Creationism

This article is about the Abrahamic belief; creationism can also refer to origin beliefs in general or, centuries earlier, to an alternative to traducianism.

Types of creationism

Creationism covers a spectrum of beliefs which have been categorised into the broad types listed below. Not all creationists are in dispute with scientific theories, though very few modern scientists are creationists.

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• Modern geocentrism — God recently created a spherical world, and placed it in the center of the universe. The Sun, planets and everything else in the universe revolve around it. All scientific claims about the age of the Earth are lies; evolution does not occur. Very few people today maintain such a belief. See, for example, the Creation Science Association for Mid-America, in Cleveland, MO, USA.
• Young-Earth Creationism — The belief that the Earth was created by God a few thousand years ago, literally as described in Creation according to Genesis, within the approximate timeframe of the Ussher-Lightfoot Calendar or somewhat more according to the interpretation of biblical genealogies. (They may or may not believe that the Universe is the same age.) As such, it rejects not only radiometric and isochron dating of the age of the Earth, arguing that they are based on debatable assumptions, but also approaches such as ice core dating and dendrochronology, which make the barest of assumptions of uniformitarianism, and which hint that the Earth is far older than the Ussher-Lightfoot Calendar suggests. Instead, it interprets the geologic record largely as a result of a global flood. This view is held by many Protestant Christians in the USA, and by many Haredi Jews. For Christian groups promoting this view, see the Institute for Creation Research (ICR), El Cajon, California, USA, and the Creation Research Society (CRS), Saint Joseph, Missouri, USA.

:Because Young Earth creationists believe in the literal truth of the description in Genesis of divine creation of every "kind" of plant and creature during a week about 6,000 years ago, they dispute parts of evolution (specifically Universal Common Ancestry) which describes all species developing from a common ancestor without a need for divine intervention over a much longer time. Different young-earth creationists offer different explanations for the fossil record, which gives the appearance that the Earth is much older:

Related Topics:
Evolution - Species - Fossil record

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::*God created the Earth only recently, but made it appear much older. This is the belief of a small subgroup of Young Earth creationists, which is sometimes termed the Omphalos hypothesis. This argument was first made by Philip Henry Gosse in 1857. He held that because the world operates in cycles (chicken to egg to chicken on so on), certain physical and biological processes need the appearance of age to function. It is termed the Omphalos hypothesis because it is based on the question of whether or not Adam (or Eve for that matter) had a navel (given that they were created as adults rather than born, they can be assumed to have never possessed an umbilical cord). Gosse postulated that Adam did have a navel because it is how humans are formed. So the appearance of history (the belly button) is there, even though he was just created. He likewise postulated that for the earth to work, it must have been established with the appearance of age to function correctly. While many creationists hold this view for some smaller aspects of creation, for example the existence of the fossil record, the argument has been largely superseded.

Related Topics:
Omphalos hypothesis - Philip Henry Gosse - 1857 - Adam - Eve - Navel - Born - Umbilical cord

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::*God created the Earth only recently, and the fossil record is the record of the destruction of the global flood recorded in Genesis. The present diversity of land animals are all descendants of the animals on the ark, having heavily diversified after the flood. There are a variety of mechanisms believed to be involved, including genomic modularity -- the ability for animals to reorganize their genome in response to stress or other outside influence, heterozygous fractionation (heterozygous genes in parents can lead to speciation by having multiple homozygous genes in children), and standard evolution.

Related Topics:
Diversity - Animal - Genome

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• Old-Earth Creationism — which maintains that the physical universe was created by God, but that the creation event of Genesis is not to be taken strictly literally. This group generally believes that the age of the Universe and the age of the Earth are as described by astronomers and geologists, but that details of the evolutionary theory are questionable.

::Old-Earth creationism itself comes in at least three types:

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::*Gap creationism, also called Restitution creationism — the view that life was immediately created on a pre-existing old Earth. This group generally translates Genesis 1:2 as "The earth became without form and void," indicating a destruction of the original creation by some unspecified cataclysm. This was popularized in the Scofield Reference Bible, but has little support from Hebrew scholars.

Related Topics:
Gap creationism - Scofield Reference Bible

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::*Day-age creationism — the view that the "six days" of Genesis are not ordinary twenty-four-hour days, but rather much longer periods (for instance, each "day" could be the equivalent of millions of years of modern time). This theory often states that the Hebrew word "yôm", in the context of Genesis 1, can be properly interpreted as "age." Some adherents claim we are still living in the seventh age ("seventh day").

Related Topics:
Day-age creationism - Genesis - Hebrew

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::* Progressive creationism — the view that species have changed or evolved in a process continuously guided by God, with various ideas as to how the process operates (often leaving room for God's direct intervention at key moments in Earth/life's history). This view accepts most of modern physical science including the age of the earth, but rejects much of modern evolutionary biology or looks to it for evidence that evolution by natural selection alone is incorrect. This view can be, and often is, held in conjunction with other Old-earth views such as Day-age creationism or framework/metaphoric/poetic views.

Related Topics:
Progressive creationism - Evolution - Natural selection

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• Evolutionary creationism/Theistic evolutionism — the general belief that some or all classical religious teachings about God and creation are compatible with some or all of the scientific theory of evolution, It views evolution as a tool used by God and can synthesize with gap or day-age creationism, although most adherents deny that Genesis was meant to be interpreted as history at all. It can still be described as "creationism" in holding that divine intervention brought about the origin of life or that divine Laws govern formation of species, but in the creation-evolution controversy its proponents generally take the "evolutionist" side while disputing that some scientists' methodological assumption of materialism can be taken as ontological as well. Many creationists would deny that this is creationism at all, and should rather be called "theistic evolution", just as many scientists allow voice to their spiritual side. In particular, this view rejects the doctrine of special creation and other doctrines. For example, evolutionary theory assumes death is a natural part of life and it had an integral part in the formation of life, but the Bible teaches that only Life begets life and that death is a result of sin.
• Intelligent Design movement — The main proponents of intelligent design have intentionally distanced themselves from other forms of creationism, preferring to be known as wholly separate from creationism as a philosophy. One of the chief websites of the movement defines it thus: "The theory of intelligent design holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection." Intelligent design styles itself as a philosophical approach to the origin of information and complexity within nature, and, its adherents claim publicly, is not concerned with religion, or the identity or nature, whether natural or supernatural, of any possible designer(s). Ostensibly, intelligent design does not oppose the theory of evolution. However, the leading proponents of intelligent design are Christian theists who vociferously oppose evolution and acknowledge to their constituency "our strategy has been to change the subject a bit so that we can get the issue of intelligent design, which really means the reality of God, before the academic world and into the schools" and that "this (the ID movement) isn't really, and never has been a debate about science. It's about religion and philosophy." Critics cite such statements as proof that intelligent design is creationism in new clothing (see Wedge strategy).