The Creation, beginning of the Antediluvian (i.e., Pre-Flood) world. (Artist's rendition by James Tissot.)
Look up antediluvian in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
The antediluvian (alternatively pre-diluvian or pre-flood) period is the time period chronicled in the Bible between the fall of man and the Genesis flood narrative in biblical cosmology. The term was coined by Thomas Browne. The narrative takes up chapters 1–6 (excluding the flood narrative) of the Book of Genesis. The term found its way into early geology and science until the late Victorian era. Colloquially, the term is used to refer to any ancient and murky period.
Precedents
The Eridu Genesis
is alleged to be the direct mythological antecessor to the biblical
flood record as well as other Near Eastern flood stories, and reflects a
similar religious and cultural relevance to their religion.
Much as the Abrahamic religions, ancient Sumerians divided the world
between pre-flood and post-flood eras, the former being a time where the
gods walked the earth with humans. After the flood, humans ceased to be
immortal and the gods distanced themselves.
Timing the antediluvian period
The Biblical flood
Noah prepares to leave the antediluvian world, Jacopo Bassano and assistants, 1579
In the Christian Bible, Hebrew Torah and Islamic Quran, the antediluvian period begins with the Fall of the first man and woman, according to Genesis and ends with the destruction of all life on the earth except those saved with Noah in the ark (Noah and his wife, his three sons and their wives). According to Bishop Ussher's 17th-century chronology, the antediluvian period lasted for 1656 years, from Creation (some say the fall of man) at 4004 BC to the Flood at 2348 BC.
The elements of the narrative include some of the best-known stories in the Bible – the creation, Adam and Eve, and Cain and Abel, followed by the genealogies tracing the descendants of Cain and Seth,
the third mentioned son of Adam and Eve. (These genealogies provide the
framework for the biblical chronology, in the form "A lived X years and
begat B".)
The Bible speaks of this era as being a time of great wickedness. There were Gibborim (giants) in the earth in those days as well as Nephilim; some Bible translations
identify the two as one and the same. The Gibborim were unusually
powerful; Genesis calls them "mighty men which were of old, men of
renown".
The antediluvian period ended when God sent the Flood to wipe out all
life except Noah, his family, and the animals they took with them.
Nevertheless, the Nephilim (literally meaning 'fallen ones', from the
Hebrew root n-f-l 'to fall') reappear much later in the biblical
narrative, in Numbers13:31–33 (where the spies sent forth by Moses report that there were Nephilim or "giants" in the promised land).
In early geology
Strata of "Secondary rock", Lyme RegisThe
Deluge subsides, thought in early geology to be responsible for the
formation of sediments, with only traces of the antediluvian world. Thomas Cole, 1829
Early scientific attempts at reconstructing the history of the Earth were founded on the biblical narrative and thus used the term antediluvian to refer to a period understood to be essentially similar to the biblical one. Early scientific interpretation of the biblical narrative divided the antediluvian into sub-periods based on the six days of Creation:
Pre-Adamitic (the first 5 days, Gen 1:1 to Gen 2:3)
Primary (the formation of the physical universe and the earth)
Prior to the 19th century, rock was classified into three main types: primary or primitive (igneous and metamorphic rock), secondary (sedimentary rock) and tertiary (sediments). The primary rocks (like granite and gneiss)
are void of fossils and were thought to be associated with the very
creation of the world in the primary Pre-Adamitic period. The secondary
rocks, often containing copious fossils, though human remains had not
been found, were thought to have been laid down in the secondary
Pre-Adamitic period. The Tertiary rocks (sediments) were thought to have
been put down after Creation and possibly in connection to a flood
event, and were thus associated with the Adamitic period. The Post-Flood period was termed the Quaternary, a name still in use in geology.
As mapping of the geological strata
progressed in the early decades of the 19th century, the estimated
lengths of the various sub-periods were greatly increased. The fossil
rich Secondary Pre-Adamitic period was divided up into the Coal period, the Lias and the Chalk period, later expanded into the now-familiar geologic time scale of the Phanerozoic. The term antediluvian was used in natural science well into the 19th century and lingered in popular imagination despite increasingly detailed stratigraphy mapping the Earth's past, and was often used for the Pleistocene period, where humans existed alongside now extinct megafauna.
The antediluvian world
Creationist interpretation
Garden of Eden by Thomas Cole, 1828. The lush vegetation and foggy atmosphere are typical of biblical interpretation of the antediluvian period.The end of the Edenic period, Adam and Eve are thrust into a bleak antediluvian world. Thomas Cole, 1828
People lived much longer than those alive today, typically between 700 and 950 years, as reported in the genealogies of Genesis;
The Earth contained many more people than it did in 1696. Whiston
calculated that as many as 500 million humans may have been born in the
antediluvian period, based on assumptions about lifespans and fertility rates;
There were no clouds or rain. Instead, the Earth was watered by
mists which rose from the Earth. (Another interpretation is that Earth
was covered completely by a global cloud layer, which was the upper
waters mentioned in the Creation. This is commonly called the vapor canopy view.)
However, there has since been debate among Creationists over the
authenticity of arguments such as the one that there was no rain before
the Flood and previous ideas about what the antediluvian world was like
are constantly changing.
In 19th-century science
During the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the understanding of the nature of early Earth went through a transformation from a biblical or deist interpretation to a naturalistic one. Even back in the early 18th century, Plutonists had argued for an ancient Earth, but the full impact of the depth of time involved in the Pre-Adamitic period was not commonly accepted until uniformitarianism as presented in Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology of 1830.
While each period was understood to be a vast aeon, the narrative of
the pre-Adamitic world was still influenced by the biblical storyline of
creation in this transition. A striking example is a description from Memoires of Ichtyosauri and Plesiosauri,
1839, describing fossil species in a world with land, sea and
vegetation, but before the creation of a separate sun and moon,
corresponding to the third day of creation in the Genesis narrative:
An "ungarnished and desolated world
which echoed the flapping of [pterodactyl] leathern wings" was lit by
"the angry light of supernatural fire", shining on a "sunless and
moonless" world, before the creation of these heavenly "lights".
