Creationism - National Center for Science Education

stars and planets. Creation of “grasses” and “herbs” are often held to refer to marine
organisms and primitive bacteria; similarly, the creatures created on the fifth day, birds
and animals “brought forth” from the waters, are interpreted to include dinosaurs, since
dinosaurs lived either in the sea or in swampy areas, and there were closely-related flying
reptiles during this era.
Gappers have come up with a number of biblical passages which they claim
corroborates their Gap hypothesis, which is otherwise unhinted at in Genesis. They have
used these passages to construct an elaborate scenario of a long pre-Adamic reign of
Satan on earth after his rebellion against God, and argue that these passages thus verify
their Gap Theory interpretation.
Gap Theory and Day-Age creationism have both remained popular through the
heyday of fundamentalist activity in the 1920s to the present time. Young-earth
creationism has enjoyed a renaissance following its re-discovery by George McCready
Price around the turn of this century, and even more so with its recent popularization
following the publication of The Genesis Flood in 1961 and the formation of strict
young-earth organizations such as CRS, ICR, and BSA and the resurgence of
fundamentalism generally.
This “new” young-earth creationism is based on Flood Geology: the interpretation
of all or most of the earth’s geophysical features as due to the action of the Genesis flood
survived by Noah. Price set forth the doctrines of modern Flood Geology, which Henry
Morris of ICR has developed and popularized to a wide audience. But much of their
explanation echoes the “classical” Flood geologists: those scientists and theoreticians,
who, prior to the development of modern geological science, and lacking other, plausible
naturalistic causes, attempted to account for earth’s geophysical features by reference to
the flood described in Genesis. The more scientific of these classical Flood theorists
attempted to rely as little as possible on sheer miracle, positing natural causes as much as
possible for earth history. This eventually led to abandonment of the Flood as
explanation for all of earth history; instead, a whole series of similar catastrophes was
hypothesized, of which the Flood was but the latest. Other variants included assumption
of a regional rather than a worldwide Flood, typically by arguing that it was only that
portion of the planet occupied and known to man which God needed to destroy to punish
fallen humanity.
The re-emergence of young-earth Flood Geology creationism is linked to the
growth of militant fundamentalism in the beginning of the century and to its revived
popularity in recent decades. Protestant “fundamentalism” is a movement built upon
various beliefs and doctrinal ingredients. Absolute biblical inerrancy, the foremost
principle, came to be insisted upon in conjunction with (and as a consequence of) other
beliefs and traditions. These include the philosophical tradition of Common Sense
realism, belief in the perspicuity of nature and the Bible and in the propositional nature of
the Bible, and prophetic and millennialist traditions based on interpretations and
calculations derived from the Bible. Together, these beliefs led to an attitude of hyperfacticity
regarding the Bible as well as nature, and a highly literalist approach to the
Bible. In turn, this fostered the Bible-science approach, which assumed that any and all
biblical statements referring to the physical world must be scientifically true, and that the
Bible contains and anticipates truths that modern science has only recently, and less
conclusively, discovered.