History of creationism: Encyclopedia II - History of creationism - Early 20th century

History of creationism - Early 20th century

The period immediately after Darwin's death in 1882 is known as the Eclipse of Darwinism, where Darwinian natural selection was considered inadequate by the scientific community. Evolution itself was assumed, but the mechanism of how it happened was in considerable debate, and none had anything near to a consensus. Among these theories were neo-Lamarckism (which merged certain aspects of Lamarck's theory of acquired characteristics with certain aspects of Darwinian evolution), orthogenesis ("straight-line" evolution, which talked about evolution towards a specific goal by forces within the organism), and the discontinious variation of Mendelism and Hugo De Vries' mutation theory. Some of these alternative theories, in particular neo-Lamarckism and orthogenesis, allowed more easily for an interpretation of the intervention of God, which appealed to many scientists at the time. By the first decades of the 20th century, the debate had become generally one between continuous-variation biometricians and discontinuous-variety Mendelians. By the 1930s and 1940s, though, they were combined into the modern evolutionary synthesis, which soon became the dominant model in the scientific community.

George McCready Price (1870 - 1963) was important in establishing "flood geology", and many of his ideas that a young earth could be deduced from science would be taken up later.

In 1910, the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church distilled the principles of Christian fundamentalism into what were known as the "five fundamentals", one of which was the inerrancy of the Scriptures, including the Genesis account of creation.[2]

After the First World War (1914 - 1918), the teaching of evolution and creation in public education grew as a public controversy. (see Creation and evolution in public education). Many texts began to teach the theory of evolution as scientific fact. Many Christians, Jews, and Muslims came to believe that in teaching evolution as fact, the State was unconstitutionally infringing on their right to the free exercise of religion, as it effectively taught their children that the Bible had been proven false.

For example, the Democratic Party politician William Jennings Bryan (1860 - 1925) "became convinced that the teaching of Evolution as a fact instead of a theory caused the students to lose faith in the Bible, first, in the story of creation, and later in other doctrines, which underlie the Christian religion."

During the First World War, horrors committed by Germans, who were citizens of one of the most scientifically advanced countries in the World, caused Bryan to state "The same science that manufactured poisonous gases to suffocate soldiers is preaching that man has a brute ancestry and eliminating the miraculous and the supernatural from the Bible."

A popular book from 1917 by Vernon L. Kellogg entitled Headquarters Nights, reported through first hand evidence German officers discussing Darwinism leading to the declaration of war.

In 1922, William Jennings Bryan published In His Image[3], in which he argued that Darwinism was both irrational and immoral. On the former point, he pointed to examples such as the eye, which he argued could not be explained by Darwinian evolution. On the latter point, he argued that Darwinism advocated the policy of "scientific breeding" or eugenics, by which the strong were to weed out the weak, a belief which directly contradicts the Christian doctrine of charity to the helpless.

In 1924, Clarence Darrow defended Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb on the charge of kidnapping and killing Bobby Franks; his defence included an argument that "this terrible crime was inherent in his organism, and it came from some ancestor".

In 1925, G.K. Chesterton published The Everlasting Man[4], in which he developed and articulated many creationist ideas and criticisms of the philosophical underpinnings and perceived logical flaws of evolution.

The Scopes Trial of 1925 is perhaps the most famous court case of its kind. The Butler Act had prohibited the teaching of evolution in public schools in Tennessee. The schoolteacher John T. Scopes was found guilty of teaching evolution and fined, although the case was later dismissed on a technicality.

In 1929 a book by one of George McCready Price's former students, Harold W. Clark described Price's catastrophism as "creationism" in Back to Creationism. Previously anti-evolutionists had described themselves as being "Christian fundamentalists" "Anti-evolution" or "Anti-false science". The term creationism had previously referred to the creation of souls for each new person, as opposed to traducianism, where souls were said to have been inherited from one's parents.

In 1933, a group of atheists seeking to develop a "new religion" to replace previous, deity-based religions, composed the Humanist Manifesto, which outlined a fifteen-point belief system, the first two points of which provided that "Religious humanists regard the universe as self-existing and not created" and "Humanism believes that man is a part of nature and that he has emerged as a result of a continuous process." [5] This document exacerbated the ideological tone of the discussion in many circles, as many creationists came to see evolution as a doctrine of the "religion" of atheism.

The American George Gaylord Simpson (1902 - 1984) was particularly instrumental in the incorporation of palaeontology in the 1940s. Some creationists, however, objected to his supposed equation of microevolution and macroevolution, acknowledging the former but denying the latter, and continue to do so to this day.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Early 20th century", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki