Origins of Creationism

During the 1800’s, in response to evidence of vast geological epochs, most theologians equated the days of creation in the Genesis account with geological ages. They accepted the idea that the Earth was very old. William Jennings Bryan still held these views in the 1920’s when he led the anti-evolution crusade.

During the early 1900’s, evangelicals in America often reconciled science and scripture by positing that the Genesis of account wasn’t really complete. They posited that there could be a gap between “In the beginning…” and the rest of the account. This would allow for unnumbered geological ages and a vaster array of fossils. That was a widely held belief among conservative Christians early in the 1900’s.

Prior to 1960, in fact, the leading advocates of a literalistic reading of Genesis tended to be in small Protestant sects, like the Seventh-Day Adventist Church. Indeed, the most visible proponent of young-earth creationism was a Seventh-Day Adventist science teacher named George McCready Price. He argued for a recent six-day creation, with Noah’s flood shaping the Earth’s features and laying down its fossils. His teachings were limited mostly to Seventh-Day Adventist Churches and colleges. This view of a young-Earth would utterly split religion from mainstream science. That is what has been happening during the last 40 years.

Creation Science

How this belief did became a main conservative Christian belief in America? Central in this story is a Baptist engineering professor named Henry Morris, who revived “Noah’s flood geology” in 1961, and began spreading it widely among conservative Protestants. He used the name “scientific creationism” or “creation science”.

Henry Morris was a very intelligent young man, I must admit. He became convinced that the entire bible must be literally true, or none of it can be trusted. Genesis had to be believed equally with the Gospel accounts. Believing this, he focused his career on the study of hydraulic engineering, to learn how catastrophic water action could impact geological features. Working with theologian John Whitcomb, Morris published the book The Genesis Flood. This book presented “scientific arguments” for creation within a biblical chronology. It attributed the fossil record and most geologic features to a single worldwide flood.

This book, as one could expect, was virtually ignored by the scientific community. During the 1960’s and 1970’s, however, it gained an enormous following within conservative protestant circles. Morris followed this book with a string of books, articles, tapes and lectures. He compounded his efforts with an institutional development. Henry Morris founded the Institute for Creation Research, or ICR, which has widely promoted “scientific creationism” through books, pamphlets, films, lectures and debates. ICR biology textbooks dominate the Christian school market.

During the mid 1970’s, the ICR prepared a creationist textbook stripped of any reference to a creator for the public school market. It was this textbook which began to be adopted by conservative school boards around the country, and drew the attention of secular scientists to these developments. This restarted the battle over biology education in public schools.

The battle for the teaching of scientific creationism in public schools began with the legal argument that it was as scientific as evolutionary science. The struggle ended, though, with the judicial conclusion that creation science was simply religious dogma. Morris and his followers freely admitted that teaching creation promotes belief in a creator. Indeed, he never tried to cover that. He claimed, however, that the promotion of this belief in a creator was simply an incidental result of teaching scientific evidence supporting the abrupt non-evolutionary appearance of the universe, life and species.

Morris claimed that teaching evolution promotes a philosophical viewpoint, citing the examples of Huxley or George Gaylord Simpson. Assuming this position, both evolutionary science and creation science, according to Morris, could be given balanced treatment in public school biology without violating the Constitution. He said that creationism isn’t more religious than evolution.

This argument had wide appeal. Public opinion surveys persistently found that Americans were evenly split over the questions of origins. About half believed that humans were created recently, as the Bible says; and half believed humans evolved. Americans broadly supported the idea of teaching both views in public schools. Three States adopted so-called “balanced treatment laws”. This is when there was a tremendous reaction by the other side.

Science groups, mainstream religious organizations and civil liberties groups challenged these new policies and laws in court. They argued they violated the separation of Church and State. One by one, each one of these laws was declared unconstitutional. In 1987, the United States Supreme Court ruled against the Louisiana balanced treatment act. No law is needed to teach scientific evidence for or against evolution.

These rulings ended the teaching of scientific creationism in public schools, but the battle sensitized school officials to the issue. The excluding of creation science from public schools further fed the Christian academy and homeschooling movements, where parents could control the type of biology was taught.

The battle continues to this day, and there aren’t signs of an ending.

The Real Causes of Creationism

By 1959, the Neo-Darwinian synthesis had gained near universal acceptance among biologists. Scientists finally understood how evolution worked. To reverse the effects of the anti-evolution crusade, the Federal Government began funding a new series of high school biology textbooks that emphasized Neo-Darwinian evolution. Up to this time, as a lingering effect of the anti-evolution crusade, most of the textbooks had simply ignored the subject of origins.

Neo-Darwinists such as Julian Huxley and George Gaylord Simpson popularized the expansion of this new biological synthesis into a broad all-encompassing humanistic worldview. They saw science as the only source for truth, and evolution as an ethical principle within science. They urged all humanity to take hold of the evolutionary process and shape it for the good of society.

For Huxley, evolution was a progressive force, generating forms ever more able to transcend their environment. He takes this as an ethical goal for life, and for humans in particular. He would call his system a humanistic religion. He was in an influential position, not only was he a noted scientist, but after World War II, he had been appointed the founding director of UNESCO. He used UNESCO as a world platform to promote his humanistic religious views.

George Gaylord Simpson saw evolution producing beings of ever greater awareness. For him the goal was knowledge, which humans could use for the general good. We have to note that at this time evolution had ultimately triumphed and was almost universally accepted as truth. In their triumphalism, evolutionists in America ignored societal shifts that by 1959 had closed large segments of American population towards the theory of evolution.

Darwinism’s public revival in the media, often proposed by people who wanted to carry it beyond biology into an entire worldview, coupled with the reappearance of Darwinism in textbooks; triggered a strong and enduring reaction among American conservative Christians.

Let’s do a quick review of the religious history of America. Largely invisible to America’s cultural elite, theologically conservative strands of American Protestantism had not withered like they expected, but they had actually increased in size and influence. A variety of factors contributed to this. Literalistic protestant sects existed largely on the fringes of American society until 1920. There were mainline denominations like the Methodists, the Lutherans and the Episcopalians, which dominated protestant religion. The literalistic sects were on the fringes, they weren’t mainstream. They had untrained ministers who were “called” to ministry, who never were taught the modern ideas of biblical interpretation and evolutionary views of religion.

What happened since 1920 is that these small literalistic denominations grew larger and larger. As the clergy of America’s mainline protestant denominations became more liberal, many conservatives moved to denominations more committed to biblical inerrancy.

And Then There Was the South

The South was the only region of the country where conservatives dominated the mainline denominations. During the 20th century there had been a growth in the importance of the South. The South gained economic, cultural and political importance thanks probably to air conditioning, as more people could live there and the economy could thrive. As people moved to the South, they moved to these more conservative Churches, and southern ways spread nationally.

These Churches developed their own colleges, schools, publishing houses, journals and evangelist associations that would reach out other denominations. Before that, most of these structures (colleges, schools, etc…), were denominational. Now they became inter-denominational, but with a conservative bent. This opened the inter-denominational network where biblical inerrancy was central.

On the other side, the secularization of western society virtually emptied European Churches. Hardly anyone in Western Europe went to Church anymore. This affected the vitality of American liberal Protestantism, and strengthened American conservatism.

The Splitting Apart of Science and Religion

Another important point is that most scientists pulled out of the Church. Early in the 20th century most scientists would go to Church, and they would encourage the Church to engage science. Now, the liberal Churches didn’t have any scientist members who encouraged them to engage science, so they pulled out of the battle with conservatives.

Darwinism remained an anathema to conservative Protestants, but they largely kept their objections within their own subculture until the 1960’s. The appearance of these federally funded evolutionary biology textbooks ignited protests from the parents and Churches. When they saw these textbooks coming to the school, they were living in a subculture where evolution was ignored. Suddenly, their children were coming home with textbooks with heavily evolutionary content. This generated ignited reactions.

Citing the likes of Huxley and Simpson, conservatives denounced scientists who were trying to push their science beyond biology into how we should live. By the mid 1960’s, fundamentalists were protesting the teaching of evolution in public schools and demanding that equal time be given to their viewpoints.

These developments had created a new situation. Religion and science had split apart. On the side of science, the materialism of the Neo-Darwinian synthesis was simply less amicable to reconciliation with religion than earlier theories. Further, scientists cared less about reconciling science and religion. In the early 1900’s, scientists tried to work out a reconciliation. By the late 1900’s, scientists didn’t even care about religion. On the science side, there has been a shift towards ignoring the topic.

On the religion side, there was also a greater deviation. The expansion of conservative Churches, coupled with the erosion of liberal Churches, has shifted the center of American Protestantism toward biblical literalism. Conservatives showed less interest in reconciling modern science with scriptural interpretation.

So, this is the historical background on which the modern creationist movement emerged. It is interesting to note the historical causes, and we can understand why it appeared in America, and at this time.

The Scopes Trial, Part II

The initial attention attracted by the new Tennessee statute expanded into media frenzy, when six weeks after the statute became law, John Scopes was indicted for violating it. From its bizarre beginnings to its inconclusive ends, the Scopes trial was never a normal criminal prosecution.

Soon after Tennessee enacted the anti-evolution statute, the ACLU, from New York, offered to defend any Tennessee school teacher willing to challenge this law’s constitutionality in court. Dayton, a small town in East Tennessee, was in an economic crisis because its main industries had closed recently. Its civic leaders invited a local science teacher named John Scopes to accept the ACLU challenge as a means to publicize their town. Scopes agreed to the scheme even though he was not a biology teacher, and he had never violated the statute.

Scopes’ indictment made front page news around the world. He was never arrested. Indeed, he was never even threatened with jail. He was assured his job back the following year, because he was invited to challenge the law by the President of the school board himself. He actually spent most of the time from the indictment to the actual trial making media appearances and traveling.

Both sides in the larger controversy saw the pending trial as an opportunity to make their case to the general public. Both Bryan and the ACLU lawyers recognized this as an opportunity to make their case. It became a show trial and in the actual trial John Scopes actually disappeared. He never testified or major appearance.

On the defense side, was America’s most famous trial lawyer, noted religious skeptic, who was known for talking and writing about the dangers of religion, Clarence Darrow. He volunteered his services to lead a team of crack ACLU lawyers to defend Scopes. It was the only time in Clarence Darrow’s entire career that he volunteered his legal services. His goal was to debunk religious law-making and to promote individual liberty.

On the other side, Jennings Bryan, who was a lawyer but hadn’t practiced law in over 30 years, volunteered too. He volunteered to make the case against the teaching of evolution. He knew that the law, and not John Scopes, was on trial.

The media promoted this heavyweight bout as “The Trial of the Century”. It was just a simple misdemeanor trial with a potential fine of 500$!! However, Scopes wasn’t really on trial, the teaching of evolution and academic freedom was on trial. It was the first broadcasted trial in American history. It was covered by over 200 reporters. It was said at the end that more words had been telegraphed from the United States to England about this trial than any event that had previously occurred in American history.

The trial itself was anticlimactic, as each side made their very familiar arguments. These had been circling around for five years. Neither side disputed that Scopes had violated the law. When the judge refused to strike the statute as unconstitutional, Clarence Darrow asked the jury to convict Scopes so that they could appeal the judges of a higher court. If Scopes wasn’t convicted there couldn’t be an appeal and they couldn’t challenge the law.

They convicted Scopes and he was fined the minimum amount of 100$, which was paid on his behalf by one of the reporters. The trial’s most memorable event occurred near its end, when Clarence Darrow invited William Jennings Bryan to take the stand as a witness in defense of the anti-evolution statute. Bryan agreed to do so. Darrow asked questions about biblical literalism, such as: Was Jonas inside the whale for three days? Was Eve made with Adam’s rib? These questions made Bryan and the biblical account look foolish.

Following the trial, Scopes accepted a scholarship to study Geology at the University of Chicago, and became a petroleum engineer in Venezuela, and later managed an oil refinery. Bryan died in Dayton, less than a week after the trial, maybe because of the stress of the trial. His crusade, however, continued. Scopes’ conviction went on to appeal into Tennessee’s Supreme Court and it was overturned on a technicality.

The anti-evolution statute was declared constitutional, which foreclose any further appeal to the United States Supreme Court. Other States imposed similar laws. Indeed, if you look at the textbooks of the time, the theory of evolution is virtually non-existent. This is really an interesting case of willful ignorance, which repeated itself later in our history.

The Anti-evolution Crusade

Evolutionary science produced a popular backslash in America during the 1920’s. This was known as America’s anti-evolution crusade. Conservative Christians had never liked the Darwinian theory of human evolution, but their concern became a crusade during the 1920’s. Several factors contributed to the timing of America’s anti-evolution crusade. Why so many years after the publication of Origin of Species? Why in the 1920’s and not the 1860’s?