A modern naturalistic view of the ancient world, along with the
abandonment of the term 'antediluvian', came about with the works of Charles Darwin and Louis Agassiz in the 1860s.
From antiquity, fossils of large animals were often quoted as having lived together with the giants from the Book of Genesis: e.g. the Tannin or "great sea monsters" of Gen 1:21. They are often described in later books of the Bible, especially by God himself in the Book of Job: e.g. Re'em in verse 39:9, Behemoth in chapter 40 and Leviathan in chapter 41. With the advent of geological mapping in the early 19th century, it became increasingly obvious that many of the fossils associated with the "secondary" (sedimentary) rock were neither those of giant humans nor of any extant animals. These included large animals such as ichthyosaurs, mosasaurs, pliosaurs and the various giant mammalsfound when excavating the Catacombs of Paris.
The geologists of the day increasingly came to use the term
'antediluvian' only for the younger strata containing fossils of animals
resembling those alive today.
Other uses
The term is also used in the field of Assyriology for kings, according to some versions of the Sumerian king list, supposed to have reigned before the great flood.
The adjective antediluvian is sometimes used figuratively to mean of great age or outmoded. H. P. Lovecraft was particularly fond of the term, using it frequently in his horror stories.
In Charles Stross's novel Saturn's Children, the religious order who believe in evolution refer to the antediluvian period as the time in which man lived alongside Tyrannosaurs.
Atlantis: The Antediluvian World is an 1882 book by Ignatius L. Donnelly that attempted to establish that all known ancient civilizations were descended from Atlantis. Many theories mentioned in the book are the source of modern-day concepts about Atlantis.
In the television series Huntik: Secrets & Seekers, Antedeluvian is a powerful vampiric Titan, formerly used by Vlad the Impaler. He returns in the second series as the primary Titan of Harrison Fears, an evil Seeker, to whom he power-bonds.
Since the mid-20th century, young Earth creationists—starting with Henry Morris (1918–2006)—have developed and promoted a pseudoscientific explanation called creation science as a basis for a religious belief in a supernatural, geologically recent creation, in response to the scientific acceptance of Charles Darwin's Theory of Evolution, which was developed over the previous century. Contemporary YEC movements arose in protest to the scientific consensus, established by numerous scientific disciplines, which demonstrates that the age of the universe is around 13.8 billion years, the formation of the Earth and Solar System happened around 4.6 billion years ago, and the origin of life occurred roughly 4 billion years ago.
A 2017 Gallup
creationism survey found that 38 percent of adults in the United States
held the view that "God created humans in their present form at some
time within the last 10,000 years or so" when asked for their views on
the origin and development of human beings, which Gallup noted was the
lowest level in 35 years.
It was suggested that the level of support could be lower when poll
results are adjusted after comparison with other polls with questions
that more specifically account for uncertainty and ambivalence.
Gallup found that, when asking a similar question in 2019, 40 percent
of US adults held the view that "God created [human beings] in their
present form within roughly the past 10,000 years."
Young Earth creationists have claimed that their view has its
earliest roots in ancient Judaism, citing, for example, the commentary
on Genesis by Ibn Ezra (c. 1089–1164). That said, Shai Cherry of Vanderbilt University notes that modern Jewish theologians have generally rejected such literal interpretations
of the written text, and that even Jewish commentators who oppose some
aspects of science generally accept scientific evidence that the Earth
is much older. Some controversy has arisen among Ultra-Orthodox Jews, some of whom accept the age and some of whom reject it. Several early Jewish scholars, including Philo, followed an allegorical interpretation of Genesis.
The most accepted and popular date of creation among young Earth
creationists is 4004 BC because this specific date appears in the Ussher chronology. This chronology was included in many Bibles from 1701 onwards, including the authorized King James Version. The youngest ever recorded date of creation within the historic Jewish or Christian traditions is 3616 BC, by Yom-Tov Lipmann-Muhlhausen, while the oldest proposed date was 6984 BC by Alfonso X of Castile.
However, some contemporary or more recent proponents of young Earth
creationism have proposed dates that are several thousands of years
earlier by theorizing significant gaps in the genealogies in chapters 5
and 11 of the Book of Genesis. Harold Camping, for example, dated the creation to 11,013 BC, while Christian Charles Josias Bunsen in the 19th century dated the creation to 20,000 BC.
The Protestant reformationhermeneutic inclined some of the Reformers, including John Calvin and Martin Luther,
and later Protestants toward a literal reading of the Bible as
translated. This means they believed that the "days" referred to in
Genesis correspond to ordinary days, in contrast to reading the "days"
as standing in for a longer period of time.
Famous poets and playwrights of the Early Modern Period (1500–1800) referenced an Earth that was thousands of years old. For example William Shakespeare:
...The poor world is almost 6,000 years old.
Scientific Revolution and the old Earth
Beginning
in the 18th century, support for a young Earth declined among
scientists and philosophers as new knowledge including discoveries of
the Scientific Revolution and philosophies of the Age of Enlightenment. In particular, discoveries in geology required an Earth that was much older than thousands of years, and proposals such as Abraham Gottlob Werner's Neptunism
attempted to incorporate what was understood from geological
investigations into a coherent description of the Earth's natural
history. James Hutton, now regarded as the father of modern geology, went further and opened up the concept of deep time
for scientific inquiry. Rather than assuming that the Earth was
deteriorating from a primal state, he maintained that the Earth was
infinitely old. Hutton stated that:
the past history of our globe must
be explained by what can be seen to be happening now … No powers are to
be employed that are not natural to the globe, no action to be admitted
except those of which we know the principle.
Hutton's main line of argument was that the tremendous displacements
and changes he was seeing did not happen in a short period of time by
means of catastrophe, but that the incremental processes of uplift and
erosion happening on the Earth in the present day had caused them. As
these processes were very gradual, the Earth needed to be ancient, in
order to allow time for the changes to occur. While his ideas of Plutonism were hotly contested, scientific inquiries on competing ideas of catastrophism
pushed back the age of the Earth into the millions of years – still
much younger than commonly accepted by modern scientists, but much older
than the young Earth of less than 20,000 years in which Biblical
literalists believed.
