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Creationism
St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture by Eric Longley
Creationism is a Christian doctrine holding that the world and the living things in it--human beings in particular--were created by God. There have been a variety of creationist viewpoints, and some of these viewpoints are in conflict with mainstream scientific theories, especially the theory of evolution.
After Charles Darwin published his Origin of Species (1859), which not only defended the pre-existing theory of evolution but also maintained that evolution took place through natural selection, many fundamentalist Christians reacted with horror. Then as now, anti-evolutionists maintained that evolution was contrary to the Bible, that it was atheistic pseudo-science, and that, by proposing that man descended from lower animals, it denied man's spiritual nature. Evolutionists denounced creationists for allegedly misinterpreting both the Bible and the scientific evidence.
In the 1920s, William Jennings Bryan, a former Nebraska Senator, Presidential candidate, and U.S. Secretary of State, joined the movement to prevent the teaching of evolution. In response to lobbyists like Bryan, the state of Tennessee passed a law making it a crime for a public-school teacher or state college professor to teach the allegedly un-Scriptural doctrine that man evolved from a lower order of animals. However, under the Butler Act (and similar laws in other states), it remained permissible to teach the theory of evolution as applied to species other than humans.
A test case of the Tennessee law was arranged in Dayton, Tennessee, in 1925. A teacher named John Thomas Scopes was charged with violating the law. Bryan was brought in to help the prosecution, and an all-star legal defense team, including famed attorney Clarence Darrow, was brought in to defend the young teacher. Scopes was convicted after a highly-publicized trial, but his conviction was overturned on a technicality by the Tennessee Supreme Court. A play based on the Scopes Monkey trial, Inherit the Wind, was turned into a movie in 1960. Spencer Tracy, Gene Kelly, and Frederic March were among the cast of this popular and anti-creationist rendering of the trial. The movie altered some of the historical details, but the movie version of the trial was probably better-known than the actual trial.
Arkansas had also passed a "monkey law" similar to Tennessee's Butler Act. In 1968, the United States Supreme Court ruled that the Arkansas law was designed to promote religious doctrine, and that therefore it was an unconstitutional establishment of religion which violated the First Amendment. The Epperson decision had no effect on the Tennessee Butler law, since that law had been repealed in 1967.
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Since the Scopes trial, the views of some creationists have been getting closer to secular scientific position. Scientists who were evangelical Christians formed an organization called the American Scientific Affiliation (ASA) during World War II. ASA members pledged support for Biblical inerrancy and declared that the Christian scriptures were in harmony with the evidence of nature. Within this framework, however, the ASA began to lean toward the "progressive creation" viewpoint--the idea that God's creation of life was accomplished over several geological epochs, that the six "days" of creation mentioned in Genesis were epochs rather than literal days, and that much or all of mainstream science's interpretation of the origins of life could be reconciled with the Bible. These "progressive creation" tendencies were articulated in Evolution and Christian Thought Today, published in 1959. Some of the contributors to this volume seemed to be flirting with evolution, with two such scientists indicating that Christian doctrine could be reconciled with something resembling evolution.
Other creationists moved in another direction entirely--towards "flood geology." This is the idea that God had created the world in six 24-hour days, that all species, including man, had been specially created, and that the fossil record was a result, not of evolution over time but of a single catastrophic flood in the days of Noah. George McCready Price, a Canadian-born creationist, had outlined these ideas in a 1923 book called The New Geology. At the time, Price's ideas had not been widely accepted by creationists outside his own Seventh Day Adventist denomination, but in 1961 Price's ideas got a boost. Teacher John C. Whitcomb, Jr. and engineer Henry M. Morris issued The Genesis Flood, which, like The New Geology, tried to reconcile the geological evidence with a strong creationist viewpoint.
In 1963, the Creation Research Society (CRS) was formed. The founders were creationist scientists (many of them from the fundamentalist Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod), and voting membership was limited to scientists. The CRS was committed to Biblical inerrancy and a creationist interpretation of the Bible, an interpretation which in practice coincided with the doctrine of flood geology.
The CRS and others began lobbying for the inclusion of creationist ideas in school curricula. This was a delicate task, on account of the Epperson decision of the Supreme Court, which prohibited the introduction of religious doctrines into the curriculum of the public schools. Creationists campaign all over the country, trying to get creationism (now often dubbed "creation science") into textbooks on an equal basis with evolution. Some states allowed the use of creationist texts like Henry M. Morris' Scientific Creationism. The Texas Board of Education required that textbooks used by the state must emphasize that evolution was merely a theory, and that other explanations of the origins of life existed. On the other hand, California--which together with Texas exerted a great influence over educational publishers due to its mass purchasing of textbooks--rejected attempts to include creationism in school texts.
Laws were passed in Arkansas and Louisiana requiring that creation science get discussed whenever evolution was discussed. However, the federal courts struck down these laws. The U.S. Supreme Court struck down the Louisiana law in 1987, on the grounds that creation science was a religious doctrine that could not constitutionally be taught in public schools.
St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture, 2002 Gale Group.