There are several factors that contributed to this. The first of these is that protestant fundamentalism increased within the mainline religious denominations during the years leading up to 1920. The term fundamentalism, which is now so common, was indeed originally coined only around 1920 to characterize a group of religious believers within the mainline protestant denominations.

In the late 1800’s, with the rise of religious liberalism within the different denominations, notions of higher criticism of the Bible appeared. They treated the Bible as a written work by people. While everyone within these denominations considered the Bible a special work, liberals viewed it as a work that reflected the evolution of the Hebrew view of God. You have the early books of the Bible that reflect how early Hebrew people viewed God. Then they developed and you have the prophetic books. Then the New Testament presents a fuller view of God. This was really an evolutionary view of religion.

It was against this that conservatives within the Church fought back. They held a very high view of scripture. They consider the entire scripture to be the word of God. The liberals would say this too, but they meant that it was inspired in a special way. Conservatives saw this evolutionary view of religion as a modern heresy.

It was the conservative-modernist controversy what was tearing apart the mainline religious denominations: the Methodists, Episcopal, Presbyterians and Baptists. It came to the point where the fundamentalists within those different denominations had more in common with each other than they did with the liberals within their own denominations. American Protestantism was splitting open.

Further, there were other factors that influenced the explosion of the crusade. After the eclipse of Darwinism, Darwin’s natural selection was beginning to revive within evolutionary science with the advent of Mendelian genetics. Pure classic Darwinism was more hostile to religious views than Lamarckianism.

Further, compulsory high-school education was just beginning to take effect around the country. This was pushing evolutionary teaching into the face of more parents. Before that, people mostly only went to elementary school, where evolution isn’t taught. Evolution is taught in high-school. With children forced to go to school, more parents who were suspicious of evolution for religious reasons were reacting.

Also, evolutionary thinking at this time was associated in the public mind with German militarism (World War I was just finished), laissez-faire capitalism and eugenics. This gave people a negative view of evolution. Finally, the 1920’s was a period of heightened social stress, as reform competed with reaction for America’s future.

With this background, around 1920, several fundamentalist leaders began targeting the theory of evolution for public condemnation. New anti-evolution fundamentalist institutions that attracted widespread following across denominations were formed.

Mainline protestant denominations became embroiled in bitter disputes over the teaching of evolution within Church Colleges and from the pulpit. Conservatives demanded orthodoxy with respect to the special creation of humans in God’s image. On the other side, the liberals defended modern science and an evolutionary view of religious understanding. In the end, in most of the denominations, the liberals won.

I think these factors help to explain the timing and explosion of the anti-evolution crusade. Next time I’ll talk about the decisive event of this war, the Trial of the Century, the well-known Scopes Trial.

Christians Juggling Biology and Theology Before Darwin

The great French naturalist Georges Cuvier, more than anyone else, founded modern biology during the early 1800’s. He had a very long carrier in France. He held very important positions and was highly regarded worldwide. He was part of the reaction against atheistic speculations that emerged in the 18th century. He based his work, rather than on speculation, on empirical research. With his research, Cuvier thought he found plenty of evidence against evolution.

In his early work, he focused on the internal structure of various species, rather than on their external structure. He carefully studied how species are designed internally. From this work, Cuvier concluded that there are only a few basic patterns of animal organization. The various species that we see out there are simply variations on these basic designed types.

Looking at individual species, he saw that bodily interactions within each species are so delicate that any significant change in them would render the individual incapable of survival. Organisms are so neatly balanced that if anything changes in it, the organism would collapse.

From his viewpoint, the origin of new species through evolution was simply impossible. It is not surprising that this view fit with Cuvier’s basic Christian convictions. In his case, however, they were fundamentally based on his scientific research.

He became Chief of the French Museum of Natural History during the Napoleonic era. There, Cuvier moved from individual research to overseeing an entire laboratory. He oversaw the first comprehensive collections of fossils and biological specimens. Napoleon was conquering much of the world, and he wanted to bring trophies back to Paris. At this time, science was a vehicle of showing success and power. Fossils and mummies were the trophies, and Cuvier was in charge of overseeing a lot of them.

From his research with these fossils and his studies with biological specimens, he found that there were no significant changes in living organisms over time. The fossils seemed to be unchanged from the earliest time. He maintained that the basic types work and they couldn’t be changed.

