Claudius Galenus , better known as Galen of Pergamon , was a prominent Roman physician, surgeon and philosopher...
, Stoic
STOIC
STOIC was a variant of Forth.It started out at the MIT and Harvard Biomedical Engineering Centre in Boston, and was written in the mid 1970s by Jonathan Sachs...
Roman
Ancient Rome
Ancient Rome was a thriving civilization that grew on the Italian Peninsula as early as the 8th century BC. Located along the Mediterranean Sea and centered on the city of Rome, it expanded to one of the largest empires in the ancient world....
physician
Physician
A physician is a health care provider who practices the profession of medicine, which is concerned with promoting, maintaining or restoring human health through the study, diagnosis, and treatment of disease, injury and other physical and mental impairments...
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.
Augustine of Hippo
Augustine of Hippo , also known as Augustine, St. Augustine, St. Austin, St. Augoustinos, Blessed Augustine, or St. Augustine the Blessed, was Bishop of Hippo Regius . He was a Latin-speaking philosopher and theologian who lived in the Roman Africa Province...
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
Adam and Eve
Adam and Eve were, according to the Genesis creation narratives, the first human couple to inhabit Earth, created by YHWH, the God of the ancient Hebrews...
, and the Flood
Noah's Ark
Noah's Ark is a vessel appearing in the Book of Genesis and the Quran . These narratives describe the construction of the ark by Noah at God's command to save himself, his family, and the world's animals from the worldwide deluge of the Great Flood.In the narrative of the ark, God sees the...
. 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.
610 - 632 – Muhammad
Muhammad
Muhammad |ligature]] at U+FDF4 ;Arabic pronunciation varies regionally; the first vowel ranges from ~~; the second and the last vowel: ~~~. There are dialects which have no stress. In Egypt, it is pronounced not in religious contexts...
reports receiving the Qur'an
Qur'an
The Quran , also transliterated Qur'an, Koran, Alcoran, Qur’ān, Coran, Kuran, and al-Qur’ān, is the central religious text of Islam, which Muslims consider the verbatim word of God . It is regarded widely as the finest piece of literature in the Arabic language...
by divine revelation. The Qur'an holds many of the core concepts of creationism, including a 6-day creation, Adam and Eve
Adam and Eve
Adam and Eve were, according to the Genesis creation narratives, the first human couple to inhabit Earth, created by YHWH, the God of the ancient Hebrews...
, Enoch
Enoch (ancestor of Noah)
Enoch is a figure in the Generations of Adam. Enoch is described as Adam's greatx4 grandson , the son of Jared, the father of Methuselah, and the great-grandfather of Noah...
, and Noah's ark
Noah's Ark
Noah's Ark is a vessel appearing in the Book of Genesis and the Quran . These narratives describe the construction of the ark by Noah at God's command to save himself, his family, and the world's animals from the worldwide deluge of the Great Flood.In the narrative of the ark, God sees the...
, but also provides some details absent from Genesis, including reference to a fourth son of Noah
Sons of Noah
The Seventy Nations or Sons of Noah is an extensive list of descendants of Noah appearing in of the Hebrew Bible, representing an ethnology from an Iron Age Levantine perspective...
who chose not to enter the ark. Through Islam
Islam
Islam . The most common are and . : Arabic pronunciation varies regionally. The first vowel ranges from ~~. The second vowel ranges from ~~~...
, creation beliefs and monotheism
Monotheism
Monotheism is the belief in the existence of one and only one god. Monotheism is characteristic of the Baha'i Faith, Christianity, Druzism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, Samaritanism, Sikhism and Zoroastrianism.While they profess the existence of only one deity, monotheistic religions may still...
replace paganism
Paganism
Paganism is a blanket term, typically used to refer to non-Abrahamic, indigenous polytheistic religious traditions....
among the Arabs.
Renaissance and protoscience
The RenaissanceRenaissance
The Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned roughly the 14th to the 17th century, beginning in Italy in the Late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe. The term is also used more loosely to refer to the historical era, but since the changes of the Renaissance were not...
starting in the 14th century saw the establishment of protoscience
Protoscience
In the philosophy of science, a protoscience is an area of scientific endeavor that is in the process of becoming established. Protoscience is distinguished from pseudoscience by its standard practices of good science, such as a willingness to be disproven by new evidence, or to be replaced by a...
that eventually became modern science
Science
Science is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe...
. This was a period of great social change
Social change
Social change refers to an alteration in the social order of a society. It may refer to the notion of social progress or sociocultural evolution, the philosophical idea that society moves forward by dialectical or evolutionary means. It may refer to a paradigmatic change in the socio-economic...
.
The Protestant Reformation
Protestant Reformation
The Protestant Reformation was a 16th-century split within Western Christianity initiated by Martin Luther, John Calvin and other early Protestants. The efforts of the self-described "reformers", who objected to the doctrines, rituals and ecclesiastical structure of the Roman Catholic Church, led...
introduced lay people reading the Bible in translation and more literal understandings, and led to a new belief that every biological species had been individually created by God.
Protoscience
The Baconian methodBaconian method
The Baconian method is the investigative method developed by Sir Francis Bacon. The method was put forward in Bacon's book Novum Organum , or 'New Method', and was supposed to replace the methods put forward in Aristotle's Organon...
introduced the empirical scientific method
Scientific method
Scientific method refers to a body of techniques for investigating phenomena, acquiring new knowledge, or correcting and integrating previous knowledge. To be termed scientific, a method of inquiry must be based on gathering empirical and measurable evidence subject to specific principles of...
. Natural theology
Natural theology
Natural theology is a branch of theology based on reason and ordinary experience. Thus it is distinguished from revealed theology which is based on scripture and religious experiences of various kinds; and also from transcendental theology, theology from a priori reasoning.Marcus Terentius Varro ...
sought evidence in nature supporting Christianity.
Nicolaus Copernicus
Nicolaus Copernicus
Nicolaus Copernicus was a Renaissance astronomer and the first person to formulate a comprehensive heliocentric cosmology which displaced the Earth from the center of the universe....
's idea of Heliocentrism
Heliocentrism
Heliocentrism, or heliocentricism, is the astronomical model in which the Earth and planets revolve around a stationary Sun at the center of the universe. The word comes from the Greek . Historically, heliocentrism was opposed to geocentrism, which placed the Earth at the center...
was proposed in the 16th century and established by Galileo Galilei
Galileo Galilei
Galileo Galilei , was an Italian physicist, mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher who played a major role in the Scientific Revolution. His achievements include improvements to the telescope and consequent astronomical observations and support for Copernicanism...
, Johannes Kepler
Johannes Kepler
Johannes Kepler was a German mathematician, astronomer and astrologer. A key figure in the 17th century scientific revolution, he is best known for his eponymous laws of planetary motion, codified by later astronomers, based on his works Astronomia nova, Harmonices Mundi, and Epitome of Copernican...
and Newton
Isaac Newton
Sir Isaac Newton PRS was an English physicist, mathematician, astronomer, natural philosopher, alchemist, and theologian, who has been "considered by many to be the greatest and most influential scientist who ever lived."...
. 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.
The English naturalist John Ray
John Ray
John Ray was an English naturalist, sometimes referred to as the father of English natural history. Until 1670, he wrote his name as John Wray. From then on, he used 'Ray', after "having ascertained that such had been the practice of his family before him".He published important works on botany,...
(29 November 1627 - 17 January 1705) 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
Teleological argument
A teleological or design argument is an a posteriori argument for the existence of God based on apparent design and purpose in the universe. The argument is based on an interpretation of teleology wherein purpose and intelligent design appear to exist in nature beyond the scope of any such human...
), such as the structure of the eye, the hollowness of the bones, the camel's stomach and the hedgehog's armor.
Carolus Linnaeus
Carolus Linnaeus
Carl Linnaeus , also known after his ennoblement as , was a Swedish botanist, physician, and zoologist, who laid the foundations for the modern scheme of binomial nomenclature. He is known as the father of modern taxonomy, and is also considered one of the fathers of modern ecology...
, in the 18th century, established a system of classification of species
Species
In biology, a species is one of the basic units of biological classification and a taxonomic rank. A species is often defined as a group of organisms capable of interbreeding and producing fertile offspring. While in many cases this definition is adequate, more precise or differing measures are...
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
Common descent
In evolutionary biology, a group of organisms share common descent if they have a common ancestor. There is strong quantitative support for the theory that all living organisms on Earth are descended from a common ancestor....
.
Religious arguments
In 1650 the Church of Ireland Archbishop of Armagh, James UssherJames Ussher
James Ussher was Church of Ireland Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland between 1625–56...
, published a monumental history of the world from creation to 70 A.D. He used the recorded genealogies and ages in the bible
Bible
The Bible refers to any one of the collections of the primary religious texts of Judaism and Christianity. There is no common version of the Bible, as the individual books , their contents and their order vary among denominations...
to derive what is commonly known as the Ussher chronology. This calculated a date for creation at 4004 BC. The date was widely accepted in the English-speaking world.
In 1696, William Whiston
William Whiston
William Whiston was an English theologian, historian, and mathematician. He is probably best known for his translation of the Antiquities of the Jews and other works by Josephus, his A New Theory of the Earth, and his Arianism...
published A New Theory of the Earth
A New Theory of the Earth
A New Theory of the Earth was a book written by William Whiston, in which he presented a description of the divine creation of the Earth and a posited global flood. He also postulated that the earth originated from the atmosphere of a comet and that all major changes in earth's history could be...
, 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
Comet
A comet is an icy small Solar System body that, when close enough to the Sun, displays a visible coma and sometimes also a tail. These phenomena are both due to the effects of solar radiation and the solar wind upon the nucleus of the comet...
.
The English divine William Derham
William Derham
William Derham was an English clergyman and natural philosopher. He produced the earliest, reasonably accurate estimate of the speed of sound.-Life:...
