Young Earth creationism
[18] Gallup found that, when asking a similar question in 2019, 40 percent of US adults held the view that "God created [human beings] in their present form within roughly the past 10,000 years.
[32]Beginning in the 18th century, support for a young Earth declined among scientists and philosophers as new knowledge including discoveries of the Scientific Revolution and philosophies of the Age of Enlightenment.
He subscribed to the latter theory (indefinite days) and found support from the side of Yale professor James Dwight Dana, one of the fathers of mineralogy, who wrote a paper consisting of four articles named 'Science and the Bible' on the topic.
Together with J. Laurence Kulp, a geologist and in fellowship with the Plymouth Brethren, and other scientists,[44] Ramm influenced Christian organizations such as the American Scientific Affiliation (ASA) in not supporting flood geology.
Given this history, they argued, "the last refuge of the case for evolution immediately vanishes away, and the record of the rocks becomes a tremendous witness... to the holiness and justice and power of the living God of Creation!
This in turn would mean that every anti-Christian system and movement (communism, racism, humanism, libertarianism, behaviorism, and all the rest) would be deprived of their pseudo-intellectual foundation", "It [evolution] has served effectively as the pseudo-scientific basis of atheism, agnosticism, socialism, fascism, and numerous faulty and dangerous philosophies over the past century.
This viewpoint was explicitly rejected in the rulings from the 1981 United States District Court case McLean v. Arkansas Board of Education as no witness was able to produce any articles that had been refused publication and the judge could not conceive how "a loose knit group of independent thinkers in all the varied fields of science could, or would, so effectively censor new scientific thought".
Armed with the backing of conservative organizations and individuals, his brand of "creation science" was widely promoted throughout the United States and overseas, with his books being translated into at least ten different languages.
[61] A 2011 Gallup survey reported that 30 per cent of Americans said the Bible is the actual word of God and should be interpreted literally, a statistic which had fallen slightly from the late 1970s.
The Science Education Resource Center at Carleton College has identified two major types of YEC belief systems:[65] Young Earth creationists regard the Bible as a historically accurate, factually inerrant record of natural history.
Young Earth creationists reject allegorical readings of Genesis and further argue that if there was not a literal Fall of Man, Noah's Ark, or Tower of Babel this would undermine core Christian doctrines like the birth and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Some young Earth creationists go further and advocate a kind of flood geology which relies on the appropriation of late eighteenth and early nineteenth century arguments in favor of catastrophism made by such scientists as Georges Cuvier and Richard Kirwan.
This approach which was replaced by the mid-nineteenth century almost entirely by uniformitarianism was adopted most famously by George McCready Price and this legacy is reflected in the most prominent YEC organizations today.
YEC ideas to accommodate the massive amount of water necessary for a flood that was global in scale included inventing such constructs as an orbiting vapor canopy which would have collapsed and generated the necessary extreme rainfall or a rapid movement of tectonic plates causing underground aquifers[70] or tsunamis from underwater volcanic steam[71] to inundate the planet.
[72] Creationists dispute these and all other methods which demonstrate the timescale of geologic history in spite of the lack of scientific evidence that there are any inconsistencies or errors in the measurement of the Earth's age.
In numerous books and articles he promoted this concept, focusing his attack on the sequence of the geologic time scale as "the devil's counterfeit of the six days of Creation as recorded in the first chapter of Genesis.
Some creationist organizations propose that the Hebrew word tanniyn (תנין, pronounced [tanˈnin]), mentioned nearly thirty times in the Old Testament, should be considered a synonym.
Alternatively, more mainstream scholars have identified the Leviathan (Job 41) with the Nile crocodile or, because Ugarit texts describe it as having seven heads, a purely mythical beast similar to the Lernaean Hydra.
Science writer Sharon A. Hill observes that the young Earth creationist segment of cryptozoology is "well-funded and able to conduct expeditions with a goal of finding a living dinosaur that they think would invalidate evolution.
"[95] Young Earth creationists occasionally claim that dinosaurs survived in Australia, and that Aboriginal legends of reptilian monsters are evidence of this,[96] referring to what is known as Megalania (Varanus priscus).
Other more recent hoaxes such as the Cardiff Giant, the Silverbell artifacts, the Burdick tracks and the Acámbaro figures are still being cited as proof of a young earth even though some of the hoaxers confessed.
As a position that developed out of the explicitly anti-intellectual side of the Fundamentalist–Modernist Controversy in the early parts of the twentieth century, there is no single unified nor consistent consensus on how creationism as a belief system ought to reconcile its adherents' acceptance of biblical inerrancy with empirical facts of the Universe.
[106] The "gap theory" acknowledges a vast age for the universe, including the Earth and solar system, while asserting that life was created recently in six 24-hour days by divine fiat.
[107][108] Many young Earth creationists distinguish their own hypotheses from the "Omphalos hypothesis", today more commonly referred to as the apparent age concept, put forth by the naturalist and science writer Philip Henry Gosse.
Although both logically unassailable and consistent with a literal reading of scripture, Omphalos was rejected at the time by scientists on the grounds that it was completely unfalsifiable and by theologians because it implied to them a deceitful God, which they found theologically unacceptable.
[112] Young Earth creationists adhere strongly to a concept of biblical inerrancy, and regard the Bible as divinely inspired and "infallible and completely authoritative on all matters with which they deal, free from error of any sort, scientific and historical as well as moral and theological".
[114] Creationists also discount certain modern Christian theological positions, like those of French Jesuit priest, geologist and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who saw that his work with evolutionary sciences actually confirmed and inspired his faith in the cosmic Christ; or those of Thomas Berry, a cultural historian and ecotheologian, that the cosmological 13-billion-year "Universe Story" provides all faiths and all traditions with a single account by which the divine has made its presence in the world.
[115] Proponents of young Earth creationism are regularly accused of quote mining, the practice of isolating passages from academic texts that appear to support their claims, while deliberately excluding context and conclusions to the contrary.
Even many Christian evangelicals who reject the notion of purely naturalistic Darwinian evolution often treat the story as a nonliteral saga, as poetry, or as liturgical literature.
[131] Measurements of archeological, astrophysical, biological, chemical, cosmological, and geological timescales differ from YEC's estimates of the Earth's age by up to five orders of magnitude (that is, by a factor of a hundred thousand times).
