Creation science
Creation science or scientific creationism is a pseudoscientific form of Young Earth creationism which claims to offer scientific arguments for certain literalist and inerrantist interpretations of the Bible. It is often presented without overt faith-based language, but instead relies on reinterpreting scientific results to argue that various myths in the Book of Genesis and other select biblical passages are scientifically valid. The most commonly advanced ideas of creation science include special creation based on the Genesis creation narrative and flood geology based on the Genesis flood narrative. Creationists also claim they can disprove or reexplain a variety of scientific facts, theories and paradigms of geology, cosmology, biological evolution, archaeology, history, and linguistics using creation science. Creation science was foundational to intelligent design.
The overwhelming consensus of the scientific community is that creation science fails to qualify as scientific because it lacks empirical support, supplies no testable hypotheses, and resolves to describe natural history in terms of scientifically untestable supernatural causes. Courts, most often in the United States where the question has been asked in the context of teaching the subject in public schools, have consistently ruled since the 1980s that creation science is a religious view rather than a scientific one. Historians, philosophers of science and skeptics have described creation science as a pseudoscientific attempt to map the Bible into scientific facts. Professional biologists have criticized creation science for being unscholarly, and even as a dishonest and misguided sham, with extremely harmful educational consequences.
Beliefs and activities
Religious basis
Creation science is based largely upon chapters 1–11 of the Book of Genesis. These describe how God calls the world into existence through the power of speech in six days, calls all the animals and plants into existence, and molds the first man from clay and the first woman from a rib taken from the man's side; a worldwide flood destroys all life except for Noah and his family and representatives of the animals, and Noah becomes the ancestor of the 70 "nations" of the world; the nations live together until the incident of the Tower of Babel, when God disperses them and gives them their different languages. Creation science attempts to explain history and science within the span of Biblical chronology, which places the initial act of creation some six thousand years ago.Modern religious affiliations
Most creation science proponents hold fundamentalist or Evangelical Christian beliefs in Biblical literalism or Biblical inerrancy, as opposed to the higher criticism supported by liberal Christianity in the Fundamentalist–Modernist Controversy. However, there are also examples of Islamic and Jewish scientific creationism that conform to the accounts of creation as recorded in their religious doctrines.The Seventh-day Adventist Church has a history of support for creation science. This dates back to George McCready Price, an active Seventh-day Adventist who developed views of flood geology, which formed the basis of creation science. This work was continued by the Geoscience Research Institute, an official institute of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, located on its Loma Linda University campus in California.
Creation science is generally rejected by the Church of England as well as the Roman Catholic Church. The Pontifical Gregorian University has officially discussed intelligent design as a "cultural phenomenon" without scientific elements. The Church of England's official website cites Charles Darwin's local work assisting people in his religious parish.
Views on science
Creation science rejects evolution and the common descent of all living things on Earth. Instead, it asserts that the field of evolutionary biology is itself pseudoscientific or even a religion. Creationists argue instead for a system called baraminology, which considers the living world to be descended from uniquely created kinds or "baramins."Creation science incorporates the concept of catastrophism to reconcile current landforms and fossil distributions with Biblical interpretations, proposing the remains resulted from successive cataclysmic events, such as a worldwide flood and subsequent ice age. It rejects one of the fundamental principles of modern geology, uniformitarianism, which applies the same physical and geological laws observed on the Earth today to interpret the Earth's geological history.
Sometimes creationists attack other scientific concepts, like the Big Bang cosmological model or methods of scientific dating based upon radioactive decay. Young Earth creationists also reject current estimates of the age of the universe and the age of the Earth, arguing for creationist cosmologies with timescales much shorter than those determined by modern physical cosmology and geological science, typically less than 10,000 years.
The scientific community has overwhelmingly rejected the ideas put forth in creation science as lying outside the boundaries of a legitimate science. The foundational premises underlying scientific creationism disqualify it as a science because the answers to all inquiry therein are preordained to conform to Bible doctrine, and because that inquiry is constructed upon theories which are not empirically testable in nature.