(26 November 1657 - 5 April 1735) published his Artificial Clockmaker in 1696 and Physico-Theology in 1713. These books were teleological argument
Teleological argument
A teleological or design argument is an a posteriori argument for the existence of God based on apparent design and purpose in the universe. The argument is based on an interpretation of teleology wherein purpose and intelligent design appear to exist in nature beyond the scope of any such human...
s for the being and attributes of God, and were used by Paley nearly a century later.
The Watchmaker analogy
Watchmaker analogy
The watchmaker analogy, or watchmaker argument, is a teleological argument for the existence of God. By way of an analogy, the argument states that design implies a designer...
was put by Bernard Nieuwentyt
Bernard Nieuwentyt
Bernard Nieuwentijt, Nieuwentijdt, or Nieuwentyt was a Dutch philosopher, mathematician, physician, magistrate, mayor , and theologian...
(1730) and referred to several times by Paley. A charge of wholesale plagiarism
Plagiarism
Plagiarism is defined in dictionaries as the "wrongful appropriation," "close imitation," or "purloining and publication" of another author's "language, thoughts, ideas, or expressions," and the representation of them as one's own original work, but the notion remains problematic with nebulous...
from this book was brought against Paley in the Athenaeum
Athenaeum Club, London
The Athenaeum Club, usually just referred to as the Athenaeum, is a notable London club with its Clubhouse located at 107 Pall Mall, London, England, at the corner of Waterloo Place....
for 1848, but the famous illustration of the watch was not peculiar to Nieuwentyt, and had been appropriated by many others before Paley.
David Hume
David Hume
David Hume was a Scottish philosopher, historian, economist, and essayist, known especially for his philosophical empiricism and skepticism. He was one of the most important figures in the history of Western philosophy and the Scottish Enlightenment...
(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
Begging the question
Begging the question is a type of logical fallacy in which the proposition to be proven is assumed implicitly or explicitly in the premise....
of the origin of God, and that design was merely a human projection
Anthropomorphism
Anthropomorphism is any attribution of human characteristics to animals, non-living things, phenomena, material states, objects or abstract concepts, such as organizations, governments, spirits or deities. The term was coined in the mid 1700s...
onto the forces of nature.
Modern geology and gap theory
James HuttonJames Hutton
James Hutton was a Scottish physician, geologist, naturalist, chemical manufacturer and experimental agriculturalist. He is considered the father of modern geology...
is often viewed as the first modern geologist
Geology
Geology is the science comprising the study of solid Earth, the rocks of which it is composed, and the processes by which it evolves. Geology gives insight into the history of the Earth, as it provides the primary evidence for plate tectonics, the evolutionary history of life, and past climates...
. In 1785 he presented a paper entitled Theory of the Earth to the Royal Society of Edinburgh
Royal Society of Edinburgh
The Royal Society of Edinburgh is Scotland's national academy of science and letters. It is a registered charity, operating on a wholly independent and non-party-political basis and providing public benefit throughout Scotland...
. Based upon a detailed examination of what we now recognise as the lithosphere, hydrosphere and atmosphere he showed that the present forces seen on the earth were sufficient to explain all the phenomena observed. He wrote "The Mosaic history places this beginning of man at no great distance; and there has not been found, in natural history, any document by which a high antiquity can be attribted to the human race. But this is not the case with regard to the inferior species of animals, particularly those which inhabit the ocean and its shorees. We find in natural history monuments which prove that those animals had long existed; and thus we thus preocure a measure for the computation of time extremely remote though far from being precisely ascertained"(p8) Based upon these principles of uniformitarianism
Uniformitarianism (science)
In the philosophy of naturalism, the uniformitarianism assumption is that the same natural laws and processes that operate in the universe now, have always operated in the universe in the past and apply everywhere in the universe. It has included the gradualistic concept that "the present is the...
, he demonstrated that the Earth is much older than had previously been supposed in order to allow enough time for mountains to be eroded
Erosion
Erosion is when materials are removed from the surface and changed into something else. It only works by hydraulic actions and transport of solids in the natural environment, and leads to the deposition of these materials elsewhere...
and for sediment
Sediment
Sediment is naturally occurring material that is broken down by processes of weathering and erosion, and is subsequently transported by the action of fluids such as wind, water, or ice, and/or by the force of gravity acting on the particle itself....
to form new rocks at the bottom of the sea, which in turn were raised up to become dry land. The presumption that the world was only 6,000 years old was scientifically abandoned as a result of Hutton's work.
This development of the scientific discipline of geology, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and the discovery that the Earth was far older than a literal interpretation of the Book of Genesis could account for, led to the development, and popularity, of the Gap Theory (now known as gap creationism
Gap Creationism
Gap creationism is a form of Old Earth creationism that posits that the six-day creation, as described in the Book of Genesis, involved literal 24-hour days, but that there was a gap of time between two distinct creations in the first and the second verses of Genesis, explaining...
) to accommodate these discoveries. Gap Theory assumes a recent six-day creation, but also that the Earth existed for many ages before this event, ending in cataclysm and a new creation (hence its alternative title 'ruin-restoration theory').
In the early 19th century, "a heterogeneous group of writers," known as scriptural geologists, arose to oppose these discoveries, and the Gap Theory. Their views were marginalised and ignored by the scientific community
Scientific community
The scientific community consists of the total body of scientists, its relationships and interactions. It is normally divided into "sub-communities" each working on a particular field within science. Objectivity is expected to be achieved by the scientific method...
of their time. They "had much the same relationship to 'philosophical' (or scientific) geologists as their indirect descendants, the twentieth-century creationists." Paul Wood describes them as "mostly Anglican evangelicals" with "no institutional focus and little sense of commonality." They generally lacked any background in geology, and had little influence even in church circles.
From 1830 to 1833, the geologist and clergyman Sir Charles Lyell
Charles Lyell
Sir Charles Lyell, 1st Baronet, Kt FRS was a British lawyer and the foremost geologist of his day. He is best known as the author of Principles of Geology, which popularised James Hutton's concepts of uniformitarianism – the idea that the earth was shaped by slow-moving forces still in operation...
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
John Herschel
Sir John Frederick William Herschel, 1st Baronet KH, FRS ,was an English mathematician, astronomer, chemist, and experimental photographer/inventor, who in some years also did valuable botanical work...
supported this gradualist view and wrote to Lyell urging a search for natural laws underlying the "mystery of mysteries" of how species formed.
In 1857, Philip Henry Gosse
Philip Henry Gosse
Philip Henry Gosse was an English naturalist and popularizer of natural science, virtually the inventor of the seawater aquarium, and a painstaking innovator in the study of marine biology...
published Omphalos: Untying the Geological Knot
Omphalos (book)
Omphalos: An Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot is a book by Philip Gosse, written in 1857 , in which he argues that the fossil record is not evidence of evolution, but rather that it is an act of creation inevitably made so that the world would appear to be older than it is...
. 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
Blasphemy
Blasphemy is irreverence towards religious or holy persons or things. Some countries have laws to punish blasphemy, while others have laws to give recourse to those who are offended by blasphemy...
because it accused the Creator of deceit. Some young Earth creationists
Young Earth creationism
Young Earth creationism is the religious belief that Heavens, Earth, and all life on Earth were created by direct acts of the Abrahamic God during a relatively short period, sometime between 5,700 and 10,000 years ago...
would later incorporate parts of his arguments.
Pre-Darwinian biology
Erasmus DarwinErasmus Darwin
Erasmus Darwin was an English physician who turned down George III's invitation to be a physician to the King. One of the key thinkers of the Midlands Enlightenment, he was also a natural philosopher, physiologist, slave trade abolitionist,inventor and poet...
published his Zoönomia
Zoönomia
Zoonomia; or the Laws of Organic Life is a two-volume medical work by Erasmus Darwin dealing with pathology, anatomy, psychology, and the functioning of the body...
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."
Advances in paleontology
Paleontology
Paleontology "old, ancient", ὄν, ὀντ- "being, creature", and λόγος "speech, thought") is the study of prehistoric life. It includes the study of fossils to determine organisms' evolution and interactions with each other and their environments...
, led by William Smith
William Smith (geologist)
William 'Strata' Smith was an English geologist, credited with creating the first nationwide geological map. He is known as the "Father of English Geology" for collating the geological history of England and Wales into a single record, although recognition was very slow in coming...
saw the recording of the first fossil records that showed the transmutation of species
Transmutation of species
Transmutation of species was a term used by Jean Baptiste Lamarck in 1809 for his theory that described the altering of one species into another, and the term is often used to describe 19th century evolutionary ideas that preceded Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection...
. Then, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck
Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, Chevalier de la Marck , often known simply as Lamarck, was a French naturalist...
proposed, in his Philosophie Zoologique of 1809, a theory of evolution, later known as Lamarckism
Lamarckism
Lamarckism is the idea that an organism can pass on characteristics that it acquired during its lifetime to its offspring . It is named after the French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck , who incorporated the action of soft inheritance into his evolutionary theories...
, by which traits that were "needed" were passed on.
William Paley
William Paley was a British Christian apologist, philosopher, and utilitarian. He is best known for his exposition of the teleological argument for the existence of God in his work Natural Theology, which made use of the watchmaker analogy .-Life:Paley was Born in Peterborough, England, and was...
published Natural Theology
Natural theology
Natural theology is a branch of theology based on reason and ordinary experience. Thus it is distinguished from revealed theology which is based on scripture and religious experiences of various kinds; and also from transcendental theology, theology from a priori reasoning.Marcus Terentius Varro ...
in response to naturalists such as Hume, refining the ancient teleological argument
Teleological argument
A teleological or design argument is an a posteriori argument for the existence of God based on apparent design and purpose in the universe. The argument is based on an interpretation of teleology wherein purpose and intelligent design appear to exist in nature beyond the scope of any such human...
(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.
The official eight Bridgewater Treatises "On the Power, Wisdom and Goodness of God, as manifested in the Creation" included the Reverend William Buckland
William Buckland
The Very Rev. Dr William Buckland DD FRS was an English geologist, palaeontologist and Dean of Westminster, who wrote the first full account of a fossil dinosaur, which he named Megalosaurus...
