creationism

creationism, the belief that the universe and the various forms of life were created by God out of nothing (ex nihilo). Although the idea of God as creator is as old as religion itself, modern creationism is largely a response to evolutionary theory, which can explain the diversity of life without recourse to the doctrine of God or any other divine power. It may also reject the big-bang model of the emergence of the universe. Mainstream scientists generally reject creationism. Creationism is largely associated with conservative branches of Protestant Christianity, though there are proponents of Jewish and Islamic creationism as well as adherents in other branches of Christianity.

Biblical, or young-Earth, creationists believe that the story told in Genesis of God’s six-day creation of all things is literally correct and that Earth is only a few thousand years old, as extrapolated from the biblical genealogies that begin with Adam, the first man. Others, such as old-Earth creationists, believe that a creator made all that exists, but they may not hold that the Genesis story is a literal history of that creation. These creationists often accept fossils and other geological evidence for the age of Earth as factual and may or may not hold that God used the big bang in the creation of the universe. Both types of creationists, however, believe that changes in organisms may involve changes within a species (often understood as the “kind” mentioned in Genesis 1:24) or downward changes such as negative mutations, but they do not believe that any of these changes can lead to the evolution of a lower or simpler species into a higher or more-complex species. Thus, the theory of biological evolution is disputed by all creationists.

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Creationism became the object of interest among conservative religious groups following the publication in 1859 of On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin (1809–82), the first systematic statement of evolutionary theory. Within two decades most of the scientific community had accepted some form of evolution, and most churches eventually followed suit. In the early 20th century some state legislatures in the United States banned the teaching of evolution on the grounds that it contradicts the biblical creation story, which they considered a revealed truth. The result was the famous Scopes Trial (the so-called “Monkey Trial”) of 1925, in which a high-school teacher, John T. Scopes, was convicted of unlawfully teaching the theory of evolution (he was later acquitted on a technicality). Creationism has largely been promulgated by conservative Protestant Christians.

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In 1950 Pope Pius XII released an encyclical confirming that there is no intrinsic conflict between the theory of evolution and the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church, provided that Catholics still believe that humans are endowed with a soul created by God. In 1996 Pope John Paul II expanded and reiterated the church’s position, affirming evolution as "more than a hypothesis."

Beginning in the late 20th century, many creationists advocated a view known as intelligent design. This view, which claimed to draw from modern science, was a contemporary interpretation of the argument from design for the existence of God as set forth by the Anglican clergyman William Paley (1743–1805). Intelligent design is not accepted by all creationists, however, because many of its proponents leave open the identity and nature of the “intelligent designer” of the universe, rather than equating it with the God of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. Today most creationists in the United States favour the elimination of evolution from the public school curriculum or at least the teaching of creationism alongside evolution as what they consider an equally legitimate scientific theory.