Creationism
Creationism, although slightly less controversial a subject now than twenty years ago, remains something of a shibboleth among practicing Christians. Catholics are by no means obliged to believe in a young Earth, though efforts to square Scripture and dogma with contemporary ‘scientific’ narrative tend to result in cosmologies so incomplete that they’re even less sensible than their secular, atheistic alternatives. On the other side of the divide, more progressive-oriented Protestants gleefully join in the secular world’s condemnation of their ‘fundamentalist’ Young Earth Evangelical brethren, of whom only a relative minority actually seem to exist. The rest of the Protestant sphere seems to reside somewhere in the middle on these matters, if the topic of human (or the world’s) origin comes up at all.
It is first important to recognize that cosmology, of which creationism is a form, consists of an entire framework of thought. Answering the question how did we all come to be necessarily touches on how old we are and what exactly this world we live in is. This informs a man’s understanding of the world around him; depending on the answers he finds, he can have radically different perspectives on history, on on anthropology and other natural philosophies, on psychology, and even theology. Someone who believes in a general sense of intelligent design does not necessarily believe the same things that a young Earth creationist does, for instance, although there’s certain to be overlap.
There are several avenues by which an inquirer can come to entertain creationism, and I will not touch on them here. Suffice it to say that I certainly didn’t believe any of it myself, having thoroughly embraced the secular dogmas of popularly-construed evolutionary theory until I was an adult. Having never had any significant religious background in my youth, the cosmological models of Darwinian death and rebirth, the growing complexity of creatures, and the incomprehensible time scales involved provided an implicit narrative to the secular belief system.
A notion of progress, albeit alien to Darwinism and evolution in their proper senses, inundated every aspect of how it was taught. Things started barren and simple, and then over periods of time so large the mind can scarcely grasp them, plants and animals just started appearing as a result of countless mutative defects. This narrative should sound familiar to anyone subjected to public school in their youth.
There is more to write on this subject, and it will be written here at The Pillarist at a later date. Suffice it to say for now, however, that this cosmology is at odds with any sort of belief in God. Theistic Evolution, Intelligent Design, Young Earth Creationism, et al are alternative means of explaining the evidence on hand—the actual evidence, by the way, and not evidence repackaged under evolutionary frameworks. The question is whether any of these alternative means better suits the data than any other, but that, again, is a subject worth more time and space than is appropriate here.
My own study of creationism is rooted in trying to better understand the world in the wake of Darwinism’s collapse (as a field), in addition to the insufficient explanations of history offered by neo-Darwinian models. I do not write on creationism here in order to offer proof; many other sites and books do that already. The point for this page is to offer a reorientation of worldview in the wake of recognizing that creationism is, in fact, a perfectly valid position to hold, even if the current Powers That Be consider it completely incredible.
Presented below are posts I’ve written over the years that approach creationism with all this in mind.
- A Reactionary Cosmology
- The Incoherence of a Mythological Genesis
- They Had Been Images of God – A Brief Analysis of the Antediluvian World
They Had Been Images of God is available as an ebook:
PDF download
EPUB download (coming… hopefully soon)