Creationism

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Creationism

Creationism affirms that God directly created the first humans. Creationism is, therefore, a particular interpretation of a broader notion of creation, widely shared among world religions, that attributes the ultimate origins and ongoing ordering of the cosmos to a being that transcends it. Although Judaism and Islam share the same basic creation account with Christianity, creationism is a uniquely Christian notion that cuts across denominational boundaries. To varying degrees, all Christian creationists share opposition to a biological evolutionism that accounts for the uniqueness of the human species exclusively through adaptive processes that began on Earth more than 3.5 billion years ago.

The two major models of Christian creationism are found in Roman Catholicism and among North American Protestants who regard the inerrancy of the Bible to be a "fundamental" tenet of Christian faith. The roots of Roman Catholic creationism can be traced to the fourth century and the position of Hilary of Poitiers (ca. 315–367) that though human flesh is always born of flesh, the human soul can be "from nowhere else than from God." (On the Trinity, Book 10, no. 22). This form of creationism is rooted in a metaphysical notion of the human borrowed from the classical Greek philosophy that held that the human is composed of body and soul. This metaphysical anthropology is evident in the positions of Roman Catholic popes in the second half of the twentieth century. Although Pius XII (the encyclical Humanae Generis, 1950) and John Paul II (the address "Evolution and the Living God," 1996) do not explicitly use the term "creationism," both argue that God immediately creates the spiritual soul of the human, while the body depends on its origins from cells provided by the parents. John Paul II, although cautious about scientific reductionism, explicitly accepts evolutionism (a.k.a. "generationism") as the origin of the human body, while retaining creationism as the origin of the spiritual soul. Since the teachings of Pius XII and John Paul II on human origins have the authority of "non-infallibility," they are not necessarily the final word and are subject to revision. What is likely not to be revised is the position that the capacity of human persons for relationship with God cannot be accounted for on scientific grounds.

The Protestant model of creationism is different from that of Roman Catholicism, because Protestant creationists reject metaphysical anthropology of soul and body in favor of a biblical one that envisions the human person as a unity. The goal of Protestant creationists is to end the hegemony of the theory of Darwinian evolution by proposing an alternative theory that they call "scientific creationism" or "creation science."

The roots of creation science can be traced in the United States to the 1920s and the antievolution articles published in the Princeton Theological Review, as well as to the antievolution movement promoted by William Jennings Bryan (1860–1925), a prohibitionist and three-time presidential candidate. Creationists gained notoriety in the well-publicized trial of John T. Scopes in 1925. Earlier that year, the Tennessee state legislature passed a bill banning public school teachers from instructing their students about any theory that denies the divine creation of humanity as taught in the Bible. Scopes broke that law by teaching evolution. At the trial Bryan represented the school board of Dayton, Tennessee. Clarence Darrow, a lawyer associated with the American Civil Liberties Union, represented Scopes. The decision of the "Scopes Monkey Trial" went against Scopes but was reversed on a technicality. Shortly after the trial, many southern states passed antievolution legislation.

In 1967 an antievolution law passed in Arkansas in 1928 was tested by Susan Epperson, a first-year biology teacher who chose a textbook that included evolution. The case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which in 1968 declared the Arkansas law unconstitutional on the grounds that it violated the establishment of religion clause of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. In the wake of this decision, creationists had reason to believe that any legislation that forbade evolution to be taught in public schools would meet the same fate.

In 1969 the California Board of Education agreed to have the Genesis account of creation taught in public schools as an alternative to the evolutionary account. In 1970 Henry Morris, a hydraulic engineer, founded the Christian Heritage College at San Diego, as an educational center explicitly committed to creation science and the defeat of evolutionism. In 1974 California reversed its decision, but in 1981 "balanced treatment" legislation was passed in Arkansas (no. 590) and Louisiana (no. 685), requiring public schools teaching Darwinian evolution to give equal attention to creation science. Among the tenets of creation science included in these statutes are positions that reflect a literal interpretation of Genesis 1–11:

The sudden (special) creation of the universe, energy, and life from nothing.
The insufficiency of mutation and natural selection to explain all living kinds of organisms.
The separate ancestry for humans and apes.
Explanation of the earth's geology by catastrophism, including the occurrence of a worldwide flood.
The relatively recent inception of the earth and life (six thousand to ten thousand years ago). [Arkansas Act no. 590, Science, Technology and Human Values 7 (1982): 11–13.]

The "balanced treatment" acts of Arkansas and Louisiana were struck down in U.S. District Court in Arkansas ( January 5, 1982) and in the U.S. Supreme Court ( June 19, 1987) because they contravened the First Amendment of the federal Constitution and promoted the advancement of religious doctrine.

Creation science not only has political significance for the relations between church and state in the United States but also has cultural significance for how the relations of religion and science are conceived. For people who interpret the scriptures literally, the Bible, as the inerrant word of God, presents a higher truth than fallible human reason, including science, can know. Biblically based religion and evolutionary science, therefore, necessarily conflict.

Not all North American Christians agree with the creationists. Other Christians interpret the Bible symbolically rather than literally. Some simply see creation doctrine and biological evolution as independent and contrasting conceptions of reality, while others believe that society can benefit from dialogue between Christians and scientists. Many in the latter group perceive meaningful analogies between cosmic evolutionary processes and God's continuous creative activity.