Hutton's ideas, called uniformitarianism or gradualism, were popularized by Sir Charles Lyell
in the early 19th century. The energetic advocacy and rhetoric of Lyell
led to the public and scientific communities largely accepting an
ancient Earth. By this time, the Reverends William Buckland, Adam Sedgwick
and other early geologists had abandoned their earlier ideas of
catastrophism related to a biblical flood and confined their
explanations to local floods. By the 1830s, the scientific consensus had
abandoned a young Earth as a serious hypothesis.
John H. Mears was one of several
scholars proposing Biblical interpretations ranging from a series of
long or indefinite periods interspersed with moments of creation to a
day-age theory of indefinite 'days'. He subscribed to the latter theory
(indefinite days) and found support from the side of Yale professor James Dwight Dana, one of the fathers of mineralogy, who wrote a paper consisting of four articles named 'Science and the Bible' on the topic.
As many biblical scholars reinterpreted Genesis 1 in the light of
Lyell's geological results with the support of a number of renowned
(Christian) scientific scholars, Developmentalism, a form of theistic
evolution based on Darwin's Natural selection, grew in acceptance.
This 19th century trend was contested. The scriptural geologists and later the founders of the Victoria Institute opposed the decline of support for a biblically literal young Earth.
Christian fundamentalism and belief in a young Earth
The rise of fundamentalist Christianity early in the 20th century brought rejection of evolution among fundamentalists who explained an ancient Earth through belief in the gap or in the day-age interpretation of Genesis. In 1923, George McCready Price, a Seventh-day Adventist, wrote The New Geology, a book partly inspired by the book Patriarchs and Prophets in which Seventh-day Adventist prophet Ellen G. White described the impact of the Great Flood
on the shape of the Earth. Although not an accredited geologist,
Price's writings, which were based on reading geological texts and
documents rather than field or laboratory work,
provide an explicitly fundamentalist perspective on geology. The book
attracted a small following, with its advocates almost all being
Lutheran pastors and Seventh-day Adventists in North America.
Price became popular with fundamentalists for his opposition to
evolution, though they continued to believe in an ancient Earth.
In the 1950s, Price's work came under severe criticism, particularly by Bernard Ramm in his book The Christian View of Science and Scripture. Together with J. Laurence Kulp, a geologist and in fellowship with the Plymouth Brethren, and other scientists, Ramm influenced Christian organizations such as the American Scientific Affiliation (ASA) in not supporting flood geology.
Price's work was subsequently adapted and updated by Henry M. Morris and John C. Whitcomb Jr. in their book The Genesis Flood
in 1961. Morris and Whitcomb argued that the Earth was geologically
recent and that the Great Flood had laid down most of the geological
strata in the space of a single year, reviving pre-uniformitarian
arguments. Given this history, they argued, "the last refuge of the case
for evolution immediately vanishes away, and the record of the rocks
becomes a tremendous witness... to the holiness and justice and power of
the living God of Creation!"
This became the foundation of a new generation of young Earth creationist believers, who organized themselves around Morris' Institute for Creation Research. Sister organizations such as the Creation Research Society have sought to re-interpret geological formations within a young Earth creationist viewpoint. Langdon Gilkey writes:
... no distinction is made between
scientific theories on the one hand and philosophical or religious
theories on the other, between scientific questions and the sorts of
questions religious beliefs seek to answer... It is, therefore, no
surprise that in their theological works, as opposed to their creation
science writings, creationists regard evolution and all other theories
associated with it, as the intellectual source for and intellectual
justification of everything that is to them evil and destructive in
modern society. For them all that is spiritually healthy and creative
has been for a century or more under attack by "that most complex of
godless movements spawned by the pervasive and powerful system of
evolutionary uniformitarianism", "If the system of flood geology can be
established on a sound scientific basis... then the entire evolutionary
cosmology, at least in its present neo-Darwinian form, will collapse.
This in turn would mean that every anti-Christian system and movement
(communism, racism, humanism, libertarianism, behaviorism,
and all the rest) would be deprived of their pseudo-intellectual
foundation", "It [evolution] has served effectively as the
pseudo-scientific basis of atheism, agnosticism, socialism, fascism, and numerous faulty and dangerous philosophies over the past century.
Impact
A 2006 joint statement of InterAcademy Panel on International Issues
(IAP) by 68 national and international science academies enumerated the
many scientific facts that young Earth creationism contradicts, in
particular that the universe, the Earth, and life are billions of years
old, that each has undergone continual change over those billions of
years, and that life on Earth has evolved from a common primordial origin into the diverse forms observed in the fossil record and present today.
Evolutionary theory remains the only explanation that fully accounts
for all the observations, measurements, data, and evidence discovered in
the fields of biology, ecology, anatomy, physiology, zoology, paleontology, molecular biology, genetics, anthropology, and others.
As such, young Earth creationism is dismissed by the academic and
the scientific communities. One 1987 estimate found that "700
scientists ... (out of a total of 480,000 U.S. earth and life
scientists) ... give credence to creation-science". An expert in the evolution-creationism controversy, professor and author Brian Alters, states that "99.9% of scientists accept evolution".
A 1991 Gallup poll found that about 5 per cent of American scientists
(including those with training outside biology) identified themselves as
creationists.
For their part, young Earth creationists say that the lack of support
for their beliefs by the scientific community is due to discrimination
and censorship by professional science journals and professional science
organizations. This viewpoint was explicitly rejected in the rulings
from the 1981 United States District Court case McLean v. Arkansas Board of Education
as no witness was able to produce any articles that had been refused
publication and the judge could not conceive how "a loose knit group of
independent thinkers in all the varied fields of science could, or
would, so effectively censor new scientific thought". A 1985 study also found that only 18 out of 135,000 submissions to scientific journals advocated creationism.
