Encyclopedia of Evolution.pdf - Online Reading Center

creationism
used to justify militarism and the oppression of the common
man (see eugenics). Theologically, he was not a fundamentalist.
He debated the famous lawyer Clarence Darrow in
the 1925 Scopes Trial in Dayton, Tennessee. Bryan’s support
was far from the only reason that creationism increased
in popularity. The political and social optimism of the Teddy
Roosevelt era in America and the Edwardian era in England
had been punctured by World War I and the influenza pandemic
that followed it. Unprecedented social changes swept
America during the 1920s, and traditional Bible Christians
scrambled to oppose this tide of modernism. The tension
between fundamentalist Christianity and social modernism
continues, and along with it, creationism has persisted unto
this day. In addition to this, much of the fuel of creationism
has come from southern Christianity, which had long been
a bastion of Bible belief, particularly after it suffered post-
Civil-War social upheaval. For the most part, then, creationism
was a product of the 20th century, rather than being a
holdout of old-time religion.
Creationism is based upon a number of assumptions that
are disputed by most Christian theologians as well as by scientists,
including:
• The Creator operates only through miracles. Even though
this Creator presumably brought the natural laws of physics
and chemistry into existence, creationists do not believe
that the operation of these laws counts as God’s action. If
it evolved, then God did not make it, they think.
• The only kind of truth is literal truth. Thus, they claim,
that when Genesis 1 says six days, it means 144 hours, and
that Adam was no symbol of humankind but was a historical
figure.
Creationists are very selective about the biblical passages
to which they apply a literalistic interpretation. They exempt
obvious poetry, as in the Psalms, and prophetic imagery, from
such interpretation. They also tend to exempt every biblical
passage that deals with any kind of science other than evolution.
Thus when Job referred to “storehouses of the wind,”
creationists do not build a creationist version of meteorology
upon the belief there are actually big rooms where God keeps
the wind locked up, nor that God opens up literal windows
for rain as is written in Genesis 6. When the second book of
Samuel says that a plague was caused by the Angel of Death,
with whom King David actually had a face-to-face conversation,
creationists do not reject the germ theory of disease and
champion a creationist version of medical science. Finally,
First Kings 1:40 describes King Solomon’s inaugural parade
by saying that “the earth was split by their noise.” Creationists
do not claim that this literally happened. Generally, creationists
insist that even though humans can employ figures
of speech, God cannot.
Creationism is based partly on Genesis 1, and upon the
genealogies in later chapters of Genesis, from which most creationists
obtain their belief in a young Earth. Though few of
them accept that creation occurred exactly in 4004 b.c.e. as
Irish archbishop James Ussher insisted (see age of Earth),
creationists usually limit the age of the planet to less than
10,000 years. To do so they must reject all of the radiometric
dating techniques.
Creationism is also based partly upon Genesis 6–9, the
account of the Flood of Noah. Creationists believe the whole
Earth was covered by a flood, which killed almost everything,
except Noah and his family, terrestrial animals on the
ark, aquatic animals, and floating mats of plant material. It is
no surprise that the late 20th-century revival of creationism
resulted from a book about the Flood of Noah: The Genesis
Flood, by Henry Morris, an engineer, and John C. Whitcomb,
a preacher. This flood could not have been tranquil,
they said, but would have produced the entire fossil record
(see fossils and fossilization). Fossils do not represent a
progression in time over the history of the Earth, according
to creationists; instead, they were produced by sedimentation
during this single flood. In their literal acceptance of Noah’s
flood, the creationists take a much more extreme position
than the catastrophists and diluvialists of earlier centuries
(see catastrophism). Many geologists of the early 19th century
believed that Noah’s flood produced only the uppermost
layer of fossils, and that previous floods had produced the
earlier deposits. To them, the fossil layers really did represent
a record of Earth history. Moreover, most of them became
convinced by Agassiz that the uppermost layer was the product
of an ice age, not a flood. But to modern creationists, the
fossil layers represent deposits of plants and animals that
were alive all at once on the Earth on the day Noah walked
into the ark.
The sheer number of fossils makes this belief at once
impossible. If all the coal and oil in the world has been
derived from swamps that were in existence all at one time,
the Earth could scarcely have held that many trees! The lowest
aquatic fossil layers contain many marine organisms but
no fishes; the lowest terrestrial fossil layers contain relatives
of ferns, club mosses, and horsetails, but no flowering plants.
Somehow Noah’s flood must have sorted out the primitive
organisms from the complex and buried the primitive ones on
the bottom. Somehow both marine and freshwater organisms
survived the mixture of freshwater and saltwater.
Perhaps the biggest problem with Flood Geology is mud.
Many geological deposits have been tilted into strange angles,
some almost vertically. This had to happen after they were
rock. In many cases, further sediments were deposited on top
of the tilted layers (see uncomformity). Creationists have
to believe that the tilting occurred while the layers were still
mud. These layers would have collapsed rather than retaining
their shape. The sedimentary fossil deposits are often
interlayered with volcanic deposits. How could hundreds of
temporally separate volcanic eruptions have spread ash and
cinders during a 371-day Flood? Some geological deposits,
such as layers of salt that were produced by evaporation, simply
could not have been produced under such conditions.
Creationist Flood Geology also fails to explain what
would have happened after the Flood. All of the rotting vegetation
(and dead sinners) would have contributed a massive
amount of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, causing a devastating
greenhouse effect. The “two of every kind” of