re: #117 tradewind

How old is this stuff (meaning crazy creationism? ) I grew up in the church, still go there, and have never heard a sermon or sentiment that tries to refute evolution. I guess I just don’t see a problem with God as the ultimate scientist.

It’s pretty recent; my guess - and it’s really just a guess - is that it’s maybe a century old. The Origin of Species was published in 1859, and was a huge best seller; the intellectual world had noted for centuries that nature’s complexity needed some mechanism to explain it, and natural selection provided just that. It was accepted almost instantly. There were rumblings from the Protestant church at the time, notably from Sam Wilberforce, but these were settled in a series of devastating public debates between Wilberforce and Thomas Huxley. But the argument then was man’s descent from apes - postulated in Darwin’s later work, The Descent of Man - there was no reference to Biblical literalism, a 6000 year old earth or any of the other nonsense peddled by creationists today.

The modern version seems to have arisen from southern Baptist fundamentalist churches in the United States, although it has spread from there to many other countries. It seems that the extreme form of literalism it is infested with is a fairly recent development; even at the Scopes trial (1926), the argument against evolution still centered on the moral problems raised by man’s postulated descent from apes, and not from any Biblical disputes.

Someone really ought to write a book on this topic and flesh out the movement’s history. My own feeling is that the phosphorescent stupidity that emanates from creationism today is a relatively recent development, although it may have roots that extend back fairly far.