Creation science

[1] Creationists also claim they can disprove or reexplain a variety of scientific facts,[2] theories and paradigms of geology,[3] cosmology, biological evolution,[4][5] archaeology,[6][7] history, and linguistics using creation science.

[10][11] Courts, most often in the United States where the question has been asked in the context of teaching the subject in public schools, have consistently ruled since the 1980s that creation science is a religious view rather than a scientific one.

[13][14][15][16][17] Professional biologists have criticized creation science for being unscholarly,[18] and even as a dishonest and misguided sham, with extremely harmful educational consequences.

in six days, calls all the animals and plants into existence, and molds the first man from clay and the first woman from a rib taken from the man's side; a worldwide flood destroys all life except for Noah and his family and representatives of the animals, and Noah becomes the ancestor of the 70 "nations" of the world; the nations live together until the incident of the Tower of Babel, when God disperses them and gives them their different languages.

This dates back to George McCready Price, an active Seventh-day Adventist who developed views of flood geology,[23] which formed the basis of creation science.

The Church of England's official website cites Charles Darwin's local work assisting people in his religious parish.

"[30] Creation science incorporates the concept of catastrophism to reconcile current landforms and fossil distributions with Biblical interpretations, proposing the remains resulted from successive cataclysmic events, such as a worldwide flood and subsequent ice age.

[38] Creation science began in the 1960s, as a fundamentalist Christian effort in the United States to prove Biblical inerrancy and nullify the scientific evidence for evolution.

The creation science texts and curricula that first emerged in the 1960s focused upon concepts derived from a literal interpretation of the Bible and were overtly religious in nature, most notably proposing Noah's flood in the Biblical Genesis account as an explanation for the geological and fossil record.

[46] The Soviet Union's successful launch of Sputnik 1 in 1957 sparked national concern that the science education in public schools was outdated.

[50] Price's "new catastrophism" was also disputed by most other creationists until its revival with the 1961 publication of The Genesis Flood by John C. Whitcomb and Henry M. Morris, a work which quickly became an important text on the issue to fundamentalist Christians[39][page needed] and expanded the field of creation science beyond critiques of geology into biology and cosmology as well.

This ruling inspired a new creationist movement to promote laws requiring that schools give balanced treatment to creation science when evolution is taught.

[56] The law in Arkansas adopted the same two-model approach as that put forward by the Institute for Creation Research, one allowing only two possible explanations for the origins of life and existence of man, plants and animals: it was either the work of a creator or it was not.

"[57] The judge concluded that "Act 590 is a religious crusade, coupled with a desire to conceal this fact," and that it violated the First Amendment's Establishment Clause.

It was co-authored by chemist and creationist Charles B. Thaxton with Walter L. Bradley and Roger L. Olsen, the foreword written by Dean H. Kenyon, and sponsored by the Christian-based Foundation for Thought and Ethics (FTE).

[60][61] Kenyon later co-wrote with creationist Percival Davis a book intended as a "scientific brief for creationism"[62] to use as a supplement to public high school biology textbooks.

School board officials there had attempted to include Of Pandas and People in their biology classrooms and testimony given during the trial revealed the book was originally written as a creationist text but following the adverse decision in the Supreme Court it underwent simple cosmetic editing to remove the explicit allusions to "creation" or "creator," and replace them instead with references to "design" or "designer.

In contrast, as a matter of principle, neo-creationism eschews references to scripture altogether in its polemics and stated goals (see Wedge strategy).

[64][65] However, the intelligent design curriculum was struck down as a violation of the Establishment Clause in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, the judge in the case ruled "that ID is nothing less than the progeny of creationism.

[72] Morris and later creationists expanded the scope with attacks against the broad spectrum scientific findings that point to the antiquity of the Universe and common ancestry among species, including growing body of evidence from the fossil record, absolute dating techniques, and cosmogony.

"[22] Creation science advocates argue that scientific theories of the origins of the Universe, Earth, and life are rooted in a priori presumptions of methodological naturalism and uniformitarianism, each of which they reject.

"[34] According to Joyce Arthur writing for Skeptic magazine, the "creation 'science' movement gains much of its strength through the use of distortion and scientifically unethical tactics" and "seriously misrepresents the theory of evolution.

[94] In the United States, the principal focus of creation science advocates is on the government-supported public school systems, which are prohibited by the Establishment Clause from promoting specific religions.

Creationists contend that any observable speciation descends from these distinctly created kinds through inbreeding, deleterious mutations and other genetic mechanisms.

The origin of the human species is particularly hotly contested; the fossil remains of hominid ancestors are not considered by advocates of creation biology to be evidence for a speciation event involving Homo sapiens.

Although scientists have noted slight increases in the decay rate for isotopes subject to extreme pressures, those differences were too small to significantly impact date estimates.

The primary challenge for young-universe cosmologies is that the accepted distances in the Universe require millions or billions of years for light to travel to Earth (the "starlight problem").

[117] Humphreys' cosmology is advocated by creationist organisations such as Answers in Genesis; however because its predictions conflict with current observations, it is not accepted by the scientific community.

[127] Creationists Harold Slusher and Richard Mandock, along with Glenn Morton (who later repudiated this claim[128]) asserted that impact craters on the Moon are subject to rock flow,[129] and so cannot be more than a few thousand years old.

While some creationist astronomers assert that different phases of meteoritic bombardment of the Solar System occurred during "creation week" and during the subsequent Great Flood, others regard this as unsupported by the evidence and call for further research.