A Short History of the Modern Creation Movement and the Continuing Modern Cultural Wars

Introduction Until the early 1800s, both common and highly educated persons in the Western world believed that all living things were deliberately created according to the general outline found in Genesis (Numbers, "Creationism" 5; Darwinism Comes 24-48). Jared Diamond argues that often overlooked by both sides in this bitter struggle, forgotten by all but a few specialists, is creation science's venerable history, which may offer valuable lessons for our time. From the rise of modern biology in the 1600s until Darwin's day, almost all scientists believed that species were created by God, in part because of the scientists' intellectual heritage, in part because the evidence for a different view was still weak. (83) Until the middle of the 1800s, many scientists were active supporters of the various forms of creationism. The term creationism, as used in this article, is the belief that the basic forms of life were intelligently designed by a being transcendent to humans (Johnson, Darwin on Trial 3-4). Diamond notes that one of the first of many creation scientists was Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680), described as "a German Jesuit who wrote some thirty learned books about everything from hieroglyphs to magnets. Like his contemporaries, he regarded Genesis not as a metaphor but as fact. Kircher was sure that science could only strengthen the faithful in their beliefs by making clear the ways in which the Lord worked his miracles" (83). Beginning primarily with the works of certain prominent philosophers in the late 1700s, the dominant scientific view of scientists on origins slowly changed. As Desmond King-Hele concluded in Erasmus Darwin, "After 1794, statements of the principle of natural selection and theories of evolution came fairly thick and fast" (75). A crucial event that propelled this change was the publication of Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species in 1859. Darwin argued that all present and past forms of life evolved over long periods of time without a creator's intervention (Pennock 69-70, 312, 334). The Origin took the world by storm, and since then, creationism "rapidly lost ground," especially among scientists (Numbers, "Creationism" 164). By the late 190Os, most prominent scientists embraced some form of biological evolution - first theistic evolution, and later, with few exceptions, naturalism or atheistic evolution (Larson and Witham 313). As Steven Weinberg notes in Dreams of Final Theory, most scientists today do not give any credence to the creation worldview. Only five percent (about 10,000) of all working scientists accept the view that God created the first humans less than 10,000 years ago (Witham 33). Conversely, among conservative Christians, Jews, and Muslims, creationism has remained strong (Morris, The Long War 231; Overman 1-46). Studies consistently find that over half of all persons in America accept strict creationism, and most of the rest accept some form of progressive creationism or theistic evolution (Gallup and Poling 137-38; Bergman, Public Opinions 42-44). About twenty percent of high school teachers hold the creationist worldview, and the number of college professors who accept the creationist label is estimated to be between ten and twenty percent (Bergman, The Attitude 118-23. See also Shankar; Affannato; Buckner; Elgin; Brown; and Clark). Henry Morris notes that one can now find a nucleus of genuine creationists on almost every college and university faculty in the country. They tend to be quiet about it or, if vocal, usually [are] persecuted for it, but they are there! Such a condition would have been unheard of 40 years ago, when I was almost alone as a creationist faculty member in the secular university world, so far as I could determine. (Morris, History of 258) Nineteenth-century ministers often criticized evolution from the pulpit, but relatively few scientists became actively involved in the anti-Darwin movement until the early 1920s. …