Morris' ideas had a considerable impact on creationism and
fundamentalist Christianity. Armed with the backing of conservative
organizations and individuals, his brand of "creation science" was
widely promoted throughout the United States and overseas, with his
books being translated into at least ten different languages. The
inauguration of so-called "young Earth creationism" as a religious
position has, on occasion, impacted science education in the United States, where periodic controversies have raged over the appropriateness of teaching YEC doctrine and creation science in public schools (see Teach the Controversy)
alongside or in replacement of the theory of evolution. Young Earth
creationism has not had as large an impact in the less literalist
circles of Christianity. Some churches, such as the Roman Catholic
Church and the Eastern Orthodox churches, accede to the possibility of theistic evolution; though some individual church members support young Earth creationism and do so without those churches' explicit condemnation.
Views on human evolution in various countries
Adherence to young Earth creationism and rejection of evolution is higher in the U.S. than in most of the rest of the Western world.
A 2012 Gallup survey reported that 46 per cent of Americans believed in
the creationist view that God created humans in their present form at
one time within the last 10,000 years, a statistic which has remained
essentially the same since 1982; for those with a postgraduate
education, only 25 per cent believed in the creationist viewpoint. About
one third of Americans believed that humans evolved with God's guidance and 15 per cent said humans evolved, but that God had no part in the process. A 2009 poll by Harris Interactive
found that 39 per cent of Americans agreed with the statement that "God
created the universe, the earth, the sun, moon, stars, plants, animals,
and the first two people within the past 10,000 years", yet only 18 per
cent of the Americans polled agreed with the statement "The earth is
less than 10,000 years old". A 2017 Gallup
creationism survey found that 38 per cent of adults in the United
States inclined to the view that "God created humans in their present
form at one time within the last 10,000 years" when asked for their
views on the origin and development of human beings, which Gallup noted
was the lowest level in 35 years.
Reasons for the higher rejection of evolution in the U.S. include the abundance of fundamentalist Christians compared to Europe. A 2011 Gallup
survey reported that 30 per cent of Americans said the Bible is the
actual word of God and should be interpreted literally, a statistic
which had fallen slightly from the late 1970s. Some 54 per cent of those
who attended church weekly and 46 per cent of those with a high school
education or less took the Bible literally.
Characteristics and beliefs
The common belief of young Earth creationists is that the Earth and life were created in six 24-hour periods,
6,000–10,000 years ago. However, there are different approaches to how
this is possible given the geological evidence for much longer
timescales. The Science Education Resource Center at Carleton College has identified two major types of YEC belief systems:
A less-visible form of YEC not seen as often on the internet is one
which claims that there has been essentially no development of the
Universe, Earth, or life whatsoever since creation—that creation has
been in a steady state since the beginning without major changes.
According to Ronald Numbers,
this belief, which does not necessarily try to explain scientific
evidence through appeal to a global flood, has not been promoted as much
as the former example given. Such YECs believe that fossils are not real and that major extinctions never occurred, so dinosaurs, trilobites,
and other examples of extinct organisms found in the fossil record
would have to either be hoaxes or simply secular lies, promoted perhaps
by the devil.
Young Earth creationists regard the Bible as a historically accurate, factually inerrant
record of natural history. As Henry Morris, a leading young Earth
creationist, explained it, "Christians who flirt with less-than-literal
readings of biblical texts are also flirting with theological disaster." According to Morris, Christians must "either ... believe God's Word all the way, or not at all."
Young Earth creationists consider the account of creation given in
Genesis to be a factual record of the origin of the Earth and life, and
that Bible-believing Christians must therefore regard Genesis 1–11 as historically accurate.
Young Earth creationists interpret the text of Genesis as strictly literal. Young Earth creationists reject allegorical readings of Genesis and further argue that if there was not a literal Fall of Man, Noah's Ark, or Tower of Babel this would undermine core Christian doctrines like the birth and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
The genealogies of Genesis record the line of descent from Adam
through Noah to Abraham. Young Earth creationists interpret these
genealogies literally, including the old ages of the men. For example, Methuselah
lived 969 years according to the genealogy. Differences of opinion
exist regarding whether the genealogies should be taken as complete or
abbreviated, hence the 6,000 to 10,000 year range usually quoted for the
Earth's age. In contrast, Old Earth Creationists
tend to interpret the genealogies as incomplete, and usually interpret
the days of Genesis 1 figuratively as long periods of time.
Young Earth creationists believe that the flood described in
Genesis 6–9 did occur, was global in extent, and submerged all dry land
on Earth. Some young Earth creationists go further and advocate a kind
of flood geology which relies on the appropriation of late eighteenth and early nineteenth century arguments in favor of catastrophism made by such scientists as Georges Cuvier and Richard Kirwan. This approach which was replaced by the mid-nineteenth century almost entirely by uniformitarianism was adopted most famously by George McCready Price
and this legacy is reflected in the most prominent YEC organizations
today. YEC ideas to accommodate the massive amount of water necessary
for a flood that was global in scale included inventing such constructs
as an orbiting vapor canopy which would have collapsed and generated the necessary extreme rainfall or a rapid movement of tectonic plates causing underground aquifers or tsunamis from underwater volcanic steam to inundate the planet.
The young Earth creationist belief that the age of the Earth is 6,000 to 10,000 years old conflicts with the age of 4.54 billion years measured using independently cross-validated geochronological methods including radiometric dating. Creationists dispute these and all other methods which demonstrate the timescale of geologic history in spite of the lack of scientific evidence that there are any inconsistencies or errors in the measurement of the Earth's age.
Between 1997 and 2005, a team of scientists at the Institute for Creation Research conducted an eight-year research project entitled RATE
(Radioisotopes and the Age of The Earth) to assess the validity and
accuracy of radiometric dating techniques. While they concluded that
there was overwhelming evidence for over 500 million years' worth of
radioactive decay, they claimed to have found other scientific evidence
to prove a young Earth. They therefore proposed that nuclear decay rates
were accelerated by a factor of one billion during the Creation week
and at the time of the Flood. However, when subjected to independent
scrutiny by non-affiliated experts, their analyses were shown to be
flawed.
