Creationism - National Center for Science Education

sharp divisions within the creationist movement. I wrote a book-length annotated
bibliography of this literature (McIver 1988a). Much of that literature forms the basis for
discussion of various topics in this dissertation as well.
Related to this diversity, a theme which emerges, and which is of particular
interest to cultural anthropologists, is the process of proliferation and diversification of
creationist thought: the cultural and ideological elaboration of creationist arguments and
theories. Creationist theory and ideology shows itself to be capable of elaborate and
limitless variation. This evolution of creationist thought needs to be comprehensively
explored and analyzed in both its historical and contemporaneous manifestations. The
process which emerges is a continual fractionation of creationist ideology into competing
and opposing theories, all the while responding to scientific and evolutionist
developments and arguments in a kind of dialectic, by development of new theories and
new variants in response to specific challenges, both internal and external.
In this sense the following study is notably different from conventional
ethnographies of traditional societies in which theoretical and ideological evolution and
elaboration is shunned, or at least not readily confessed to, by informants. By contrast, in
this study, creationist believers, though they usually insist that truth is absolute, eternal,
and obtainable by man through God’s Word, must admit to the existence of vigorously
competing schools of creationist thought and interpretation, which they are forced to
confront intellectually and against which they spend much time and energy, and also to
the existence and development of often sharply different theories in the past.
Thus, though creationism employs a cultural logic based on more or less shared
cultural and intellectual traditions, and though creationist thought develops more or less
logically given the underlying assumptions and presuppositions of these traditions, extant
creationist theories continually change and diversify, segmenting and fissioning, both as a
result of internal intellectual evolution and as a response to external (scientific and
evolutionist) challenges. Each of these new forms of creationism in turn constitute a
more or less coherent and logical system of thought and belief (again, given the
presuppositions of the cultural traditions). But, there is no single or stable end product of
creationist theory, despite the perennial exhortation of strict creationists to return “back to
the Bible.” (The creationist theories are “more or less” logical given their
presuppositions, but each contains contradictions and logical weak points, even within
their own systems of presuppositions and logic.) Since this is cultural rather than
biological evolution, there is considerable feedback and cross-fertilization between
theories rather than simply lineal descent, and also much re-discovery of past theories.
This theoretical flux may seem odd at first, given the creationist insistence on
adherence to God’s single and unchanging Truth as embodied in His Word, the Bible.
But this paradox is only apparent. Theories and ideologies in traditional cultures, after
all, do change (though usually not as much); it is just that, in contrast to this present
study, this change and diversification is generally not visible—it is either lost in the past,
or denied in the present. Not so with creationism, which is based upon religions of the
Book, the written Word. The Book, indeed, remains the same. But there are different
versions and translations. There are also hundreds of years of interpretation, exegesis,
and elaboration: all also preserved in the written word, and thus available for all (more or
less) to see and to debate. Creationism is not so much denominational as sectarian and
even, in many cases, cultic. There are many institutions—seminaries, Bible institutes,