Creationism is the belief that evolutionary science is wrong and that the history of the Earth and life can be explained only by numerous miracles. There is a range of beliefs ranging from the most extreme forms of creationism to evolutionary science:
• Young-Earth creationists insist that the universe and all its components were created recently by God and the entire fossil record was produced by a single flood, the Deluge of Noah.
• Old-Earth creationists believe that the Earth is old but that life-forms were created miraculously throughout the history of the Earth.
• Theistic evolutionists accept the general outline of the evolutionary history of life on Earth but believe that God intervened miraculously, perhaps subtly, in the evolutionary process.
• Deists believe that God set the natural laws in motion at the beginning and has not physically acted upon the universe since that time. Deism, in terms of scientific evidence, cannot be distinguished from evolutionary science, except perhaps in cosmology (see universe, origin of).
In the review that follows, the young-Earth definition is used. Creationism consists of a creationist theology, in which the Christian Bible is interpreted literalistically, and “creation science,” in which scientific information is presented to support those literalistic Bible interpretations.
Although many evolutionary scientists believe in God (see essay, “Can an Evolutionary Scientist Be Religious?”), evolutionary science operates under the assumption that God,
if God exists, has not influenced the processes that are being studied.