Scientists also deem creation science's attacks against biological evolution to be without scientific merit. The views of the scientific community were accepted in two significant court decisions in the 1980s, which found the field of creation science to be a religious mode of inquiry, not a scientific one.
History
Creation science began in the 1960s, as a fundamentalist Christian effort in the United States to prove Biblical inerrancy and nullify the scientific evidence for evolution. It has since developed a sizable religious following in the United States, with creation science ministries branching worldwide. The main ideas in creation science are: the belief in creation ex nihilo ; the conviction that the Earth was created within the last 6,000–10,000 years; the belief that humans and other life on Earth were created as distinct fixed "baraminological" kinds; and "flood geology" or the idea that fossils found in geological strata were deposited during a cataclysmic flood which completely covered the entire Earth. As a result, creationists also challenge the geologic and astrophysical measurements of the age of the Earth and the universe along with their origins, which creationists believe are irreconcilable with the account in the Book of Genesis. Creation science proponents often refer to the theory of evolution as "Darwinism" or as "Darwinian evolution."The creation science texts and curricula that first emerged in the 1960s focused upon concepts derived from a literal interpretation of the Bible and were overtly religious in nature, most notably proposing Noah's flood in the Biblical Genesis account as an explanation for the geological and fossil record. These works attracted little notice beyond the schools and congregations of conservative fundamental and Evangelical Christians until the 1970s, when its followers challenged the teaching of evolution in the public schools and other venues in the United States, bringing it to the attention of the public-at-large and the scientific community. Many school boards and lawmakers were persuaded to include the teaching of creation science alongside evolution in the science curriculum. Creation science texts and curricula used in churches and Christian schools were revised to eliminate their Biblical and theological references, and less explicitly sectarian versions of creation science education were introduced in public schools in Louisiana, Arkansas, and other regions in the United States.
The 1982 ruling in McLean v. Arkansas found that creation science fails to meet the essential characteristics of science and that its chief intent is to advance a particular religious view. The teaching of creation science in public schools in the United States effectively ended in 1987 following the United States Supreme Court decision in Edwards v. Aguillard. The court affirmed that a statute requiring the teaching of creation science alongside evolution when evolution is taught in Louisiana public schools was unconstitutional because its sole true purpose was to advance a particular religious belief.
In response to this ruling, drafts of the creation science school textbook Of Pandas and People were edited to change references of creation to intelligent design before its publication in 1989. The intelligent design movement promoted this version. Requiring intelligent design to be taught in public school science classes was found to be unconstitutional in the 2005 Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District federal court case.
Before 1960s
The teaching of evolution was gradually introduced into more and more public high school textbooks in the United States after 1900, but in the aftermath of the First World War the growth of fundamentalist Christianity gave rise to a creationist opposition to such teaching. Legislation prohibiting the teaching of evolution was passed in certain regions, most notably Tennessee's Butler Act of 1925.The Soviet Union's successful launch of Sputnik 1 in 1957 sparked national concern that the science education in public schools was outdated. In 1958, the United States passed National Defense Education Act which introduced new education guidelines for science instruction. With federal grant funding, the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study drafted new standards for the public schools' science textbooks which included the teaching of evolution. Almost half the nation's high schools were using textbooks based on the guidelines of the BSCS soon after they were published in 1963.
The Tennessee legislature did not repeal the Butler Act until 1967.
Creation science emerged as an organized movement during the 1960s. It was strongly influenced by the earlier work of armchair geologist George McCready Price who wrote works such as Illogical Geology: The Weakest Point in the Evolution Theory and The New Geology to advance what he termed "new catastrophism" and dispute the current geological time frames and explanations of geologic history. Price was cited at the Scopes Trial of 1925, but his writings had no credence among geologists and other scientists. Price's "new catastrophism" was also disputed by most other creationists until its revival with the 1961 publication of The Genesis Flood by John C. Whitcomb and Henry M. Morris, a work which quickly became an important text on the issue to fundamentalist Christians and expanded the field of creation science beyond critiques of geology into biology and cosmology as well. Soon after its publication, a movement was underway to have the subject taught in United States' public schools.