'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
Charles Babbage
Charles Babbage, FRS was an English mathematician, philosopher, inventor and mechanical engineer who originated the concept of a programmable computer...
then published his unofficial Ninth Bridgewater Treatise in 1837, putting forward a thesis that God had the omnipotence and foresight to create as a divine legislator, making laws (or programs) that 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
Richard Owen
Sir Richard Owen, FRS KCB was an English biologist, comparative anatomist and palaeontologist.Owen is probably best remembered today for coining the word Dinosauria and for his outspoken opposition to Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection...
had theories influenced by Johannes Peter Müller
Johannes Peter Müller
Johannes Peter Müller , was a German physiologist, comparative anatomist, and ichthyologist not only known for his discoveries but also for his ability to synthesize knowledge.-Early years and education:...
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.
Late in 1844 the anonymous publication of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation
Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation
Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation is a unique work of speculative natural history published anonymously in England in 1844. It brought together various ideas of stellar evolution with the progressive transmutation of species in an accessible narrative which tied together numerous...
popularised the idea of divinely ordered development of everything from stellar evolution
Stellar evolution
Stellar evolution is the process by which a star undergoes a sequence of radical changes during its lifetime. Depending on the mass of the star, this lifetime ranges from only a few million years to trillions of years .Stellar evolution is not studied by observing the life of a single...
to transmutation of species
Transmutation of species
Transmutation of species was a term used by Jean Baptiste Lamarck in 1809 for his theory that described the altering of one species into another, and the term is often used to describe 19th century evolutionary ideas that preceded Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection...
. It quickly gained fashionable success in court circles and aroused interest in all sections of society. It also aroused religious controversy, and after initially being slow to respond, the scientific establishment attacked the book. It continued to be a best seller to around the end of the century.
Herbert Spencer
Herbert Spencer
Herbert Spencer was an English philosopher, biologist, sociologist, and prominent classical liberal political theorist of the Victorian era....
was a 19th century 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
Social Darwinism
Social Darwinism is a term commonly used for theories of society that emerged in England and the United States in the 1870s, seeking to apply the principles of Darwinian evolution to sociology and politics...
. It is also he and not Darwin who coined the phrase survival of the fittest
Survival of the fittest
"Survival of the fittest" is a phrase originating in evolutionary theory, as an alternative description of Natural selection. The phrase is today commonly used in contexts that are incompatible with the original meaning as intended by its first two proponents: British polymath philosopher Herbert...
. 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 so-called "social Darwinism" or its derivative philosophies such as eugenics
Eugenics
Eugenics is the "applied science or the bio-social movement which advocates the use of practices aimed at improving the genetic composition of a population", usually referring to human populations. The origins of the concept of eugenics began with certain interpretations of Mendelian inheritance,...
.
Age of Darwin
Charles Darwin
Charles Robert Darwin FRS was an English naturalist. He established that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestry, and proposed the scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called natural selection.He published his theory...
's publication of The Origin of Species
The Origin of Species
Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, published on 24 November 1859, is a work of scientific literature which is considered to be the foundation of evolutionary biology. Its full title was On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the...
, in 1859, saw the overwhelming majority of North American and British naturalists accept some form of evolution, with many liberal and educated churchmen following their example, and thereby rejecting a biblically literalist
Biblical literalism
Biblical literalism is the interpretation or translation of the explicit and primary sense of words in the Bible. A literal Biblical interpretation is associated with the fundamentalist and evangelical hermeneutical approach to Scripture, and is used almost exclusively by conservative Christians...
interpretation of Genesis. Although Darwin's work rejected "the dogma of separate creations," he invoked creation as the probable source of the first lifeforms ("into which life was first breathed"). This led Asa Gray
Asa Gray
-References:*Asa Gray. Dictionary of American Biography. American Council of Learned Societies, 1928–1936.*Asa Gray. Encyclopedia of World Biography, 2nd ed. 17 Vols. Gale Research, 1998.*Asa Gray. Plant Sciences. 4 vols. Macmillan Reference USA, 2001....
, who was both religiously orthodox, and Darwin's most prominent American supporter, to suggest that Darwin had accepted "a supernatural beginning of life on earth" and that he should therefore allow a second "special origination" for humanity. Darwin however rejected this view, and used uncompromisingly naturalistic language in place of biblical idiom, starting with The Descent of Man in 1871.
Darwin's book caused less controversy than he had feared, as the idea of evolution had been widely popularized in Victorian
Victorian era
The Victorian era of British history was the period of Queen Victoria's reign from 20 June 1837 until her death on 22 January 1901. It was a long period of peace, prosperity, refined sensibilities and national self-confidence...
Britain
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
by the 1844 publication of Vestiges of Creation. However, it posed fundamental questions about the relationship between religion and science
Relationship between religion and science
The relationship between religion and science has been a focus of the demarcation problem. Somewhat related is the claim that science and religion may pursue knowledge using different methodologies. Whereas the scientific method basically relies on reason and empiricism, religion also seeks to...
. 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
Common descent
In evolutionary biology, a group of organisms share common descent if they have a common ancestor. There is strong quantitative support for the theory that all living organisms on Earth are descended from a common ancestor....
) who had evolved a particular set of characteristics — rather than a spiritual being created by God — continued to be one of the most divisive notions of the 19th century. One of the most famous disputes was the Oxford
Oxford
The city of Oxford is the county town of Oxfordshire, England. The city, made prominent by its medieval university, has a population of just under 165,000, with 153,900 living within the district boundary. It lies about 50 miles north-west of London. The rivers Cherwell and Thames run through...
Debate of 1860, in which T.H. Huxley, Darwin's self-appointed "bulldog," debate
Debate
Debate or debating is a method of interactive and representational argument. Debate is a broader form of argument than logical argument, which only examines consistency from axiom, and factual argument, which only examines what is or isn't the case or rhetoric which is a technique of persuasion...
d evolution with Samuel Wilberforce
Samuel Wilberforce
Samuel Wilberforce was an English bishop in the Church of England, third son of William Wilberforce. Known as "Soapy Sam", Wilberforce was one of the greatest public speakers of his time and place...
, the Bishop
Bishop
A bishop is an ordained or consecrated member of the Christian clergy who is generally entrusted with a position of authority and oversight. Within the Catholic Church, Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox Churches, in the Assyrian Church of the East, in the Independent Catholic Churches, and in the...
of Oxford. Both sides claimed victory, then the controversy was overshadowed by the even greater theological furore over the publication of Essays and Reviews
Essays and Reviews
Essays and Reviews, published in March 1860, is a broad-church volume of seven essays on Christianity. The topics covered the biblical research of the German critics, the evidence for Christianity, religious thought in England, and the cosmology of Genesis....
questioning whether miracles were atheistic, bringing to a head arguments in the Church of England
Church of England
The Church of England is the officially established Christian church in England and the Mother Church of the worldwide Anglican Communion. The church considers itself within the tradition of Western Christianity and dates its formal establishment principally to the mission to England by St...
between liberal theologians
Liberal Christianity
Liberal Christianity, sometimes called liberal theology, is an umbrella term covering diverse, philosophically and biblically informed religious movements and ideas within Christianity from the late 18th century and onward...
supporting higher criticism, and conservative Evangelicals
Evangelicalism
Evangelicalism is a Protestant Christian movement which began in Great Britain in the 1730s and gained popularity in the United States during the series of Great Awakenings of the 18th and 19th century.Its key commitments are:...
. The essays were described by their opponents as heretical
Heresy
Heresy is a controversial or novel change to a system of beliefs, especially a religion, that conflicts with established dogma. It is distinct from apostasy, which is the formal denunciation of one's religion, principles or cause, and blasphemy, which is irreverence toward religion...
, and the essayists were called "The Seven Against Christ."
In 1862, the Glaswegian
Glasgow
Glasgow is the largest city in Scotland and third most populous in the United Kingdom. The city is situated on the River Clyde in the country's west central lowlands...
physicist William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin)
William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin
William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin OM, GCVO, PC, PRS, PRSE, was a mathematical physicist and engineer. At the University of Glasgow he did important work in the mathematical analysis of electricity and formulation of the first and second laws of thermodynamics, and did much to unify the emerging...
published calculations, based on his presumption of uniformitarianism
Uniformitarianism (science)
In the philosophy of naturalism, the uniformitarianism assumption is that the same natural laws and processes that operate in the universe now, have always operated in the universe in the past and apply everywhere in the universe. It has included the gradualistic concept that "the present is the...
, and that the heat of the sun was caused by its gravitational shrinkage, that fixed the age of the Earth
Age of the Earth
The age of the Earth is 4.54 billion years This age is based on evidence from radiometric age dating of meteorite material and is consistent with the ages of the oldest-known terrestrial and lunar samples...
and the solar system
Solar System
The Solar System consists of the Sun and the astronomical objects gravitationally bound in orbit around it, all of which formed from the collapse of a giant molecular cloud approximately 4.6 billion years ago. The vast majority of the system's mass is in the Sun...
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
Geology
Geology is the science comprising the study of solid Earth, the rocks of which it is composed, and the processes by which it evolves. Geology gives insight into the history of the Earth, as it provides the primary evidence for plate tectonics, the evolutionary history of life, and past climates...
and the discovery of radioactivity that showed that the sun was in fact heated by nuclear fusion
Nuclear fusion
Nuclear fusion is the process by which two or more atomic nuclei join together, or "fuse", to form a single heavier nucleus. This is usually accompanied by the release or absorption of large quantities of energy...
that demonstrated the present estimated 4.567 billion years, or ~700,000 times Ussher's value. A way to measure the age of the universe
Age of the universe
The age of the universe is the time elapsed since the Big Bang posited by the most widely accepted scientific model of cosmology. The best current estimate of the age of the universe is 13.75 ± 0.13 billion years within the Lambda-CDM concordance model...
would be discovered by Edwin Hubble
Edwin Hubble
Edwin Powell Hubble was an American astronomer who profoundly changed the understanding of the universe by confirming the existence of galaxies other than the Milky Way - our own galaxy...
