History of Creationism - Early 20th Century

Early 20th Century

In the 1920s, the term creationism became particularly associated with a Christian fundamentalist movement opposed to the idea of human evolution, which succeeded in getting teaching of evolution banned in United States public schools. From the mid-1960s young Earth creationism proposed "scientific creationism" using "Flood geology" as support for a literal reading of Genesis. After legal judgements that teaching this in public schools contravened constitutional separation of Church and State, it was stripped of biblical references and called creation science, then when this was ruled unacceptable, intelligent design was coined.

The decades before the start of the 20th century, and the first decades of that century, have been described as the eclipse of Darwinism. Darwin's work had quickly established scientific consensus that evolution occurred, but there was considerable disagreement about the mechanisms involved, and few gave as much significance to natural selection as Darwin himself. Evolution itself was assumed, but the mechanism of how it happened was in considerable debate, and none had anything near to a consensus. Among these theories were neo-Lamarckism (which merged certain aspects of Lamarck's theory of acquired characteristics with certain aspects of Darwinian evolution), orthogenesis ("straight-line" evolution, which talked about evolution towards a specific goal by forces within the organism), and the discontinuous variation of Mendelism and Hugo De Vries' mutation theory. Some of these alternative theories, in particular neo-Lamarckism and orthogenesis, allowed more easily for an interpretation of the intervention of God, which appealed to many scientists at the time. The term Darwinism had covered a wide range of ideas, many of which differed from Darwin's views, but it became associated with the minority view of August Weismann who went further than Darwin by rejecting inheritance of acquired characters and attributing all evolution to natural selection, a view also called neo-Darwinism. By the first decades of the 20th century, the debate had become generally one between continuous-variation biometricians and discontinuous-variety Mendelians. In the 1930s and 1940s, though, they were combined with natural selection into the modern evolutionary synthesis, which soon became the dominant model in the scientific community. This model has also been called Darwinism and neo-Darwinism.

George McCready Price was important in developing flood geology, and while he had limited influence at a time when all geologists had long accepted an ancient earth, many of his ideas that a young earth could be deduced from science were taken up later. Price was a Seventh-day Adventist, and followed one of the founders of the church, Ellen White, in seeing fossils as evidence of the Great Flood. In 1906, Price published Illogical Geology: The Weakest Point in the Evolution Theory in which he offered $1000 "to any one who will, in the face of the facts here presented, show me how to prove that one kind of fossil is older than another."