Creationism in Europe Medicine, Science, and Religion in Historical Context Ronald L

Creationism in Europe Medicine, Science, and Religion in HiStoRical context Ronald L. Numbers, Consulting Editor Creationism in Europe edited by Stefaan Blancke, Hans Henrik Hjermitslev, and Peter C. Kjærgaard Foreword by Ronald L. Numbers Johns Hopkins University Press Baltimore © 2014 Johns Hopkins University Press All rights reserved. Published 2014 Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper 2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1 Johns Hopkins University Press 2715 North Charles Street Baltimore, Maryland 21218- 4363 www .press .jhu .edu Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Creationism in Europe / edited by Stefaan Blancke, Hans Henrik Hjermitslev, and Peter C. Kjærgaard. pages cm. — (Medicine, science, and religion in historical context) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4214-1562-8 (hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-4214-1563-5 (electronic) — ISBN 1-4214-1562-3 (hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 1-4214-1563-1 (electronic) 1. Creationism—Europe. I. Blancke, Stefaan, 1976– editor. BS651.C75 2014 231.7'652094—dc23 2014010423 A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. Special discounts are available for bulk purchases of this book. For more information, please contact Special Sales at 410- 516- 6936 or [email protected]. Johns Hopkins University Press uses environmentally friendly book materials, including recycled text paper that is composed of at least 30 percent post- consumer waste, whenever possible. Contents Foreword, by Ronald L. Numbers vii Acknowledgments xvii Introduction: Creationism in Europe or European Creationism? 1 Stefaan blancke, HanS HenRik HjermitSlev, and PeteR c. kjæRgaaRd 1 France 15 ThoMaS lePeltieR 2 Spain and Portugal 31 jeSúS i. catalá- goRgueS 3 United Kingdom 50 joacHiM allgaieR 4 The Low Countries 65 Stefaan blancke, abRaHaM c. flipse, and joHan BraeckMan 5 Scandinavia 85 HanS HenRik HjermitSlev and PeteR c. kjæRgaaRd 6 Germany 105 ulRicH kutScHeRa 7 Poland 125 baRtoSz boRczyk 8 Greece 144 eftHyMioS nicolaidiS 9 Russia and Its Neighbors 162 inga levit, geoRgy S. levit, uwe Hossfeld, and lennaRt olsson 10 Turkey 180 MaRtin RiexingeR vi Contents 11 Catholicism 199 Rafael a. MaRtínez and ThoMaS f. glick 12 Intelligent Design 214 baRbaRa foRReSt 13 The Rise of Anti- creationism in Europe 228 PeteR c. kjæRgaaRd Afterword: Reclaiming Science for Creationism 242 nicolaaS a. RuPke A Note on Sources, by Stefaan Blancke 251 List of Contributors 257 Index 265 Foreword Ronald l. nuMbers Until fairly recently the notion of a history of creationism in Europe would have struck many readers as preposterous. Although the United States had become notorious for spawning creationism, the rest of the world seemed relatively im- mune. As the late Stephen Jay Gould assured non- Americans in 2000, creationism, though “insidious,” had remained confined to the United States; indeed, in his opinion, it had remained largely “a local, indigenous, American bizarrity.” His Harvard colleague Richard C. Lewontin, a prominent evolutionary biologist, shared this view, writing that “creationism is an American institution, and it is not only American but specifically southern and southwestern.”1 But even as Gould and Lewontin assured the rest of the world’s population that it was safe from this uniquely American concept, creationism was spread- ing beyond the confines of the United States. Despite its “Made in America” label, it had begun to emerge among conservative Protestants in various parts of the world. At first, beginning in the late 1960s, the leading proponents were men such as Henry M. Morris and Duane Gish from the Institute for Creation Research (ICR) near San Diego, California, which eventually published creationist tracts in some two dozen languages. After the mid- 1990s, leadership passed increasingly to Kenneth A. Ham at Answers in Genesis (AiG), a Kentucky- based operation located just south of Cincinnati. In less than a decade Ham and his AiG colleagues had created a network of international branches and distributed books in languages ranging from Afrikaans and Albanian to Romanian and Russian.2 During that time scientific creationism and its younger cousin, intelligent design, also spread from their evangelical Protestant bases to Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, Islam, Judaism, and beyond.3 As the last sentence suggests, the term creationism spans a spectrum of mean- ings, from relatively rare supernatural interventions in the natural order to the creation of the entire universe no more than ten thousand years ago. Although much of the world’s population rejected (and continues to reject) naturalistic evolution, organized antievolutionism did not