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 13.73 billion years or some ~2,000,000 times Ussher's value.
The Swiss-American paleontologist Louis Agassiz
Louis Agassiz
Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz was a Swiss paleontologist, glaciologist, geologist and a prominent innovator in the study of the Earth's natural history. He grew up in Switzerland and became a professor of natural history at University of Neuchâtel...
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. Though uniformitarianism dominated ideas from the 1840s onwards, Catastrophism
Catastrophism
Catastrophism is the theory that the Earth has been affected in the past by sudden, short-lived, violent events, possibly worldwide in scope. The dominant paradigm of modern geology is uniformitarianism , in which slow incremental changes, such as erosion, create the Earth's appearance...
remained a major paradigm in geology
Geology
Geology is the science comprising the study of solid Earth, the rocks of which it is composed, and the processes by which it evolves. Geology gives insight into the history of the Earth, as it provides the primary evidence for plate tectonics, the evolutionary history of life, and past climates...
until replaced by new models that allowed for both cataclysms (such as meteor strikes) and gradualist patterns (such as ice age
Ice age
An ice age or, more precisely, glacial age, is a generic geological period of long-term reduction in the temperature of the Earth's surface and atmosphere, resulting in the presence or expansion of continental ice sheets, polar ice sheets and alpine glaciers...
s) to explain observed geologic phenomena.
In 1878, American Presbyterians held the first annual Niagara Bible Conference
Niagara Bible Conference
The Niagara Bible Conference was held annually from 1876 to 1897, with the exception of 1884. In the first few years it met in different resort locations around the United States...
, founding the Christian fundamentalist movement, which took its name from the "Five Fundamentals" of 1910, and came to be concerned about the implications of evolution for the accuracy of the Bible. But by no means all orthodox Presbyterians were opposed to evolution as a possible method of the Divine procedure. Dr Charles Hodge
Charles Hodge
Charles Hodge was the principal of Princeton Theological Seminary between 1851 and 1878. A Presbyterian theologian, he was a leading exponent of historical Calvinism in America during the 19th century. He was deeply rooted in the Scottish philosophy of Common Sense Realism...
of Princeton Seminary objected in 1874 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, and most churchmen sought to reconcile Darwinism with Christianity.
Darwin died in 1882. In 1915, Lady Elizabeth Hope
Elizabeth Hope
Elizabeth Reid, Lady Hope, née Cotton was a British evangelist who claimed in 1915 to have visited the British naturalist Charles Darwin shortly before his death in 1882, during which interview Hope claimed Darwin had had second thoughts about publicizing the theory of evolution.- Biography...
spread rumors that he had repented and accepted God on his deathbed. Lady Hope's story is almost certainly false, and it is unlikely that she visited Darwin as she claimed.
Early 20th century
In the 1920s, the term creationism became particularly associated with a Christian fundamentalistFundamentalist Christianity
Christian fundamentalism, also known as Fundamentalist Christianity, or Fundamentalism, arose out of British and American Protestantism in the late 19th century and early 20th century among evangelical Christians...
movement opposed to the idea of human evolution
Human evolution
Human evolution refers to the evolutionary history of the genus Homo, including the emergence of Homo sapiens as a distinct species and as a unique category of hominids and mammals...
, which succeeded in getting teaching of evolution
Evolution
Evolution is any change across successive generations in the heritable characteristics of biological populations. Evolutionary processes give rise to diversity at every level of biological organisation, including species, individual organisms and molecules such as DNA and proteins.Life on Earth...
banned in United States public schools. From the mid 1960s young Earth creationism
Young Earth creationism
Young Earth creationism is the religious belief that Heavens, Earth, and all life on Earth were created by direct acts of the Abrahamic God during a relatively short period, sometime between 5,700 and 10,000 years ago...
proposed "scientific creationism" using "Flood geology
Flood geology
Flood geology is the interpretation of the geological history of the Earth in terms of the global flood described in Genesis 6–9. Similar views played a part in the early development of the science of geology, even after the Biblical chronology had been rejected by geologists in favour of an...
" as support for a literal reading of Genesis. After legal judgements that teaching this in public schools contravened constitutional separation of Church and State
Separation of church and state
The concept of the separation of church and state refers to the distance in the relationship between organized religion and the nation state....
, it was stripped of biblical references and called creation science
Creation science
Creation Science or scientific creationism is a branch of creationism that attempts to provide scientific support for the Genesis creation narrative in the Book of Genesis and disprove generally accepted scientific facts, theories and scientific paradigms about the history of the Earth, cosmology...
, then when this was ruled unacceptable, intelligent design
Intelligent design
Intelligent design is the proposition that "certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection." It is a form of creationism and a contemporary adaptation of the traditional teleological argument for...
was coined.
The decades before the start of the 20th century, and the first decades of that century, have been described as the eclipse of Darwinism. Darwin's work had quickly established scientific consensus that evolution occurred, but there was considerable disagreement about the mechanisms involved, and few gave as much significance to natural selection as Darwin himself. 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
Orthogenesis
Orthogenesis, orthogenetic evolution, progressive evolution or autogenesis, is the hypothesis that life has an innate tendency to evolve in a unilinear fashion due to some internal or external "driving force". The hypothesis is based on essentialism and cosmic teleology and proposes an intrinsic...
("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
Hugo de Vries
Hugo Marie de Vries ForMemRS was a Dutch botanist and one of the first geneticists. He is known chiefly for suggesting the concept of genes, rediscovering the laws of heredity in the 1890s while unaware of Gregor Mendel's work, for introducing the term "mutation", and for developing a mutation...
' 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. The term Darwinism
Darwinism
Darwinism is a set of movements and concepts related to ideas of transmutation of species or of evolution, including some ideas with no connection to the work of Charles Darwin....
had covered a wide range of ideas, many of which differed from Darwin's views, but it became associated with the minority view of August Weismann
August Weismann
Friedrich Leopold August Weismann was a German evolutionary biologist. Ernst Mayr ranked him the second most notable evolutionary theorist of the 19th century, after Charles Darwin...
who went further than Darwin by rejecting inheritance of acquired characters
Inheritance of acquired characters
The inheritance of acquired characteristics is a hypothesis that physiological changes acquired over the life of an organism may be transmitted to offspring...
and attributing all evolution to natural selection, a view also called neo-Darwinism
Neo-Darwinism
Neo-Darwinism is the 'modern synthesis' of Darwinian evolution through natural selection with Mendelian genetics, the latter being a set of primary tenets specifying that evolution involves the transmission of characteristics from parent to child through the mechanism of genetic transfer, rather...
. By the first decades of the 20th century, the debate had become generally one between continuous-variation biometricians and discontinuous-variety Mendelians. In the 1930s and 1940s, though, they were combined with natural selection into the modern evolutionary synthesis
Modern evolutionary synthesis
The modern evolutionary synthesis is a union of ideas from several biological specialties which provides a widely accepted account of evolution...
, which soon became the dominant model in the scientific community. This model has also been called Darwinism and neo-Darwinism.
George McCready Price
George McCready Price
George McCready Price was a Canadian creationist. He produced several anti-evolution and creationist works, particularly on the subject of flood geology...
was important in developing flood geology
Flood geology
Flood geology is the interpretation of the geological history of the Earth in terms of the global flood described in Genesis 6–9. Similar views played a part in the early development of the science of geology, even after the Biblical chronology had been rejected by geologists in favour of an...
, and while he had limited influence at a time when all geologists had long accepted an ancient earth, many of his ideas that a young earth could be deduced from science were taken up later. Price was a Seventh-day Adventist
Seventh-day Adventist Church
The Seventh-day Adventist Church is a Protestant Christian denomination distinguished by its observance of Saturday, the original seventh day of the Judeo-Christian week, as the Sabbath, and by its emphasis on the imminent second coming of Jesus Christ...
, and followed one of the founders of the church, Ellen White, in seeing fossils as evidence of the Great Flood. In 1906, Price published Illogical Geology: The Weakest Point in the Evolution Theory in which he offered $1000 "to any one who will, in the face of the facts here presented, show me how to prove that one kind of fossil is older than another."
United States
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 ScripturesBible
The Bible refers to any one of the collections of the primary religious texts of Judaism and Christianity. There is no common version of the Bible, as the individual books , their contents and their order vary among denominations...
, including the Genesis account of creation. The Fundamentals
The Fundamentals
The Fundamentals or The Fundamentals: A Testimony To The Truth edited by A. C. Dixon and later by Reuben Archer Torrey is a set of 90 essays in 12 volumes published from 1910 to 1915 by the Bible Institute of Los Angeles. They were designed to affirm orthodox Protestant beliefs and defend against...
were published as a series of essays. Its authors accepted ancient earth geology, while holding different ideas about how this was reconciled with biblical accounts. The views expressed on evolution were mixed: two short articles were anti evolution, one anonymous and one by the little known Henry Beach. Their focus was on human evolution, as were attacks made on evolution by Dyson Hague
Dyson Hague
Dyson Hague was a Canadian evangelical Anglican rector, author and lecturer.-Early life and education:Hague was born in Toronto in April 1857 to Sarah Cousins and George Hague. He was educated at Upper Canada College before earning his B.A. and M.A. at University College and his D.D. at Wycliffe...
. Major figures were explicitly open to the possibility that God created through a Lamarckian form of evolution: long articles by James Orr
James Orr (theologian)
James Orr was a Scottish Presbyterian minister and professor of church history and then theology. He was an influential defender of evangelical doctrine and a contributor to The Fundamentals.- Biography :...
and George Frederick Wright
George Frederick Wright
George Frederick Wright was an American geologist and a professor at Oberlin Theological Seminary, first of New Testament language and literature , and then of "harmony of science and revelation" . He wrote prolifically, publishing works in geology, history, and theology...
expressed this openness, and Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield
Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield
Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield was professor of theology at Princeton Seminary from 1887 to 1921. Some conservative Presbyterians consider him to be the last of the great Princeton theologians before the split in 1929 that formed Westminster Seminary and the Orthodox Presbyterian Church.-Early...
and A H Strong shared this view.