Young Earth creationists reject almost all of the results of physical anthropology and human evolution and instead insist that Adam and Eve were the universal ancestors of every human to have ever lived. Noah's flood
as reported in the book of Genesis is said to have killed all humans on
Earth with the exception of Noah and his sons and their wives, so young
Earth creationists also argue that all humans alive today are descended
from this single family.
The literal belief that the world's linguistic variety originated with the tower of Babel is pseudoscientific, sometimes called pseudolinguistics, and it is contrary to what is known about the origin and history of languages.
Young Earth creationists reject the geologic evidence that the stratigraphic sequence of fossils proves the Earth is billions of years old. In his Illogical Geology, expanded in 1913 as The Fundamentals of Geology, George McCready Price argued that the occasionally out-of-order sequence of fossils that are shown to be due to thrust faults
made it impossible to prove any one fossil was older than any other.
His "law" that fossils could be found in any order implied that strata
could not be dated sequentially. He instead proposed that essentially
all fossils were buried during the flood and thus inaugurated flood geology. In numerous books and articles he promoted this concept, focusing his attack on the sequence of the geologic time scale as "the devil's counterfeit of the six days of Creation as recorded in the first chapter of Genesis." Today, many young Earth creationists still contend that the fossil record can be explained by the global flood.
In The Genesis Flood (1961) Henry M. Morris
reiterated Price's arguments, and wrote that because there had been no
death before the Fall of Man, he felt "compelled to date all the rock
strata which contain fossils of once-living creatures as subsequent to
Adam's fall", attributing most to the flood. He added that humans and dinosaurs
had lived together, quoting Clifford L. Burdick for the report that
dinosaur tracks had supposedly been found overlapping a human track in
the Paluxy River bed Glen Rose Formation.
He was subsequently advised that he might have been misled, and Burdick
wrote to Morris in September 1962 that "you kind of stuck your neck out
in publishing those Glen Rose tracks." In the third printing of the
book this section was removed.
Following in this vein, many young Earth creationists, especially
those associated with the more visible organizations, do not deny the
existence of dinosaurs and other extinct animals present in the fossil record.
Usually, they claim that the fossils represent the remains of animals
that perished in the flood. A number of creationist organizations
further propose that Noah took the dinosaurs with him in the ark, and that they only began to disappear as a result of a different post-flood environment. The Creation Museum in Kentucky portrays humans and dinosaurs coexisting before the Flood while the California roadside attraction Cabazon Dinosaurs describes dinosaurs as being created the same day as Adam and Eve. The Creation Evidence Museum in Glen Rose, Texas, has a "hyperbaricbiosphere" intended to reproduce the atmospheric conditions before the Flood which could grow dinosaurs. The proprietor Carl Baugh says that these conditions made creatures grow larger and live longer, so that humans of that time were giants.
As the term "dinosaur" was coined by Richard Owen in 1842, the Bible does not use the word "dinosaur". Some creationist organizations propose that the Hebrew word tanniyn (תנין, pronounced[tanˈnin]), mentioned nearly thirty times in the Old Testament, should be considered a synonym. In English translations, tanniyn has been translated as "sea monster" or "serpent", but most often it is translated as "dragon". Additionally, in the Book of Job, a "behemoth" (Job 40:15–24)
is described as a creature that "moves his tail like a cedar"; the
behemoth is described as ranking "first among the works of God" and as
impossible to capture (vs. 24). Biblical scholars have alternatively
identified the behemoth as either an elephant, a hippopotamus, or a bull, but some creationists have identified the behemoth with sauropod dinosaurs, often specifically the Brachiosaurus
according to their interpretation of the verse "He is the chief of the
ways of God" implying that the behemoth is the largest animal God
created. The leviathan
is another creature referred to in the Bible's Old Testament that some
creationists argue is actually a dinosaur. Alternatively, more
mainstream scholars have identified the Leviathan (Job 41) with the Nile crocodile or, because Ugarit texts describe it as having seven heads, a purely mythical beast similar to the Lernaean Hydra.
A subset of adherents of the pseudoscience of cryptozoology promote young Earth creationism, particularly in the context of so-called "living dinosaurs". Science writerSharon A. Hill
observes that the young Earth creationist segment of cryptozoology is
"well-funded and able to conduct expeditions with a goal of finding a
living dinosaur that they think would invalidate evolution." Anthropologist
Jeb J. Card says that "Creationists have embraced cryptozoology and
some cryptozoological expeditions are funded by and conducted by
creationists hoping to disprove evolution." Young Earth creationists occasionally claim that dinosaurs survived in Australia, and that Aboriginal legends of reptilian monsters are evidence of this, referring to what is known as Megalania (Varanus priscus). However, Megalania was a gigantic species of monitor lizard, and not a dinosaur, as its discoverer, Richard Owen, realized that the skeletal remains were that of a lizard, and not an archosaur. Some creationists believe that Mokele-mbembe,
a cryptid said to dwell deep in the Congo rainforest, may be a living
sauropod, though the scientific consensus is that this is extremely
unlikely.
In a 2019 issue of Skeptical Inquirer
science author Philip J. Senter details many 16th and 17th century
hoaxes who constructed composite dragons which Senter calls the
"Piltdown Men of Creationism" stating that many young Earth creationists
believe these hoaxes even though "the fakes don't even resemble the
very animals the creationist authors claim they are". Other more recent
hoaxes such as the Cardiff Giant, the Silverbell artifacts, the Burdick tracks and the Acámbaro figures
are still being cited as proof of a young earth even though some of the
hoaxers confessed. Young Earth creationists according to Senter are
quick to point out the embarrassing forgeries that some scientists
believed for years, such as the Piltdown Man.
Senter continues "But it is also somewhat hypocritical, for the YEC
literature is replete with cases in which its own authors have fallen
for taxidermic 'dragon' hoaxes".
Young Earth creationists disagree with the methodological naturalism that is part of the scientific method. Instead, they assert the actions of God as described in the Bible occurred as written and therefore only scientific evidence that points to the Bible being correct can be accepted. See Creation–evolution controversy for a more complete discussion.
As a position that developed out of the explicitly anti-intellectual side of the Fundamentalist–Modernist Controversy
in the early parts of the twentieth century, there is no single unified
nor consistent consensus on how creationism as a belief system ought to
reconcile its adherents' acceptance of biblical inerrancy with empirical facts
of the Universe. Although young Earth creationism is one of the most
stridently literalist positions taken among professed creationists,
there are also examples of biblical literalist adherents to both geocentrism and a flat Earth.
Conflicts between different kinds of creationists are rather common,
but three in particular are of particular relevance to YEC: Old Earth Creationism, Gap creationism, and the Omphalos hypothesis.
Young Earth creationists reject old Earth creationism and day-age creationism
on textual and theological grounds. In addition, they claim that the
scientific data in geology and astronomy point to a young Earth, against
the consensus of the general scientific community.
Young Earth creationists generally hold that, when Genesis
describes the creation of the Earth occurring over a period of days,
this indicates normal-length 24-hour days, and cannot reasonably be
interpreted otherwise. They agree that the Hebrew word for "day" (yôm)
can refer to either a 24-hour day or a long or unspecified time; but
argue that, whenever the latter interpretation is used, it includes a
preposition defining the long or unspecified period. In the specific context of Genesis 1,
since the days are both numbered and are referred to as "evening and
morning", this can mean only normal-length days. Further, they argue
that the 24-hour day is the only interpretation that makes sense of the Sabbath command in Exodus 20:8–11. YECs argue that it is a glaring exegeticalfallacy
to take a meaning from one context (yom referring to a long period of
time in Genesis 1) and apply it to a completely different one (yom referring to normal-length days in Exodus 20).
Hebrew scholars reject the rule that yôm with a number or an "evening and morning" construct can only refer to 24-hour days. Hugh Ross
has pointed out that the earliest reference to this rule dates back to
young Earth creationist literature in the 1970s and that no reference to
it exists independent of the young Earth movement.
The "gap theory" acknowledges a vast age for the universe, including
the Earth and solar system, while asserting that life was created
recently in six 24-hour days by divine fiat. Genesis 1 is thus
interpreted literally, with an indefinite "gap" of time inserted between
the first two verses. (Some gap theorists insert a "primordial
creation" and Lucifer's
rebellion into the gap.) Young Earth creationist organizations argue
that the gap theory is unscriptural, unscientific, and not necessary, in
its various forms.
Many young Earth creationists distinguish their own hypotheses from
the "Omphalos hypothesis", today more commonly referred to as the
apparent age concept, put forth by the naturalist and science writer Philip Henry Gosse. Omphalos was an unsuccessful mid-19th century attempt to reconcile creationism with geology. Gosse proposed that just as Adam had a navel (omphalos is Greek for navel), evidence of a gestation he never experienced, so also the Earth was created ex nihilo
complete with evidence of a prehistoric past that never actually
occurred. The Omphalos hypothesis allows for a young Earth without
giving rise to any predictions that would contradict scientific findings
of an old Earth. Although both logically unassailable and consistent
with a literal reading of scripture, Omphalos was rejected at the time
by scientists on the grounds that it was completely unfalsifiable and by theologians because it implied to them a deceitful God, which they found theologically unacceptable.
Today, in contrast to Gosse, young Earth creationists posit that
not only is the Earth young but that the scientific data supports that
view. However, the apparent age concept is still used in young Earth
creationist literature. There are examples of young Earth creationists arguing that Adam did not have a navel.
Criticism
Young Earth creationists adhere strongly to a concept of biblical inerrancy, and regard the Bible as divinely inspired
and "infallible and completely authoritative on all matters with which
they deal, free from error of any sort, scientific and historical as
well as moral and theological".
Young Earth creationists also suggest that supporters of modern
scientific understanding with which they disagree are primarily
motivated by atheism. Critics reject this claim by pointing out that
many supporters of evolutionary theory are religious believers, and that
major religious groups, such as the Roman Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox Church, the Anglican Communion and mainline Protestant churches,
believe that concepts such as physical cosmology, chemical origins of
life, biological evolution, and geological fossil records do not imply a
rejection of the scriptures. Critics also point out that workers in
fields related to biology, chemistry, physics, or geosciences are not
required to sign statements of belief in contemporary science comparable
to the biblical inerrancy pledges required by creationist
organizations, contrary to the creationist claim that scientists operate
on an a priori disbelief in biblical principles.
Creationists also discount certain modern Christian theological
positions, like those of French Jesuit priest, geologist and
paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who saw that his work with evolutionary sciences actually confirmed and inspired his faith in the cosmic Christ; or those of Thomas Berry, a cultural historian and ecotheologian, that the cosmological
13-billion-year "Universe Story" provides all faiths and all traditions
with a single account by which the divine has made its presence in the
world.
Proponents of young Earth creationism are regularly accused of quote mining,
the practice of isolating passages from academic texts that appear to
support their claims, while deliberately excluding context and
conclusions to the contrary.
For example, scientists acknowledge that there are indeed a number of
mysteries about the Universe left to be solved, and scientists actively
working in the fields who identify inconsistencies or problems with
extant models, when pressed, explicitly reject creationist
interpretations. Theologians and philosophers have also criticized this "God of the gaps" viewpoint.
In defending against young Earth creationist attacks on
"evolutionism" and "Darwinism", scientists and skeptics have offered
rejoinders that every challenge made by proponents of YEC is either made
in an unscientific fashion, or is readily explainable by science.
Few modern theologians take the Genesis account of creation literally. Even many Christian evangelicals who reject the notion of purely naturalistic Darwinian evolution often treat the story as a nonliteral saga, as poetry, or as liturgical literature.
