Progressive creationism
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Progressive creationism is the religious belief that God created new forms of life gradually, over a period of hundreds of millions of years. As a form of Old Earth creationism, it accepts mainstream geological and cosmological estimates for the age of the Earth, but posits that the new "kinds" of plants and animals that have appeared successively over the planet's history represent instances of God directly intervening to create those new types by means outside the realm of science. Progressive creationists generally reject macroevolution as biologically untenable and not supported by the fossil record, and they generally reject the concept of universal descent from a last universal ancestor.
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[edit] Historical development
The American Scientific Affiliation (ASA) was founded in the early 1940s as an organisation of orthodoxly Christian scientists.[1] Although its original leadership favoured Biblical literalism and it was intended to be anti-evolutionary, it rejected the creationist theories propounded by George McCready Price (young Earth creationism) and Harry Rimmer (gap creationism), and it was soon moving rapidly in the direction of theistic evolution, with some members "stopping off" on the less Modernist view that they called "progressive creationism."[2] In 1954 evangelical philosopher and theologian Bernard Ramm (an associate of the inner circle of the ASA) wrote The Christian View of Science and Scripture, advocating Progressive Creationism which did away with the necessity for of a young Earth, a universal flood and the recent appearance of humans.[3]
[edit] Modern progressive creationism
Progressive creationism is distinct from theistic evolution, in that God is seen to regularly involve himself in the process of species development through special creative acts.[4]
Proponents of the Progressive creation theory include astronomer-turned-apologist Hugh Ross, whose organization, Reasons To Believe, accepts the scientifically determined age of the Earth but seeks to disprove Darwinian evolution.[4] Answers in Creation is another organization, set up in 2003, which supports progressive creationism. The main focus of Answers In Creation is to provide rebuttals to the scientific claims of young earth creationism which are widely regarded as a pseudoscience.
[edit] Interpretation of Genesis
- See also: Creation according to Genesis
Most progressive creationists reject a strict literalist approach to Genesis chapter 1, and prefer interpretative options such as the day-age theory or the literary framework view. A range of views regarding the literal historicity of Genesis chapters 2-11 exists. The majority of progressive creationists would contend that Noah's flood was a regional rather than global event, although differences of opinion might exist concerning its precise geographical extent.
[edit] Notes
- ^ Numbers(2006) p181
- ^ Numbers(2006) p194-195
- ^ Numbers(2006) p208
- ^ a b Eugenie C. Scott (December 7, 2000). The Creation/Evolution Continuum. National Center for Science Education. Retrieved on 2007-11-19.
[edit] References
- Numbers, Ronald (Nov 30, 2006). The Creationists: From Scientific Creationism to Intelligent Design, Expanded Edition. Harvard University Press, 624 pages. ISBN 0674023390.