After the First World War (1914–1918), the teaching of creation and evolution in public education
Creation and evolution in public education
The status of creation and evolution in public education has been the subject of substantial debate in legal, political, and religious circles...
grew as a public controversy. By this time, many texts taught the theory of evolution as scientific fact. Many Christians in the U.S.A. and later Jews and Muslims, expressed concern that in teaching evolution as fact, the State was unconstitutionally infringing on their right to the free exercise of religion, as in their opinion this taught their children that the Bible had been proven false.
For example, the Democratic Party politician William Jennings Bryan
William Jennings Bryan
William Jennings Bryan was an American politician in the late-19th and early-20th centuries. He was a dominant force in the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, standing three times as its candidate for President of the United States...
"became convinced that the teaching of Evolution as a fact 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."
During the First World War, reports of horrors committed by Germans, who were citizens of one of the most scientifically advanced countries in the World, led 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 published in 1917 by Stanford University professor and entomologist Vernon L. Kellogg
Vernon Lyman Kellogg
Vernon Myman Lyman Kellogg was a U.S. entomologist, evolutionary biologist, and science administrator....
entitled Headquarters Nights, drew a direct association between German war ideology and Darwinian description of nature as a struggle. Kellogg was a leading authority on evolution of insects, and had published Darwinism Today in 1907. His anti-Darwinian and anti-German rhetoric in Headquarters Nights influenced biologists who tried to play down the negative implications of "survival of the fittest
Survival of the fittest
"Survival of the fittest" is a phrase originating in evolutionary theory, as an alternative description of Natural selection. The phrase is today commonly used in contexts that are incompatible with the original meaning as intended by its first two proponents: British polymath philosopher Herbert...
."
Benjamin Kidd
Benjamin Kidd
Benjamin Kidd was a British sociologist. He entered the British civil service and did not become generally known until the publication of an essay, Social Evolution, in 1894...
's 1918 book Science of Power, claimed that there were historical and philosophical connections between Darwinism and German militarism. This book and others around this time had an effect on many people.
In 1922, William Jennings Bryan published In His Image, 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
Eugenics
Eugenics is the "applied science or the bio-social movement which advocates the use of practices aimed at improving the genetic composition of a population", usually referring to human populations. The origins of the concept of eugenics began with certain interpretations of Mendelian inheritance,...
, by which the strong were to weed out the weak, a policy that directly contradicts the Christian doctrine of charity to the helpless.
In 1923, fundamentalist preacher and evangelist William Bell Riley
William Bell Riley
William Bell Riley was known as "The Grand Old Man of Fundamentalism." After being educated at normal school in Valparaiso, Indiana, Riley received his teacher's certificate. After teaching in county schools, he attended college in Hanover, Indiana, where he received an A.B. degree in 1885...
, known as "The Grand Old Man of Fundamentalism," founded the Anti-Evolution League of Minnesota, which, in 1924, became the Anti-Evolution League of America
Anti-Evolution League of America
The Anti-Evolution League of America was an Adamist organization created in 1924 a year after William Bell Riley founded the Anti-Evolution League of Minnesota. The first president was the Kentucky preacher Dr. J. W. Porter and T. T. Martin of Mississippi was field secretary and editor of the...
. The organization was behind anti-evolution legislation in Kentucky
Kentucky
The Commonwealth of Kentucky is a state located in the East Central United States of America. As classified by the United States Census Bureau, Kentucky is a Southern state, more specifically in the East South Central region. Kentucky is one of four U.S. states constituted as a commonwealth...
, where its efforts were supported by William Jennings Bryan.
In 1924, Clarence Darrow
Clarence Darrow
Clarence Seward Darrow was an American lawyer and leading member of the American Civil Liberties Union, best known for defending teenage thrill killers Leopold and Loeb in their trial for murdering 14-year-old Robert "Bobby" Franks and defending John T...
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 the 1920s and 1930s, Harry Rimmer
Harry Rimmer
Harry Rimmer was an American creationist, evangelist and writer of anti-evolution pamphlets. He is most prominent as an early pioneer in the creationist movement in the United States.-Early life:...
was one of the most prominent American creationists. Known as the "noisiest evangelist in America," he published many creationist tracts, debated other creationists and was involved in a famous trial known as the "Floyd-Rimmer trial" against the atheist William Floyd.
In 1925, G. K. Chesterton
G. K. Chesterton
Gilbert Keith Chesterton, KC*SG was an English writer. His prolific and diverse output included philosophy, ontology, poetry, plays, journalism, public lectures and debates, literary and art criticism, biography, Christian apologetics, and fiction, including fantasy and detective fiction....
published The Everlasting Man, in which he developed and articulated many creationist ideas and criticisms of the philosophical underpinnings and perceived logical flaws of evolution.
Scopes Trial
The Scopes Trial—formally known as The State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes and informally known as the Scopes Monkey Trial—was a landmark American legal case in 1925 in which high school science teacher, John Scopes, was accused of violating Tennessee's Butler Act which made it unlawful to...
of 1925 is perhaps the most famous court case of its kind. The Butler Act
Butler Act
The Butler Act was a 1925 Tennessee law prohibiting public school teachers from denying the Biblical account of man’s origin. It was enacted as Tennessee Code Annotated Title 49 Section 1922...
had prohibited the teaching of evolution in public schools
Public education
State schools, also known in the United States and Canada as public schools,In much of the Commonwealth, including Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and the United Kingdom, the terms 'public education', 'public school' and 'independent school' are used for private schools, that is, schools...
in Tennessee
Tennessee
Tennessee is a U.S. state located in the Southeastern United States. It has a population of 6,346,105, making it the nation's 17th-largest state by population, and covers , making it the 36th-largest by total land area...
. Clarence Darrow
Clarence Darrow
Clarence Seward Darrow was an American lawyer and leading member of the American Civil Liberties Union, best known for defending teenage thrill killers Leopold and Loeb in their trial for murdering 14-year-old Robert "Bobby" Franks and defending John T...
was the defense counsel, and William Jennings Bryan was the prosecutor. Bryan appealed for assistance to George McCready Price
George McCready Price
George McCready Price was a Canadian creationist. He produced several anti-evolution and creationist works, particularly on the subject of flood geology...
, Johns Hopkins University
Johns Hopkins University
The Johns Hopkins University, commonly referred to as Johns Hopkins, JHU, or simply Hopkins, is a private research university based in Baltimore, Maryland, United States...
physician Howard A. Kelly, physicist Louis T. More, and Alfred W. McCann, all of who had written books supporting creationism. Price was away in England, Kelly and More told Bryan they considered themselves more convinced by evolution, and McCann was not interested because of Bryan's stance on prohibition
Prohibition
Prohibition of alcohol, often referred to simply as prohibition, is the practice of prohibiting the manufacture, transportation, import, export, sale, and consumption of alcohol and alcoholic beverages. The term can also apply to the periods in the histories of the countries during which the...
. Nevertheless, a schoolteacher named John T. Scopes
John T. Scopes
John Thomas Scopes , was a biology teacher in Dayton, Tennessee, who was charged on May 5, 1925 for violating Tennessee's Butler Act, which prohibited the teaching of evolution in Tennessee schools...
was found guilty of teaching evolution and fined, although the case was later dismissed on a technicality.
Following up on the Butler Act
Butler Act
The Butler Act was a 1925 Tennessee law prohibiting public school teachers from denying the Biblical account of man’s origin. It was enacted as Tennessee Code Annotated Title 49 Section 1922...
, antievolutionary laws were passed in Mississippi
Mississippi
Mississippi is a U.S. state located in the Southern United States. Jackson is the state capital and largest city. The name of the state derives from the Mississippi River, which flows along its western boundary, whose name comes from the Ojibwe word misi-ziibi...
in 1926, and then in Arkansas
Arkansas
Arkansas is a state located in the southern region of the United States. Its name is an Algonquian name of the Quapaw Indians. Arkansas shares borders with six states , and its eastern border is largely defined by the Mississippi River...
in 1928. However, the 1928 election and the onset of the Depression
Great Depression
The Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression in the decade preceding World War II. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, but in most countries it started in about 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s or early 1940s...
changed the playing field. Creationists shifted their attention from state legislatures to local school boards, having substantial success. They set themselves to the tasks of "the emasculation of textbooks, the 'purging' of libraries, and above all the, continued hounding of teachers." Discussions of evolution vanished from almost all schoolbooks. By 1941, about one third of American teachers were afraid of being accused of supporting evolution.
In 1929, a book by one of George McCready Price
George McCready Price
George McCready Price was a Canadian creationist. He produced several anti-evolution and creationist works, particularly on the subject of flood geology...
's former students, Harold W. Clark
Harold W. Clark
Harold Willard Clark was a prominent creationist in the middle of the twentieth century.-Biography:Clark was raised as a Seventh-day Adventist on a farm in New England, whose interest in science and religion was first evoked by George McCready Price's Back to the Bible...
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 soul
Soul
A soul in certain spiritual, philosophical, and psychological traditions is the incorporeal essence of a person or living thing or object. Many philosophical and spiritual systems teach that humans have souls, and others teach that all living things and even inanimate objects have souls. The...
s for each new person, as opposed to traducianism
Traducianism
In Christian theology, traducianism is a doctrine about the origin of the soul , in one of the biblical uses of word to mean the immaterial aspect of human beings . Traducianism means that this immaterial aspect is transmitted through natural generation along with the body, the material aspect of...
, 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
Humanist Manifesto
Humanist Manifesto is the title of three manifestos laying out a Humanist worldview. They are the original Humanist Manifesto , the Humanist Manifesto II , and Humanism and Its Aspirations...
