Creationism in America, particularly Young Earth Creationism, portrays itself as knowing the real truth about the creation of the universe. It would be easy to assume that Creationism in America represents a view held by believers since the founding of the Church, or even to Moses. But Young Earth Creationism only became widespread in America in the last 50 years. Far from being an old understanding of how the world came into being, Young Earth Creationism evolves rapidly and spreads like Kudzu on the Georgia countryside--a new and foreign plant that threatens to choke the more delicate and complex ways people understood Creation in the past.
Describing someone simply as a Creationist is like describing both Lance Armstrong and a five-year-old on training wheels as bicyclists. They both ride bicycles, but the similarities end there. I can’t cover all of Creationism in one brief essay, but I will attempt a summary of Creationism in the United States over the past two centuries and how it has evolved.
Before the mid 19th century science and religion coexisted in general harmony, if not complete harmony. Well into the 19th century, many of those who practiced science were also churchmen. In America, the 18th Century Puritan Jonathan Edwards, widely known for his sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” was also devoted to science. He wrote on spiders and died a martyr for science after he volunteered to be one of the first to test the smallpox vaccine.
That harmony changed in the second half of the 19th century. In the 1870s two very different men published tomes that became bestsellers. Both authors proposed that conflict between science and religion was the norm in the history of the Christian West. John William Draper, the first president of the American Chemical Society, blamed the Catholic Church for nearly every ill in history. Andrew Dickson White, the first president of Cornell University, blamed all religion. Both are cited by historians of science as good examples of bad history.
In the second decade of the 20th century a series of pamphlets outlining the Fundamentals of the Christian Faith were published and distributed by the Bible Institute of Los Angeles in the belief that high school education – now widely available even in rural areas -- was destroying the faith of youth in America. Although Creation was certainly part of the fundamentals, it’s worth noting that, with the exception of Seventh Day Adventists, Fundamentalists in the early 20thcentury did not believe the cosmos was only 10,000 years old. No one knew how old the universe was. At least not until publication of “The Genesis Flood” by John C. Whitcomb and Henry M. Morris in 1961.
Whitcomb and Morris started a movement within the American Evangelical Church that maintained that life on Earth began in seven literal 24-hour days just 6000 years ago, and that the universe itself is no more than 10,000 years old. Just as the publication of “The Fundamentals” was a reaction to the greater reach of high-school education -- student numbers increased five-fold between 1880 and 1910 -- the Young Earth Creationist movement was in part a reaction to the fanfare surrounding the Darwin Centennial in 1959, the discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953, and the Miller-Urey experiment of 1952, which showed that under early earth conditions the precursors of life could arise spontaneously.
Reaction to “The Fundamentals” led to the original Scopes trial in 1926. The rapid expansion of Young Earth Creationism (YEC) in the 1960s and 70s, especially in the South, led to “Scopes 2,” the Creation trial in Arkansas in 1981. The first Scopes trial had an ambiguous result, but Scopes 2 stopped the teaching of Scientific Creationism, as YEC came to be known, in public schools.
A decade later the Intelligent Design movement was born. Although it appeared to be an outgrowth of YEC, the two groups have little in common except hostility to Charles Darwin and evolution. Intelligent Design (ID) does not argue with the age of the Earth or the Universe. ID had such rapid success in its first decade that some adherents decided to try to push ID into the curriculum in the Dover Pennsylvania high school. ID was defeated and labeled Creationism, not science, in a trial that was covered around the world.
Despite defeats, both movements have continued to grow and, dare I say, evolve. YEC enshrined its view of creation in a museum in Kentucky. In fact, the $25 million facility opened its doors in 2005 just as ID was facing defeat in Dover. Among many attractions, the Creation Museum displays a dinosaur with English saddle. In the compressed YEC cosmos, dinosaurs roamed the world between the fifth day of creation and the Genesis Flood.
Although all Creationists are united in their distaste for Darwin and evolution, YEC dismisses Einstein and much of 20thcentury physics also. Before Einstein’s work on relativity, most people believed the cosmos did not begin at a specific time. The Big Bang theory of Catholic priest Georges Lemaitre, based on Einstein’s relativity physics, sets the age of the universe using the speed of light as a fundamental constant. For the universe to be less than 10,000 years old, light must have moved much faster in the early universe. In fact “c Decay”, decay of the speed of light over time, is a YEC theory that denies that the speed of light is a fundamental constant. Another YEC theory uses a unique interpretation of general relativity to explain how the universe can appear to be billions of years old yet actually have an age of 10,000 years.
As to the genesis of that theory, Christiananswers.net says “Dr. Russell Humphreys was inspired to develop a new creationist cosmology which appears to solve the problem of the apparent conflict with the Bible's clear, authoritative teaching of a recent creation.” Humphreys started with his answer and worked backwards from there. It would be difficult to find a clearer example of a method that is not scientific. But it is also a method that works with millions who follow Creationism as it evolves.