Genesis contains two accounts of the Creation: in chapter 1 man was created after the animals (Genesis 1:24–26), while in chapter 2 man was created (Genesis 2:7) before the animals (Genesis 2:19).Proponents of the Documentary hypothesis suggest that Genesis 1 was a litany from the Priestly source (possibly from an early Jewish liturgy), while Genesis 2 was assembled from older Jahwist
material, holding that, for both stories to be a single account, Adam
would have named all the animals, and God would have created Eve from
his rib as a suitable mate, all within a single 24 hour period.
Creationists responding to this point attribute the view to
misunderstanding having arisen from poor translation of the tenses in
Genesis 2 in contemporary translations of the Bible (e.g. compare
"planted" and "had planted" in the King James Version and New International Version).
Some Christians assert that the Bible is free from error only in
religious and moral matters, and that, where scientific or historic
questions are concerned, the Bible should not be read literally. This
position is held by a number of major denominations. For instance, in a
publication entitled The Gift of Scripture, the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales
comments that, "We should not expect to find in Scripture full
scientific accuracy or complete historical precision". The Bible is held
to be true in passages relating to human salvation, but, "We should not
expect total accuracy from the Bible in other, secular matters". While the Catholic Church teaches that the Bible's message is without error, it does not consider it always to be literal.
By contrast, young Earth creationists contend that moral and spiritual
matters in the Bible are intimately connected with its historical
accuracy; in their view, the Bible stands or falls as a single
indivisible block of knowledge.
Christian and Jewish theology
actually has a long story of not interpreting the Genesis creation
narrative literally: already in the 2nd century CE, Christian theologian
and apologist Origen wrote that it was inconceivable to consider Genesis literal history, while Augustine of Hippo
(4th century CE) argued that God created everything in the universe in
the same instant, and not in six days as a plain reading of Genesis
would require;even earlier, 1st-century CE Jewish scholar Philo wrote that it would be a mistake to think that creation happened in six days or in any determinate amount of time.
Aside from the theological doubts voiced by other Christians,
young Earth creationism also stands in opposition to the creation
mythologies of other religions (both extant and extinct).
Many of these make claims regarding the origin of the Universe and
humanity that are completely incompatible with those of Christian
creationists (and with one another). Marshaling support for the Judeo-Christian creation myth
versus other creation myths after having rejected much of the
scientific evidence is largely, then, done on the basis of accepting on
faith the veracity of the biblical account rather than the alternative.
Scientific refutation
The
vast majority of scientists reject young Earth creationism. Around the
start of the 19th century mainstream science abandoned the concept that
the Earth was younger than millions of years.
Measurements of archeological, astrophysical, biological, chemical,
cosmological, and geological timescales differ from YEC's estimates of
the Earth's age by up to five orders of magnitude (that is, by a factor of a hundred thousand times). Scientific estimates of the age of the earliest pottery discovered at 20,000 BCE, the oldest known trees before 9,400 BCE, ice cores up to 800,000 years old, and layers of silt deposit in Lake Suigetsu
at 52,800 years old, are all significantly older than YEC estimate of
the Earth's age. YEC's theories are further contradicted by scientists'
ability to observe galaxies billions of light years away.
The scientific community generally regards claims that YEC has a scientific basis to be religiously motivated pseudoscience,
because young Earth creationists only look for evidence to support
their preexisting belief that the Bible is a literal description of the
development of the universe. In 1997, a poll by the Gallup organization
showed that 5 per cent of U.S. adults with professional degrees in
science took a young Earth creationist view.
In the same poll, 40 per cent of the same group said they believed that
life, including humans, had evolved over millions of years, but that
God guided this process, a view described as theistic evolution, while 55 per cent held a view of "naturalistic evolution" in which no God took part in this process. Some scientists (such as Hugh Ross and Gerald Schroeder) who believe in creationism are known to subscribe to other forms, such as day-age creationism and progressive creationism,
which posit an act of creation that took place millions or billions of
years ago, with variations on the timing of the creation of mankind.
Chemist Paul Braterman has argued that young Earth creationism "bears all the hallmarks of a conspiracy theory"
by "offering a complete parallel universe with its own organisations
and rules of evidence, and claims that the scientific establishment
promoting evolution is an arrogant and morally corrupt elite", adding
that "This so-called elite supposedly conspires to monopolise academic
employment and research grants. Its alleged objective is to deny divine
authority, and the ultimate beneficiary and prime mover is Satan."
Critical rationalists hold that scientific theories and any other claims to knowledge can and should be rationally criticized, and (if they have empirical
content) can and should be subjected to tests which may falsify them.
Thus claims to knowledge may be contrastingly and normatively evaluated.
They are either falsifiable and thus empirical (in a very broad sense),
or not falsifiable and thus non-empirical. Those claims to knowledge
that are potentially falsifiable can then be admitted to the body of
empirical science, and then further differentiated according to whether
they are retained or are later actually falsified. If retained, further
differentiation may be made on the basis of how much subjection to
criticism they have received, how severe such criticism has been, and
how probable the theory is, with the least probable theory that still withstands attempts to falsify it being the one to be preferred. That it is the least
probable theory that is to be preferred is one of the contrasting
differences between critical rationalism and classical views on science,
such as positivism, which holds that one should instead accept the most probable theory.
The least probable theory is preferred because it is the one with the
highest information content and most open to future falsification.
Critical rationalism as a discourse positioned itself against what its proponents took to be epistemologically relativist philosophies, particularly post-modernist or sociological
approaches to knowledge. Critical rationalism holds that knowledge is
objective (in the sense of being embodied in various substrates and in
the sense of not being reducible to what humans individually "know"),
and also that truth is objective (exists independently of social
mediation or individual perception, but is "really real").
However, this contrastive, critical approach to objective
knowledge is quite different from more traditional views that also hold
knowledge to be objective. (These include the classical rationalism of the Enlightenment, the verificationism of the logical positivists, or approaches to science based on induction, a supposed form of logical inference which critical rationalists reject, in line with David Hume.)
