For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountain of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries. – Robert Jastrow
Among the many intriguing questions that boggle the reflective mind are the following: How did the world come to be? How did the earth come to be? How did we and the other animals come to be?
Since ancient times many thinkers have come up with a simple answer: It was all done by an all-powerful Being, the Almighty God. It was He who created the world, made the earth, fashioned a variety of creatures at whose pinnacle he placed Man who was made very much like God Himself. This key idea came into the sacred books of practically all religions.
It was expressed in different ways in different texts. It has been satisfactory as an overall picture for billions of people who felt/feel that the puzzle has been solved. The idea that the world and life on earth were created by an intelligent, all-knowing, and all-powerful God may be described as Creationism.
Different religious traditions have their own variations on this refrain. Zoroastrianism says that at one time in the very remote past there was the wise Ahura Mazda in an endless ocean of Light. At the same time there was an evil Ahriman submerged in an infinite ocean of Darkness. Then at one instant Ahura Mazda made a metallic sky, water, the earth with ups and downs, plants, animals, and so on; and finally man was created, as also fire to serve him.
There are numerous versions of cosmogenesis in Chinese lore. According to one, the pillars holding up heaven once fell down. At that time the She-God Nügua set them right and created human beings. In the Hindu world there are several visions of how the world came to be: from the hatching of a cosmic Golden Egg (Hiranyagarbha) to emergence from utter void. At the core of the Abrahamic faiths is the Biblical notion of the creation of the world and man by God in six days. Other cultures in other parts of the world have their own views of how it all came to be.
Perhaps the greatest incentive, if not necessarily the proof, for creationism may be seen in the fact that our world is not a mindless mound of matter, but a well-ordered system functioning in accordance with well-formulated laws. William Paley (1743 – 1805) gave the famous watch-maker analogy: If you chanced to see a watch lying somewhere, you will not accept that it was formed all by itself, but that there must have been a watchmaker who had made it. The same is true a zillion-fold with our mechanically well-functioning universe. Indeed, Isaac Newton had also granted the existence of an Intelligent Being on the basis of the laws he had discovered.
Creationism, like belief in God, is a universal religious idea. After all, it was in the context of accounting from the emergence and existence of the world that one invokes God most of all. But aside from ancient doubts as to whether indeed one needs to invoke the idea of God to account for the fact that there is a world, developments in modern science raised some serious questions in that regard. For one thing, the uncovering of fossils and their interpretations of ancient life forms of several million years ago made it difficult to accept the idea that the world was created in 4004 BCE or thereabouts as maintained by some ardent (Christian) creationists. Matters became serious when geologists, after the discovery of radioactivity in the earth’s crust estimated that the earth must be a few billion years old. Some ardent creationists have explained this away by seriously suggesting that God created pseudo-fossils and pseudo-radioactivity to mislead atheists into thinking the world is much older, as if God has nothing more serious to do in running the universe.
One may grant that our well-meaning ancestors, given that they lived in an era of far less sound scientific knowledge, might have erred in this matter. But creationists, moved by allegiance to ancient wisdom rather than instructed by new knowledge, began to twist and turn the old thesis in a variety of ways. Thus, like other sectarian divisions of religious tenets, creationism began to take on different colors.
In our own times we have young-earth creationism, old-earth creationism, gap-creationism, and so forth. In the meanwhile, some thoughtful theologians began to tweak their tenets so as to make them as compatible with current cosmology as they possibly could, some going so far as to say that their scriptures already mentioned the Big-Bang idea, albeit in occult language. Others changed the time scale of Biblical chronology, arguing that a day actually referred to a few billion years, not unlike what we do in cartography: an inch actually represents so many thousand miles.
An interesting Creation Museum was established in 2007 in Petersburg, KY to inform people on the fundamentalist Creationist thesis.
What is unfortunate, and certainly needless, in all this is that if one finds psychological or spiritual comfort in holding on to the view that God created the Universe, including earthlings, that should be enough for the person of faith. There is really no need to seek scientific corroboration for an article of faith. Indeed, attempts to formulate deeply held religious beliefs in modern scientific terms, or justify them in terms of Big-Bang and black holes trivializes ancient visions. Reducing the Seven-Day Creation idea of the Hiranya-garbha idea, or the Ahura-Mazda vision to unified field theories and DNA sounds more like a spoof than a proof of time-honored tenets.
In brief, Creationism as a conviction that our complex world arose from the creative act of an unfathomable Cosmic Being is a grand and uplifting idea, whether perceptive or poetic. But to link it to a science that periodically reviews and revises its own understanding of origin issues, and to insist that it should be taught in biology courses may not be the best way to honor the Creator. Yet, in theocratic nations, children are taught creationism in schools. Herein lies the awkward tragicomedy of linking religious beliefs to scientific theories: an endeavor that arises from a misapprehension of what each of these – science and religion – is meant for in human life and culture..
Creationism in its earliest form still has a place in human culture. After all, at the very least, it is a wise admission of our ignorance of the Ultimate Cause. But its variations to accommodate it with the latest results of modern science hardly command much respect from the scientifically awakened. Such attempts expose them to unnecessary ridicule from the science-informed community. But this does not diminish the appeal such attempts hold to vast numbers of people who are unswervingly and literally affiliated to the doctrinal fetters of traditional religions. As long as deep convictions of ultimate questions do not prompt forced imposition of views or hurtful behavior towards those who are not persuaded, Creationism can be just another interesting perspective and a matter about which none of us can claim to have the final right answer.
Spurts of Thought 