appear until the early 1920s, and then in the United States among conservative Protestants who believed in an in- viii Foreword errant Bible. With few exceptions, however, even the most literalistic Bible believers accepted the antiquity of life on earth as revealed in the paleontological record. They typically did so either by interpreting the days of Genesis 1 as vast geologic ages (the day- age theory) or by inserting a series of catastrophes and re- creations or ruins and restorations into an imagined gap between the first two verses of the Bible (the gap theory). By the close of the nineteenth century, virtually the only Christians writing in defense of the recent appearance of life on earth and attributing the fossil record to the action of Noah’s flood were Seventh- day Adventists, a fundamentalist group then numbering fewer than 100,000 members. The leading popularizer of this uncompromisingly literal reading of Gene- sis was the Canadian- born Adventist “geologist” George McCready Price, who dubbed his version of creationism flood geology. Price’s idiosyncratic interpreta- tion of earth history remained on the periphery of fundamentalism until after 1961, when John C. Whitcomb Jr., an Old Testament scholar, and Henry M. Morris, a hydraulic engineer, brought out a book called The Genesis Flood. Whit- comb and Morris presented Price’s flood geology as the only acceptable inter- pretation of the first chapters of Genesis. Their insistence on beginning with a literal reading of the Bible and then trying to fit science into that context, rather than constantly accommodating the Bible to the findings of science, struck a responsive chord with many concerned Christians. In substantial, though un- determined, numbers they abandoned the once- favored day- age and gap theo- ries, which allowed for the antiquity of life on earth, accepting instead the strict young- earth creationism urged by Whitcomb and Morris. In 1963 Morris and nine other like- minded creationists banded together to form the Creation Research Society (CRS). About 1970, in an effort to make their Bible- based creationism sufficiently secular to be taught in state schools, leaders of the CRS rechristened flood geology “creation science” or “scientific creationism.” In the context of creation science, the sequence and timing of key events, such as a recent special creation and subsequent worldwide flood, remained the same, but all direct references to biblical characters and places, such as Adam and Eve, the Garden of Eden, and Noah and his ark, disappeared from the stripped-down narrative. The young- earth creationists associated with the CRS and Morris’s Institute for Creation Research, established near San Diego in 1972, proved highly ef- fective in promoting Price’s version of creationism among conservative Chris- tians. Within a decade or two, the tireless proselytizers for scientific creationism had virtually co- opted the generic creationist label for their hyperliteralist Foreword ix views, which only a half century earlier had languished on the margins of Amer- ican fundamentalism. After the 1970s people who called themselves creationists typically assumed that most listeners would identify them as believers in a young earth. In the early 1980s various state legislatures debated the wisdom of mandat- ing the teaching of “creation science” in public- school classrooms whenever “evolution science” was taught. Two states, Arkansas and Louisiana, passed such “balanced treatment” laws. In 1987, however, the US Supreme Court ruled that these laws violated the First Amendment of the Constitution requiring the sep- aration of church and state. This created an opening for a new species of antievolutionism: intelligent design theory (ID). Although some critics dismissed it as “the same old creationist bullshit dressed up in new clothes” and dispar- aged it as merely the latest “creationist alias,” promoters of ID stressed the dif- ferences between young- earth creationism and their own position. The authors of Pandas and People: The Central Question of Biological Origins (1989), the first book explicitly to promote intelligent design, insisted that their text implied “ab- solutely nothing about beliefs normally associated with Christian fundamentalism, such as a young earth, a global flood, or even the existence of the Christian God.” Hoping to distance themselves from the intellectually marginal creation scientists and to avoid endless niggling over the meaning of the Mosaic story of creation, design theorists carefully avoided any mention of Genesis or God, although, as one of them confessed to some fellow Christians, referring to an intelligent designer was merely a “politically correct way to refer to God.” In Dar- win on Trial (1991), another early book advocating ID, the Berkeley law professor Phillip

Load more