For criticism is all that can be done when attempting to differentiate
claims to knowledge, according to the critical rationalist. Reason is
the organon of criticism, not of support; of tentative refutation, not of proof.
Supposed positive evidence (such as the provision of "good
reasons" for a claim, or its having been "corroborated" by making
successful predictions) does nothing to bolster, support, or prove a
claim, belief, or theory.
In this sense, critical rationalism turns the normal
understanding of a traditional rationalist, and a realist, on its head.
Especially the view that a theory is better if it is less likely to be
true is in direct opposition to the traditional positivistic view, which
holds that one should seek theories that have a high probability.
Popper notes that this "may illustrate Schopenhauer's remark that the
solution of a problem often first looks like a paradox and later like a
truism". Even a highly unlikely theory that conflicts with a current
observation (and is thus false, like "all swans are white") must be
considered to be better than one which fits observations perfectly, but
is highly probable (like "all swans have a color"). This insight is the
crucial difference between naive falsificationism and critical
rationalism. The lower probability theory is favoured by critical
rationalism because the greater the informative content of a theory the
lower will be its probability, for the more information a statement
contains, the greater will be the number of ways in which it may turn
out to be false. The rationale behind this is simply to make it as easy
as possible to find out whether the theory is false so that it can be
replaced by one that is closer to the truth. It is not meant as a
concession to justificatory epistemology, like assuming a theory to be
"justifiable" by asserting that it is highly unlikely and yet fits
observation.
Critical rationalism rejects the classical position that knowledge is justified true belief; it instead holds the exact opposite: that, in general, knowledge is unjustified untrue unbelief.
It is unjustified because of the non-existence of good reasons. It is
untrue, because it usually contains errors that sometimes remain
unnoticed for hundreds of years. And it is not belief either, because
scientific knowledge, or the knowledge needed to, for example, build an
airplane, is contained in no single person's mind. It is only what is
recorded in artifacts such as books.
Non-justificationism
William Warren Bartley compared critical rationalism to the very general philosophical approach to knowledge which he called justificationism,
the view that scientific theories can be justified. Most
justificationists do not know that they are justificationists.
Justificationism is what Popper called a "subjectivist" view of truth,
in which the question of whether some statement is true is confused with
the question of whether it can be justified (established, proven,
verified, warranted, made well-founded, made reliable, grounded,
supported, legitimated, based on evidence) in some way.
According to Bartley, some justificationists are positive about
this mistake. They are naïve rationalists, and thinking that their
knowledge can indeed be founded, in principle, it may be deemed certain
to some degree, and rational.
Other justificationists are negative about these mistakes. They
are epistemological relativists, and think (rightly, according to the
critical rationalist) that you cannot find knowledge, that there
is no source of epistemological absolutism. But they conclude (wrongly,
according to the critical rationalist) that there is therefore no
rationality, and no objective distinction to be made between the true
and the false.
By dissolving justificationism itself, the critical rationalist (a proponent of non-justificationism)[8]
regards knowledge and rationality, reason and science, as neither
foundational nor infallible, but nevertheless does not think we must
therefore all be relativists. Knowledge and truth still exist, just not
in the way we thought.
Non-justificationism is also accepted by David Miller and Karl Popper. However, not all proponents of critical rationalism oppose justificationism; it is supported most prominently by John W. N. Watkins.
In justificationism, criticism consists of trying to show that a claim
cannot be reduced to the authority or criteria that it appeals to. That
is, it regards the justification of a claim as primary, while the claim
itself is secondary. By contrast, non-justificational criticism works
towards attacking claims themselves.
The pitfalls of justificationism and positivism
Are all swans white? The classical view of the philosophy of science is that it is the goal of science to “prove” such hypotheses or induce
them from observational data. Such "proof" would require us to infer a
general rule from a number of individual cases, which can have
predictive use but is inadmissible by the rules of logic. However, if we
find one single black swan, logic allows us to conclude that the
statement that all swans are white is false. Falsificationism thus
strives for questioning, for falsification, of hypotheses instead of
proving them.
The rejection of "positivist" approaches to knowledge occurs due to various pitfalls that positivism falls into.
The naïve empiricism of induction
was shown to be illogical by Hume. A thousand observations of some
event A coinciding with some event B does not allow one to logically
infer that all A events coincide with B events. According to the
critical rationalist, if there is a sense in which humans accrue
knowledge positively by experience, it is only by pivoting observations
off existing conjectural theories pertinent to the observations, or off
underlying cognitive schemas which unconsciously handle perceptions and
use them to generate new theories. But these new theories advanced in
response to perceived particulars are not logically "induced" from them. These new theories may be wrong. The myth that we induce theories from particulars is persistent because when
we do this we are often successful, but this is due to the advanced
state of our evolved tendencies. If we were really "inducting" theories
from particulars, it would be inductively logical to claim that the sun
sets because I get up in the morning, or that all buses must have drivers in them (if you've never seen an empty bus).
Popper and David Miller showed in 1983
that evidence supposed to partly support a hypothesis can, in fact,
only be neutral to, or even be counter-supportive of the hypothesis.
Related to the point above, David Miller,
attacks the use of "good reasons" in general (including evidence
supposed to support the excess content of a hypothesis). He argues that
good reasons are neither attainable, nor even desirable. Basically,
Miller asserts that all arguments purporting to give valid support for a
claim are either circular or question-begging. That is, if one provides
a valid deductive argument (an inference from premises to a conclusion)
for a given claim, then the content of the claim must already be
contained within the premises of the argument (if it is not, then the
argument is ampliative
and so is invalid). Therefore, the claim is already presupposed by the
premises, and is no more "supported" than are the assumptions upon which
the claim rests, i.e. begging the question.
Argentine-Canadian philosopher of science Mario Bunge, who edited a book dedicated to Popper in 1964 that included a paper by Bartley, appreciated critical rationalism but found it insufficient as a comprehensive philosophy of science, so he built upon it (and many other ideas) to formulate his own account of scientific realism in his many publications.
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