History of creationism

The Genesis creation narrative has provided a basic framework for Jewish and Christian epistemological understandings of how the universe came into being – through the divine intervention of the god, Yahweh.

In 1605, Francis Bacon emphasized that the works of God in nature teach us how to interpret the Bible, and the Baconian method introduced the empirical approach which became central to modern science.

The diluvial cosmogonies fell victim to their own success, as the spirit of scientific inquiry they had stimulated, gradually led to discoveries that undercut the biblical premises of flood geology and catastrophism.

This view clashed with that of conservative evangelicals in the Church of England, but in 1860 their attention turned to the much greater uproar about Essays and Reviews by liberal Anglican theologians, which introduced "higher criticism", a hermeneutic method re-examining the Bible and questioning literal readings.

The exact chronology proposed by Darwin was disputed by other geologists, and the leading physicist William Thomson (later ennobled as Lord Kelvin) produced an analyses of the heat energy and thermal histories of the Earth and Sun which yielded age estimates that were too short for gradual evolution.

[28] 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.

The Protestant Reformation introduced lay people reading the Bible in translation and more literal understandings,[15] and led to a new belief that every biological species had been individually created by God.

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.

[32] Descartes was influenced by the Francisco Suarez's view on primitivism and divine realism, for which the connections between properties of the real world (e.g. 'being a man' and 'being an animal') belong immutably to the essence and intellect of God the Creator from ever and forever, and therefore aren't created by Him.

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."

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

[8] 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.

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.

Many Christians in the US 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.

A popular book published in 1917 by Stanford University professor and entomologist Vernon L. Kellogg entitled Headquarters Nights,[60] drew a direct association between German war ideology and Darwinian description of nature as a struggle.

[65] 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."

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 whom had written books supporting creationism.

[56][72] 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."

His friend and former student Harold W. Clark had earned a master's degree in biology from the University of California, Berkeley, and felt that Price's book New Geology was "entirely out of date and inadequate."

American creationist explanation for the Holocaust is that it had been driven in part by eugenics, or the principle that individuals with "undesirable" genetic characteristics should be removed from the gene pool.

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.

"[83] 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.

[85] 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,[86] and in 1991, he brought out a book entitled Darwin on Trial,[87] challenging the principles of naturalism and uniformitarianism in contemporary scientific philosophy.