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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Creation science | 1/8 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creation_science | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T09:18:20.205476+00:00 | kb-cron |
Creation science or scientific creationism is a pseudoscientific form of young Earth creationism which claims to offer scientific arguments for certain literalist and inerrantist interpretations of the Bible. It is often presented without overt faith-based language, but instead relies on reinterpreting scientific results to argue that various myths in the Book of Genesis and other select biblical passages are scientifically valid. The most commonly advanced ideas of creation science include special creation based on the Genesis creation narrative and flood geology based on the Genesis flood narrative. Creationists also claim they can disprove or reexplain a variety of scientific facts, theories and paradigms of geology, cosmology, biological evolution, archaeology, history, and linguistics using creation science. Creation science was foundational to intelligent design. The overwhelming consensus of the scientific community is that creation science fails to qualify as scientific because it lacks empirical support, supplies no testable hypotheses, and resolves to describe natural history in terms of scientifically untestable supernatural causes. Courts, most often in the United States where the question has been asked in the context of teaching the subject in public schools, have consistently ruled since the 1980s that creation science is a religious view rather than a scientific one. Historians, philosophers of science and skeptics have described creation science as a pseudoscientific attempt to map the Bible into scientific facts. Professional biologists have criticized creation science for being unscholarly, and even as a dishonest and misguided sham, with extremely harmful educational consequences.
== Beliefs and activities ==
=== Religious basis === Creation science is based largely upon chapters 1–11 of the Book of Genesis. These describe how God calls the world into existence through the power of speech ("And God said, Let there be light," etc.) in six days, calls all the animals and plants into existence, and molds the first man from clay and the first woman from a rib taken from the man's side; a worldwide flood destroys all life except for Noah and his family and representatives of the animals, and Noah becomes the ancestor of the 70 "nations" of the world; the nations live together until the incident of the Tower of Babel, when God disperses them and gives them their different languages. Creation science attempts to explain history and science within the span of Biblical chronology, which places the initial act of creation some six thousand years ago.
=== Modern religious affiliations === Most creation science proponents hold fundamentalist or Evangelical Christian beliefs in Biblical literalism or Biblical inerrancy, as opposed to the higher criticism supported by liberal Christianity in the Fundamentalist–Modernist Controversy. However, there are also examples of Islamic and Jewish scientific creationism that conform to the accounts of creation as recorded in their religious doctrines. The Seventh-day Adventist Church has a history of support for creation science. This dates back to George McCready Price, an active Seventh-day Adventist who developed views of flood geology, which formed the basis of creation science. This work was continued by the Geoscience Research Institute, an official institute of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, located on its Loma Linda University campus in California. Creation science is generally rejected by the Church of England as well as the Roman Catholic Church. The Pontifical Gregorian University has officially discussed intelligent design as a "cultural phenomenon" without scientific elements. The Church of England's official website cites Charles Darwin's local work assisting people in his religious parish.
=== Views on science ===
Creation science rejects evolution and the common descent of all living things on Earth. Instead, it asserts that the field of evolutionary biology is itself pseudoscientific or even a religion. Creationists argue instead for a system called baraminology, which considers the living world to be descended from uniquely created kinds or "baramins." Creation science incorporates the concept of catastrophism to reconcile current landforms and fossil distributions with Biblical interpretations, proposing the remains resulted from successive cataclysmic events, such as a worldwide flood and subsequent ice age. It rejects one of the fundamental principles of modern geology (and of modern science generally), uniformitarianism, which applies the same physical and geological laws observed on the Earth today to interpret the Earth's geological history. Sometimes creationists attack other scientific concepts, like the Big Bang cosmological model or methods of scientific dating based upon radioactive decay. Young Earth creationists also reject current estimates of the age of the universe and the age of the Earth, arguing for creationist cosmologies with timescales much shorter than those determined by modern physical cosmology and geological science, typically less than 10,000 years. The scientific community has overwhelmingly rejected the ideas put forth in creation science as lying outside the boundaries of a legitimate science. The foundational premises underlying scientific creationism disqualify it as a science because the answers to all inquiry therein are preordained to conform to Bible doctrine, and because that inquiry is constructed upon theories which are not empirically testable in nature. Scientists also deem creation science's attacks against biological evolution to be without scientific merit. The views of the scientific community were accepted in two significant court decisions in the 1980s, which found the field of creation science to be a religious mode of inquiry, not a scientific one.
== History ==