Cuvier also was the man to establish that certain fossils, such as the mastodon from America, represented extinct species. This doesn’t directly agree with the Bible. With this, he showed his openness to new evidence (something which many Christians today should try to imitate).

When he looked closer he found sharp breaks in the fossil record, with each break containing a distinctive array of fossil types. He was the one who originated the idea of different geological epochs. Before Cuvier, the past was just the same as the present. He broke it into periods: the Paleozoic, where you find mostly marine invertebrates; the Mesozoic, were giant reptiles appeared; and then the Cenozoic, the age of birds and mammals.

He saw that each epoch had its own types of species, then there were breaks and new types laid on top of it. This suggested to Cuvier that there were great catastrophic extinctions in the past. By some vast environmental catastrophes, probably worldwide floods (he never suggested Noah’s flood being one of them). When his followers could not find any source for the repopulation of regions after the catastrophes, they concluded that God or some vital force in nature must had recreated life modeled on the few basic viable types after each catastrophe.

Fully developed by the mid 1800’s, this theory held that the Earth had gone through a series of massive floods or ice ages. This was followed by the creation of new life. This theory vastly elongated the biblical chronology. Many of Cuvier’s followers, who were Christians, tried to reconcile it with the account of creation found in the book of Genesis, by arguing that the days mentioned in Genesis were geological ages. This is the day-age view of creation.

After each massive catastrophe, God would recreate life. The intelligent design of each species, and the ongoing need for the intervention of a superior intelligence, proved, to these Christians, God’s existence and his intervention throughout history. Cuvier’s science was employed to prove Christian theology. This is where biology stood in Darwin’s youth. This is the biology that Darwin learnt when he went to Cambridge.

The Truth About Ussher's Chronology

James Ussher was an Irishman born near the end of the 16th century. Elizabeth was on Britain’s throne and remained there until Usher was 22. By that time, he had accomplished a great deal. He was very gifted with languages. Young James went off to Dublin to enter Trinity College when he was only 13. He was ordained a priest at the age of 20. He became a professor at Trinity when he was only 26. When he was 44, he became Archbishop of Armagh. That made him the head of the Anglo-Irish Church, a protestant leader in a predominantly Catholic land.

Ussher’s skills and his references were scholarly. He held an administrative position as Archbishop, but his heart laid elsewhere. In fact, he was criticized as an administrator because his inclination was to debate, not to simply deal with opposition by politics of intolerant decree.

It was during the final period of his life that he wrote the work for which he is now famous, the "Annals of the Old Testament, deduced from the first origins of the world". This work appeared right at mid-century in 1650. It’s common to say that Ussher reached his famous date of 4004 B.C.E. by simply calculating back from the time of Jesus by adding up years involved in the lineages of Christ given in the Bible, and going all the way back to Adam. It was much more complicated than that.

There is complete information given in the Old Testament to make an accurate calculation up to the time of Solomon, but after that, ambiguities begin to creep in. For approximately the last 400 years before the birth of Jesus, the Bible gives no help at all. What Ussher did was what to correlate information from this period with known dates from the histories of other cultures, specifically the Chaldean and Persian cultures. This required an incredible expertise in biblical history, secular history and language abilities. The bulk of the knowledge he applied was non-biblical. Ussher had one of the best minds of his time.

The late Stephen Jay Gould, noted paleontologist and Darwinian evolutionist, once wrote a wonderful explanation of how Ussher came to his conclusions (it is available here), including how he came to the precise date he gave for the creation: October 23, at noon.

Gould’s point in taking up the subject was to criticize those who dismiss Ussher’s work as the application of dogma to a scientific subject. They are not only ignorant, but they miss the point entirely. Gould said “I close with a final plea for judging people by their own criteria, not by later standards that they couldn't possibly know or assess”.

He was delighted with Ussher’s explanation of how he determined his result. Not only by the plain use of Holy Scripture, by also by light of reason well directed. Because of his erudition, Ussher’s calculation became accepted in the Western Christian tradition for a long time.

King James commissioned a translation of the Bible in the first decade of the 17th century. It became the authorized version in English and continues to exist to this day. By a half-century after Ussher’s death, his calculation of 4004 B.C.E. for the date of creation was inserted into the column of annotations that stood between the double columns of text. It lasted there until the second half of the 20th century.