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Creationism
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William Blake's watercolor of 1794, for the frontispiece of Europe, a prophecy Creationism or "creation-science" is a term applied by the advocates of a strictly literal interpretation of the biblical account of creation. It denounces the theory of evolution and claims to represent authentic religion and science. Actually, it represents neither. Spokespersons for the mainstream religions, Catholic, Protestant and Jewish have officially come out against the creationist viewpoint as being not in agreement with modern biblical scholarship. Scientists ... reject the so-called science claimed to back up the creationist views. All bills introduced into courts to insist on the teaching of the Creationist platform in public schools have been thrown out as unacceptable.
Creationism and intelligent design are not the same. Creationism arose from clearly religious motivations. For political reasons, its advocates found they could "sell" it better to non-fundamentalists if they downplayed the religious content and renamed it "creation-science". But its essential content and goals were the same. Most creationists held that the earth was no more than about 10,000 years old, that the fossil record was laid down during the Genesis flood, and that natural laws were vastly different before man's "fall" in the Garden of Eden. To further their campaign to get some of this into schools, the Biblical content was stripped away even more, and what was left was primarily an attack on evolution.
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After the Scopes Trial, general agreement is that the Creationism movement had peaked and declined quite dramatically and quickly. Yet, it did have its lasting effects. Text-book manufacturers increasingly took evolution — Darwinism especially — out of their books, so that schoolchildren got less and less exposure to the ideas anyway. Whatever battles the evolutionists may have thought they had won in the court of popular opinion, in the trenches of the classroom they were losing the war badly. Things started to move again in the late 1950s. It was then that, thanks to Sputnik, the Russians so effectively demonstrated their superiority in rocketry (with its implications for the arms race of the Cold War), and America realized with a shudder how ineffective was its science training of its young.
Evolution vs. Creationism: An Introduction Each of the four sections of Evolution vs. Creationism provides a resource that will assist the reader in better understanding these issues. The first section addresses the nature of how evolution works as part of the scientific enterprise, as well as a summary of the relationship between religious beliefs and science. A section on the history of the controversy provides a handy synopsis of the lengthy struggles, from before Darwin to the present day, between advocates of creationism and the proponents of evolution. A collection of primary source documents addressing cosmology, law, education, and religious issues from all sides of the debate constitute the third section. The book concludes with a selection of resources for further information for those who wish to study the topic in more depth.
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Creationism in the West is primarily based on creation according to Genesis, and in its broad sense covers a wide range of beliefs and interpretations. Through the 19th century the term most commonly referred to direct creation of individual souls, in contrast to traducianism, but in 1929 in the United States the term became particularly associated with Christian fundamentalist opposition to human evolution and belief in flood geology.[2] Several states passed laws against the teaching of evolution in public schools, as upheld in the Scopes Trial. Evolution was omitted entirely from school textbooks across the United States until the 1960s. Since then, renewed efforts to introduce teaching creationism in public schools in the form of flood geology, creation science, and intelligent design have been consistently held to contravene the constitutional separation of Church and State by a succession of legal judgements.[3] The meaning of the term creationism was contested, but by the 1980s it had been co-opted by proponents of creation science and flood geology.[2]
Creationism, roughly, is the belief that the earth and all life was created by the JudeoChristian god in literal accordance with the Genesis description. There are ... Islamic creationists and Hindu creationists (and probably others as well), but they do not factor into the American political sphere.
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