, 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." 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.
In 1935, the "Religion and Science Association" was formed by a small group of creationists, led by a Wheaton College professor, to form a "a unified front against the theory of evolution." There were three main schools of creationist thought, represented by Price, Rimmer, and tidal expert William Bell Dawson. However, since Dawson was a proponent of day-age creationism
Day-Age Creationism
Day-age creationism, a type of old Earth creationism, is an interpretation of the creation accounts found in Genesis. It holds that the six days referred to in the Genesis account of creation are not ordinary 24-hour days, but rather are much longer periods...
and Rimmer was ardently convinced that gap creationism
Gap Creationism
Gap creationism is a form of Old Earth creationism that posits that the six-day creation, as described in the Book of Genesis, involved literal 24-hour days, but that there was a gap of time between two distinct creations in the first and the second verses of Genesis, explaining...
was correct, the staunch supporters of a literal 6 day creation and 6000 year old earth
Young Earth creationism
Young Earth creationism is the religious belief that Heavens, Earth, and all life on Earth were created by direct acts of the Abrahamic God during a relatively short period, sometime between 5,700 and 10,000 years ago...
were incensed, and the organization fell apart.
Price and his supporters retreated to California, and with several doctors working at the College of Medical Evangelists (now Loma Linda University), formed the "Deluge Geology Society." The "Deluge Geology Society" published the Bulletin of Deluge Geology and Related Science from 1941 to 1945. They made secret plans to unveil discoveries of fossils of human footprints that were in rock that was purportedly older than accounted for in evolutionary theory. However, again the organization foundered over disagreements about a 6000 year old earth
Young Earth creationism
Young Earth creationism is the religious belief that Heavens, Earth, and all life on Earth were created by direct acts of the Abrahamic God during a relatively short period, sometime between 5,700 and 10,000 years ago...
.
Price was particularly strident in his attacks against fellow creationists. His friend and former student Harold W. Clark
Harold W. Clark
Harold Willard Clark was a prominent creationist in the middle of the twentieth century.-Biography:Clark was raised as a Seventh-day Adventist on a farm in New England, whose interest in science and religion was first evoked by George McCready Price's Back to the Bible...
had earned a masters degree in biology from the Berkeley
University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...
, and felt that Price's book New Geology was "entirely out of date and inadequate." Unfortunately, Price responded angrily when he found out, accusing Clark of suffering from "the modern mental disease of universityitis" and of falling in with the "tobacco-smoking, Sabbath-breaking. God-defying" evolutionists. Clark pleaded with Price that he still believed in a 6 day creation and a young earth and a universal flood, but Price responded with a vitriolic publication entitled Theories of Satanic Origin about Clark and his views.
The American George Gaylord Simpson
George Gaylord Simpson
George Gaylord Simpson was an American paleontologist. Simpson was perhaps the most influential paleontologist of the twentieth century, and a major participant in the modern evolutionary synthesis, contributing Tempo and mode in evolution , The meaning of evolution and The major features of...
argued that the paleontological record supported evolution
Evolution
Evolution is any change across successive generations in the heritable characteristics of biological populations. Evolutionary processes give rise to diversity at every level of biological organisation, including species, individual organisms and molecules such as DNA and proteins.Life on Earth...
in the 1940s. Some creationists, however, objected to his supposed equation of microevolution
Microevolution
Microevolution is the changes in allele frequencies that occur over time within a population. This change is due to four different processes: mutation, selection , gene flow, and genetic drift....
and macroevolution
Macroevolution
Macroevolution is evolution on a scale of separated gene pools. Macroevolutionary studies focus on change that occurs at or above the level of species, in contrast with microevolution, which refers to smaller evolutionary changes within a species or population.The process of speciation may fall...
, acknowledging the former but denying the latter, and continue to do so to this day.
United States
The Second World War (1939–1945) saw the horrors of the Nazi Holocaust. The USA creationist explanation for the Holocaust is that it had been driven in part by eugenicsEugenics
Eugenics is the "applied science or the bio-social movement which advocates the use of practices aimed at improving the genetic composition of a population", usually referring to human populations. The origins of the concept of eugenics began with certain interpretations of Mendelian inheritance,...
, 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.
Fissures within the creationist community, which had always been present, continued to deepen as fundamentalists received advanced training in the sciences. Geochemist J. Laurence Kulp
J. Laurence Kulp
John Laurence Kulp was a 20th century geochemist. He led major studies on the effects of nuclear fallout and acid rain. He was a prominent advocate in American Scientific Affiliation circles in favor of an Old Earth and against the pseudoscience of flood geology...
had gone to the evangelical school Wheaton College
Wheaton College (Illinois)
Wheaton College is a private, evangelical Protestant liberal arts college in Wheaton, Illinois, a suburb west of Chicago in the United States...
for his undergraduate degree and was a Plymouth Brother. He obtained a PhD from Princeton
Princeton University
Princeton University is a private research university located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. The school is one of the eight universities of the Ivy League, and is one of the nine Colonial Colleges founded before the American Revolution....
before taking a faculty position at Columbia. He felt it was his duty to warn fellow Christians in the evangelical scientific organization the American Scientific Affiliation
American Scientific Affiliation
The American Scientific Affiliation is a Christian religious organization of scientists and people in science-related disciplines. The stated purpose is "to investigate any area relating Christian faith and science." The organization publishes a journal, Perspectives of Science and Christian Faith...
(ASA) of the problems with Price's claims. Kulp wrote a review of Price's work, in which he stated that "major propositions of the theory are contradicted by established physical and chemical laws" in 1950. This caused substantial consternation among his fellow members of the American Scientific Affiliation
American Scientific Affiliation
The American Scientific Affiliation is a Christian religious organization of scientists and people in science-related disciplines. The stated purpose is "to investigate any area relating Christian faith and science." The organization publishes a journal, Perspectives of Science and Christian Faith...
(ASA), an affiliation of Christians who are also scientists, causing many to claim that Kulp had been contaminated with "the orthodox geological viewpoint" and this was responsible for his faith in the Bible being badly shaken. Kulp's influence, however, continues today within the American Scientific Affiliation
American Scientific Affiliation
The American Scientific Affiliation is a Christian religious organization of scientists and people in science-related disciplines. The stated purpose is "to investigate any area relating Christian faith and science." The organization publishes a journal, Perspectives of Science and Christian Faith...
, which continues to support old earth creationism
Old Earth creationism
Old Earth creationism is an umbrella term for a number of types of creationism, including gap creationism and progressive creationism...
.
In the 1950s the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
slid into a Cold War
Cold War
The Cold War was the continuing state from roughly 1946 to 1991 of political conflict, military tension, proxy wars, and economic competition between the Communist World—primarily the Soviet Union and its satellite states and allies—and the powers of the Western world, primarily the United States...
with the communist
Communism
Communism is a social, political and economic ideology that aims at the establishment of a classless, moneyless, revolutionary and stateless socialist society structured upon common ownership of the means of production...
Soviet Union
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
, its former ally. Communism had as one of its principles atheism
Atheism
Atheism is, in a broad sense, the rejection of belief in the existence of deities. In a narrower sense, atheism is specifically the position that there are no deities...
. Americans divided over the issues of Communism and Atheism, but with the Great Purge
Great Purge
The Great Purge was a series of campaigns of political repression and persecution in the Soviet Union orchestrated by Joseph Stalin from 1936 to 1938...
, Cultural Revolution
Cultural Revolution
The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, commonly known as the Cultural Revolution , was a socio-political movement that took place in the People's Republic of China from 1966 through 1976...
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
Occam's razor
Occam's razor, also known as Ockham's razor, and sometimes expressed in Latin as lex parsimoniae , is a principle that generally recommends from among competing hypotheses selecting the one that makes the fewest new assumptions.-Overview:The principle is often summarized as "simpler explanations...
. The American shock and panic about the 1957 Sputnik
Sputnik 1
Sputnik 1 ) was the first artificial satellite to be put into Earth's orbit. It was launched into an elliptical low Earth orbit by the Soviet Union on 4 October 1957. The unanticipated announcement of Sputnik 1s success precipitated the Sputnik crisis in the United States and ignited the Space...
launch lead to passage of the National Defense Education Act
National Defense Education Act
The National Defense Education Act , signed into law on September 2, 1958, provided funding to United States education institutions at all levels. The act authorized funding for four years, increasing funding per year: for example, funding increased on eight program titles from 183 million dollars...
in 1958 to reform American science curricula. This resulted in the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study, also begun in 1958 and with the goal of writing new up-to-date biology textbooks. These new biology textbooks included a discussion of the theory of evolution. Within a few years, half of American schools were using the new BSCS biology textbooks. In addition, the hundredth anniversary of the publication of The Origin of Species
The Origin of Species
Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, published on 24 November 1859, is a work of scientific literature which is considered to be the foundation of evolutionary biology. Its full title was On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the...
was in 1959, and this sparked renewed public interest in evolutionary biology. The creationist fervor of the past seemed like ancient history. A historian at Oklahoma
Oklahoma
Oklahoma is a state located in the South Central region of the United States of America. With an estimated 3,751,351 residents as of the 2010 census and a land area of 68,667 square miles , Oklahoma is the 28th most populous and 20th-largest state...
's Northeastern State University
Northeastern State University
Northeastern State University is a public university with its main campus located in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, United States, at the foot of the Ozark Mountains. Northeastern's home, Tahlequah, is also the capital of the Cherokee nation of Oklahoma...
, R. Halliburton, even made a prediction in 1964 that "a renaissance of the [creationist] movement is most unlikely."
In 1961, Henry M. Morris
Henry M. Morris
Henry Madison Morris was an American young earth creationist and Christian apologist. He was one of the founders of the Creation Research Society and the Institute for Creation Research...
and John C. Whitcomb, Jr published a book entitled The Genesis Flood, in an effort to provide a scientific basis for young earth creationism
Young Earth creationism
Young Earth creationism is the religious belief that Heavens, Earth, and all life on Earth were created by direct acts of the Abrahamic God during a relatively short period, sometime between 5,700 and 10,000 years ago...
and Flood geology
Flood geology
Flood geology is the interpretation of the geological history of the Earth in terms of the global flood described in Genesis 6–9. Similar views played a part in the early development of the science of geology, even after the Biblical chronology had been rejected by geologists in favour of an...
. Morris had published several books previously, but none had the impact that The Genesis Flood did. Its publication resulted in ten like-minded creationists forming the Creation Research Society
Creation Research Society
The Creation Research Society is a Christian research group that engages in creation science. The organization has produced various publications, including a journal and a creation-based biology textbook...
in 1963, and the Institute for Creation Research
Institute for Creation Research
The Institute for Creation Research is a Christian institution in Dallas, Texas that specializes in education, research, and media promotion of Creation Science and Biblical creationism. The ICR adopts the Bible as an inerrant and literal documentary of scientific and historical fact as well as...
in 1972.
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
Separation of church and state in the United States
The phrase "separation of church and state" , attributed to Thomas Jefferson and others, and since quoted by the Supreme Court of the United States, expresses an understanding of the intent and function of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the Constitution of 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
Institute for Creation Research
The Institute for Creation Research is a Christian institution in Dallas, Texas that specializes in education, research, and media promotion of Creation Science and Biblical creationism. The ICR adopts the Bible as an inerrant and literal documentary of scientific and historical fact as well as...
, 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."
In 1973, a famous anti-young earth creationist essay by the evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky
Theodosius Dobzhansky
Theodosius Grygorovych Dobzhansky ForMemRS was a prominent geneticist and evolutionary biologist, and a central figure in the field of evolutionary biology for his work in shaping the unifying modern evolutionary synthesis...
was published in the American Biology Teacher entitled Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution
Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution
"Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution" is a 1973 essay by the evolutionary biologist and Russian Orthodox Christian Theodosius Dobzhansky, criticising anti-evolution creationism and espousing theistic evolution...
. He argued that evolution
Evolution
Evolution is any change across successive generations in the heritable characteristics of biological populations. Evolutionary processes give rise to diversity at every level of biological organisation, including species, individual organisms and molecules such as DNA and proteins.Life on Earth...
was not incompatible with a belief in God
God
God is the English name given to a singular being in theistic and deistic religions who is either the sole deity in monotheism, or a single deity in polytheism....
nor a belief in the accuracy of scriptures.
In 1975, in Daniel v. Waters
Daniel v. Waters
Daniel v. Waters was a 1975 legal case in which the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit struck down Tennessee's law regarding the teaching of "equal time" of evolution and creationism in public school science classes because it violated the Establishment clause of the US...
, the U.S. Sixth Circuit of Appeals struck down Tennessee
Tennessee
Tennessee is a U.S. state located in the Southeastern United States. It has a population of 6,346,105, making it the nation's 17th-largest state by population, and covers , making it the 36th-largest by total land area...
's "equal time" bill.
In 1978 the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy developed the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy
Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy
The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy was formulated in October 1978 by more than 200 evangelical leaders at a conference sponsored by the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy, held in Chicago. The statement was designed to defend the position of Biblical inerrancy against a perceived...
, 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
Walt Brown (creationist)
Walter T. Brown is an American engineer and young earth creationist , who is the director of his own ministry called the Center for Scientific Creation. According to his self-published book, Brown has a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a B.S...
became director of the Center for Scientific Creation.
In 1981, the San Diego based fundamentalist group the Creation Science Research Center 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
Frank D. White
Frank Durward White was the 41st Governor of the U.S. state of Arkansas since Reconstruction. He served a single two-year term from 1981 to 1983. He is one of only two people to have defeated President Bill Clinton in an election. Frank Durward White (June 4, 1933 – May 21, 2003) was...
, the Governor of Arkansas
Arkansas
Arkansas is a state located in the southern region of the United States. Its name is an Algonquian name of the Quapaw Indians. Arkansas shares borders with six states , and its eastern border is largely defined by the Mississippi River...
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
William Overton (judge)
William Ray Overton was a judge on the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas.Overton was born in Malvern, Arkansas. He received a B.S./B.A. from the University of Arkansas in 1961, and an LL.B. from the University of Arkansas School of Law in 1964...
early in 1982, just as a similar (and equally unsuccessful) Bills were approved by legislators in Mississippi
Mississippi
Mississippi is a U.S. state located in the Southern United States. Jackson is the state capital and largest city. The name of the state derives from the Mississippi River, which flows along its western boundary, whose name comes from the Ojibwe word misi-ziibi...
and Louisiana
Louisiana
Louisiana is a state located in the southern region of the United States of America. Its capital is Baton Rouge and largest city is New Orleans. Louisiana is the only state in the U.S. with political subdivisions termed parishes, which are local governments equivalent to counties...
.
Carl Baugh
Carl Baugh
Carl Edward Baugh is an American young earth creationist. Along with others, Baugh has said he discovered human alongside dinosaur footprints near the Paluxy River in Texas. Baugh is a national television host, purporting to present science supporting creationism on the program Creation in the...
established the Creation Evidence Museum in Glen Rose, Texas
Glen Rose, Texas
Glen Rose is a city in Somervell County, Texas, United States. It is the county seat of Somervell County. As of the 2010 census, the city population was 2,444. Glen Rose is part of the Granbury micropolitan area.-19th century:...
in 1984. Kent Hovind
Kent Hovind
Kent E. Hovind is an American young earth creationist. Hovind speaks on creation science and aims to convince listeners to reject theories of evolution, geophysics, and cosmology in favor of the Genesis creation narrative as found in the Bible...
's Young Earth Creationist ministry was founded in 1989.
In 1986, another creationist organization called "Reasons to Believe" was established. Unlike most current creationist organizations, RTB supports Old Earth creationism
Old Earth creationism
Old Earth creationism is an umbrella term for a number of types of creationism, including gap creationism and progressive creationism...
.
In 1987, the US Supreme Court again ruled, this time in Edwards v. Aguillard
Edwards v. Aguillard
Edwards v. Aguillard, was a legal case about the teaching of creationism that was heard by the Supreme Court of the United States in 1987. The Court ruled that a Louisiana law requiring that creation science be taught in public schools, along with evolution, was unconstitutional because the law...
, that requiring the teaching of "creation science
Creation science
Creation Science or scientific creationism is a branch of creationism that attempts to provide scientific support for the Genesis creation narrative in the Book of Genesis and disprove generally accepted scientific facts, theories and scientific paradigms about the history of the Earth, cosmology...
" 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 gave a clear definition of science, and further ruled that so-called "creation science" was simply creationism wrongly using a contrived dualism to assert that any evidence against evolution would prove Creation. Later that year, drafts of the creation science school textbook Of Pandas and People
Of Pandas and People
Of Pandas and People: The Central Question of Biological Origins is a controversial 1989 school-level textbook written by Percival Davis and Dean H. Kenyon and published by the Texas-based Foundation for Thought and Ethics...
were revised to change all references to "creation" to relate to "intelligent design
Intelligent design
Intelligent design is the proposition that "certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection." It is a form of creationism and a contemporary adaptation of the traditional teleological argument for...
."
In 1989, the Foundation for Thought and Ethics
Foundation for Thought and Ethics
The Foundation for Thought and Ethics is a Christian non-profit organization based in Richardson, Texas, that publishes textbooks and articles promoting intelligent design, abstinence, and Christian nationism. In addition, the foundation's officers and editors are some of the leading proponents...
published Of Pandas and People
Of Pandas and People
Of Pandas and People: The Central Question of Biological Origins is a controversial 1989 school-level textbook written by Percival Davis and Dean H. Kenyon and published by the Texas-based Foundation for Thought and Ethics...
by Percival Davis
Percival Davis
See also Clifford Grey, whose real name was Percival Davis.Percival William Davis, also known as Bill Davis, is an American author, young earth creationist, and intelligent design proponent.-Education and career:...
and Dean H. Kenyon
Dean H. Kenyon
Dean H. Kenyon is Professor Emeritus of Biology at San Francisco State University and an intelligent design proponent. He is also the author of Of Pandas and People, a controversial book on intelligent design.- Career :...
, editor Charles Thaxton
Charles Thaxton
Charles B. Thaxton is an intelligent design author and Fellow of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture.-Biography:Thaxton earned a doctorate in physical chemistry from Iowa State University...
, with the definition that "Intelligent design means that various forms of life began abruptly through an intelligent agency, with their distinctive features already intact. Fish with fins and scales, birds with feathers, beaks, wings, etc." The publisher got church groups and Christian radio to campaign for state textbook approval, with a petition in Alabama
Alabama
Alabama is a state located in the southeastern region of the United States. It is bordered by Tennessee to the north, Georgia to the east, Florida and the Gulf of Mexico to the south, and Mississippi to the west. Alabama ranks 30th in total land area and ranks second in the size of its inland...
urging that "Intelligent Design" be presented as an alternative to evolution, and their attorney arguing that it did not compel belief in the supernatural and was not a creationist text. After setbacks it focussed efforts "outside the schools" to prompt grass-roots activity from local school boards, teacher's groups and parents.
In 1990, law professor Phillip E. Johnson
Phillip E. Johnson
Phillip E. Johnson is a retired UC Berkeley law professor and author. He became a born-again Christian while a tenured professor and is considered the father of the intelligent design movement...
set out his argument that the ground rules of science
Scientific method
Scientific method refers to a body of techniques for investigating phenomena, acquiring new knowledge, or correcting and integrating previous knowledge. To be termed scientific, a method of inquiry must be based on gathering empirical and measurable evidence subject to specific principles of...
as presented at Edwards v. Aguillard unfairly disqualified creationist explanations by excluding the supernatural, and in 1991, he brought out a book entitled Darwin on Trial
Darwin on Trial
Darwin on Trial is a 1991 book about the theory of evolution and the creation-evolution debate. It was written by Harvard graduate and University of California, Berkeley law professor emeritus Phillip E. Johnson...
, challenging the principles of naturalism
Humanistic naturalism
Humanistic naturalism is the branch of philosophical naturalism wherein human beings are best able to control and understand the world through use of the scientific method. Concepts of spirituality, intuition, and metaphysics are not pursued because they are unfalsifiable, and therefore can never...
and uniformitarianism
Uniformitarianism (science)
In the philosophy of naturalism, the uniformitarianism assumption is that the same natural laws and processes that operate in the universe now, have always operated in the universe in the past and apply everywhere in the universe. It has included the gradualistic concept that "the present is the...
in contemporary scientific philosophy.
In March, 1992, a symposium at Southern Methodist University
Southern Methodist University
Southern Methodist University is a private university in Dallas, Texas, United States. Founded in 1911 by the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, SMU operates campuses in Dallas, Plano, and Taos, New Mexico. SMU is owned by the South Central Jurisdiction of the United Methodist Church...
in Dallas provided the public debut for a small group that included Phillip Johnson, Steven Meyer, William Dembski, and Michael Behe
Michael Behe
Michael J. Behe is an American biochemist, author, and intelligent design advocate. He currently serves as professor of biochemistry at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania and as a senior fellow of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture...
, initiating the wedge strategy
Wedge strategy
The wedge strategy is a political and social action plan authored by the Discovery Institute, the hub of the intelligent design movement. The strategy was put forth in a Discovery Institute manifesto known as the Wedge Document, which describes a broad social, political, and academic agenda whose...
that Johnson claims to have worked out by 1991.
The 1993 second edition of the school textbook Of Pandas and People
Of Pandas and People
Of Pandas and People: The Central Question of Biological Origins is a controversial 1989 school-level textbook written by Percival Davis and Dean H. Kenyon and published by the Texas-based Foundation for Thought and Ethics...
added a section by Michael Behe making the argument he later called irreducible complexity
Irreducible complexity
Irreducible complexity is an argument by proponents of intelligent design that certain biological systems are too complex to have evolved from simpler, or "less complete" predecessors, through natural selection acting upon a series of advantageous naturally occurring, chance mutations...
.
The 1990s saw the rise of intelligent design
Intelligent design
Intelligent design is the proposition that "certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection." It is a form of creationism and a contemporary adaptation of the traditional teleological argument for...
, which maintains that intelligent intervention was necessary for evolution and in other ways seeks to create doubt about the validity and feasibility of evolution
Evolution
Evolution is any change across successive generations in the heritable characteristics of biological populations. Evolutionary processes give rise to diversity at every level of biological organisation, including species, individual organisms and molecules such as DNA and proteins.Life on Earth...
, and to change the scientific method
Scientific method
Scientific method refers to a body of techniques for investigating phenomena, acquiring new knowledge, or correcting and integrating previous knowledge. To be termed scientific, a method of inquiry must be based on gathering empirical and measurable evidence subject to specific principles of...
so that supernatural explanations are accepted.
In 1994, the court case Peloza v. Capistrano School District
Peloza v. Capistrano School District
Peloza v. Capistrano Unified School District, 37 F.3d 517 , was a 1994 court case heard by United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in which a creationist schoolteacher, John E...
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.
In 1996, the Discovery Institute
Discovery Institute
The Discovery Institute is a non-profit public policy think tank based in Seattle, Washington, best known for its advocacy of intelligent design...
's Center for Science and Culture
Center for Science and Culture
The Center for Science and Culture , formerly known as the Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture , is part of the Discovery Institute, a conservative Christian think tank in the United States...
(CSC), formerly known as the Center for Renewal of Science and Culture, was founded to promote Intelligent design
Intelligent design
Intelligent design is the proposition that "certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection." It is a form of creationism and a contemporary adaptation of the traditional teleological argument for...
, and entered public discourse with the publication of Darwin's Black Box
Darwin's Black Box
Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution is a book written by Michael J. Behe and published by Free Press in which he presents his notion of irreducible complexity and claims that its presence in many biochemical systems indicates therefore that they must be the result of...
by Michael Behe
Michael Behe
Michael J. Behe is an American biochemist, author, and intelligent design advocate. He currently serves as professor of biochemistry at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania and as a senior fellow of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture...
, arguing for evidence of Irreducible complexity
Irreducible complexity
Irreducible complexity is an argument by proponents of intelligent design that certain biological systems are too complex to have evolved from simpler, or "less complete" predecessors, through natural selection acting upon a series of advantageous naturally occurring, chance mutations...
. 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, which it defines narrowly as meaning young earth creationism
Young Earth creationism
Young Earth creationism is the religious belief that Heavens, Earth, and all life on Earth were created by direct acts of the Abrahamic God during a relatively short period, sometime between 5,700 and 10,000 years ago...
, though in court intelligent design was found to be creationism.
In October 1999 the Michael Polanyi Center
Michael Polanyi Center
The Michael Polanyi Center at Baylor University was the first center at a research university exclusively dedicated to intelligent design study. It was founded in 1999 "with the primary aim of advancing the...
was founded in the science faculty of Baylor University
Baylor University
Baylor University is a private, Christian university located in Waco, Texas. Founded in 1845, Baylor is accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools.-History:...
, 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
United States Congress
The United States Congress is the bicameral legislature of the federal government of the United States, consisting of the Senate and the House of Representatives. The Congress meets in the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C....
passed the No Child Left Behind Act
No Child Left Behind Act
The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 is a United States Act of Congress concerning the education of children in public schools.NCLB was originally proposed by the administration of George W. Bush immediately after he took office...
, which contained the following statement of policy, called the Santorum Amendment
Santorum Amendment
The Santorum Amendment was an amendment to the 2001 education funding bill which became known as the No Child Left Behind Act, proposed by former Republican United States Senator Rick Santorum from Pennsylvania, which promotes the teaching of intelligent design while questioning the academic...
, 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." http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/filesDB-download.php?id=112
In December 2001, Dembski established the International Society for Complexity, Information and Design
International Society for Complexity, Information and Design
The International Society for Complexity, Information, and Design was a non-profit professional society that promoted intelligent design...
.
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. They are anti-young earth, and promote Christianity by endorsing old earth creationism.
In 2004 Ohio adopted education standards sympathetic to intelligent design promoted by the Discovery Institute. In February 2006 the Ohio Board of Education voted to drop the Discovery Institute's "Critical Analysis of Evolution
Critical Analysis of Evolution
Critical Analysis of Evolution is the name of both a proposed high school science lesson plan promoting intelligent design and a tactic to promote design using Teach the Controversy promoted by the American think tank, Discovery Institute, originators of the intelligent design movement, as part of...
" intelligent design lesson plan after the 2005 ruling against intelligent design in Kitzmiller v. Dover and revelations that the lesson plan was adopted despite warnings from the Ohio Department of Education, whose experts described it as wrong and misleading.
In May 2005, the Kansas
Kansas
Kansas is a US state located in the Midwestern United States. It is named after the Kansas River which flows through it, which in turn was named after the Kansa Native American tribe, which inhabited the area. The tribe's name is often said to mean "people of the wind" or "people of the south...
school board held the Kansas evolution hearings
Kansas evolution hearings
The Kansas evolution hearings were a series of hearings held in Topeka, Kansas, United States May 5 to May 12, 2005 by the Kansas State Board of Education and its State Board Science Hearing Committee to change how evolution and the origin of life would be taught in the state's public high school...
. The court-style hearings were promoted by the Discovery Institute and attended by its Fellows and other intelligent design advocates but not by mainstream scientists, who accused it of being a kangaroo court
Kangaroo court
A kangaroo court is "a mock court in which the principles of law and justice are disregarded or perverted".The outcome of a trial by kangaroo court is essentially determined in advance, usually for the purpose of ensuring conviction, either by going through the motions of manipulated procedure or...
. The result of the hearings was the adoption by the Republican-dominated board of new science standards that relied upon the Discovery Institute's Critical Analysis of Evolution lesson plan employing the institute's Teach the Controversy
Teach the Controversy
Teach the Controversy is the name of a Discovery Institute campaign to promote intelligent design, a variant of traditional creationism, while attempting to discredit evolution in United States public high school science courses...
approach, despite these having been rejected by the State Board Science Hearing Committee. With the 2006 ouster of the majority of the conservative board members, the Kansas State Board of Education approved a new curriculum that removed any reference to Intelligent Design as part of science in February 2007.
In 2005, the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania ruled on the case of Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District
Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District
Tammy Kitzmiller, et al. v. Dover Area School District, et al. was the first direct challenge brought in the United States federal courts testing a public school district policy that required the teaching of intelligent design...
that intelligent design was religious in nature, a form of creationism, not scientific and thus violated the First Amendment to the United States Constitution
First Amendment to the United States Constitution
The First Amendment to the United States Constitution is part of the Bill of Rights. The amendment prohibits the making of any law respecting an establishment of religion, impeding the free exercise of religion, abridging the freedom of speech, infringing on the freedom of the press, interfering...
. The ruling barred the teaching of intelligent design in public school science classrooms for that district, but the 'Dover trial' as it came to be known, has had far-reaching effects. Around the same time as the Kiztmiller ruling, many state legislators were considering bills promoted by the Discovery Institute supporting the teaching of intelligent design. Most were rejected in the light of the ruling in Dover trial out of what has been called the "Dover-effect."
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
- History of the Collapse of Flood Geology and a Young Earth
- Understanding the Intelligent Design Creationist Movement: Its True Nature and Goals. A Position Paper from the Center for Inquiry, Office of Public Policy by Barbara ForrestBarbara ForrestBarbara Carroll Forrest is a professor of philosophy at Southeastern Louisiana University in Hammond, Louisiana. She is a critic of intelligent design and the Discovery Institute.- Biography :...