Contemporary Grammars of Meaning Creation: Scientific Creationism and New Atheism

This article approaches the grammars of meaning creation by Scientific Creationism and New Atheism from an anthropological-communicological perspective. By grammars of meaning creation, we understand the different languages that the human being uses to communicate the meaning of their existence to themself and others. Nowadays, Scientific Creationism is disseminated around the world and has transcended evangelical Christianity by permeating non-Christian religions. On the other hand, New Atheism, headed by Richard Dawkins, has also reached non-Western cultures such as Muslim cultures. Starting from Apelian transcendental semiotics, the hermeneutics of Durand’s symbol, and Lluís Duch’s anthropological study on mythos and logos, we reflect on the horizons of understanding of both movements. Our study shows that, contrary to what one might think given the antagonistic metaphysical positions the two movements seem to profess, Scientific Creationists and New Atheists share the same grammar of meaning creation: positivism. What one could interpret as a new epistemological controversy between science and religion can be better understood as a fight based on positivist science to establish the true origin myth. Thus, creationists and atheists implicitly recognize positivism as the contemporary theological discourse, i.e., the self-evident grammar of meaning creation that allows the Truth to be expressed.

Bookshelf: Kappan authors on their favorite reads

In this monthly column, Kappan authors discuss books and articles that have informed their views on education. Lois Beardslee recommends Jim Crow’s Children: The Broken Promises of the Brown Decision by Peter Irons. Adam Laats recommends The Creationists: From Scientific Creationism to Intelligent Design by Ronald Numbers. And Antony Farag recommends An Indigenous People’s History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and other books in the Revising History series.

Science, state, and spirituality: Stories of four creationists in South Korea

This paper presents an analysis of the birth and growth of scientific creationism in South Korea by focusing on the lives of four major contributors. After creationism arrived in Korea in 1980 through the global campaign of leading American creationists, including Henry Morris and Duane Gish, it steadily grew in the country, reflecting its historical and social conditions, and especially its developmental state with its structured mode of managing science and appropriating religion. We argue that while South Korea’s creationism started with the state-centered conservative Christianity under the government that also vigilantly managed scientists, it subsequently constituted some technical experts’ efforts to move away from the state and its religion and science through their negotiation of a new identity as Christian intellectuals ( chisigin). Our historical study will thus explain why South Korea became what Ronald Numbers has called “the creationist capital of the world.”

Creationism

Creationism in the broadest sense refers to God as Creator. It is an essential element in the beliefs of the so-called Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) and centers on the claim that God made the physical world out of nothing. However, more recently “creationism” has been appropriated for an idiosyncratic version of Protestant Christianity, American made, and dating from the early 19th century. At the beginning of the 20th century a series of pamphlets, known as the “Fundamentals,” gave a name to the overall position of a literal reading of the Bible, and this was followed by legal efforts in parts of the United States to enforce exclusion of nonbiblical ideas (first and foremost, evolution) from the state-supported schools of the Union. In 1925 in Tennessee a young schoolteacher named John Thomas Scopes was prosecuted for teaching that humans have natural origins. Although he was found guilty, the conviction was overturned on a technicality. Then some thirty years later, thanks to the book Genesis Flood (1961), written by biblical scholar John C. Whitcomb and hydraulic engineer Henry M. Morris, the modern creationism movement was born. Matters came to a climax in 1981 when an Arkansas state law mandated “balanced treatment” between evolution and creationism (now often known as “creation science” or “scientific creationism”). A challenge was mounted, and the teaching of creationism was judged unconstitutional. In the early 1990s, the shift was made to arguing that the problem with much science, especially science that challenges a literalistic reading of the Bible, is that it is overly reliant on the materialistic atheistic doctrine of “naturalism.” Backed later in the decade by the writings of both those trained in the sciences and those trained in the humanities, and backed financially by the Discovery Institute in Seattle, so-called intelligent design theory (IDT) elbowed aside the more traditional creationism. In 2005 after a court case in Dover, Pennsylvania, it was ruled that IDT violated the First Amendment separation of church and state no less than scientific creationism did.

Interlude: Helium, Argon, and Creationism

Henry M. Morris, widely regarded as the founder of the modern creationist movement, died February 25, 2006, at the age of eighty-seven. His 1961 book The Genesis Flood, subtitled, The Biblical Record and Its Scientific Implications, was a cornerstone of the movement. Many more books followed, including Scientific Creationism; What Is Creation Science?; Men of Science; Men of God; History of Modern Creationism; The Long War Against God; and Biblical Creationism. In 1970 he founded the Institute for Creation Research, which continues to be a leading creationist force, now headed by his sons, John and Henry III. In 1982 I debated the subject with him at the Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale in front of a sellout crowd of several thousand. He had emphasized in our initial contacts that the debate would be based on science, not religion, but when he opened his remarks with this same statement and the audience responded with loud cries of “Amen!” and “Praise Jesus!” I knew I was in for a long night. Both of us steered away from the biological arguments, I because I’m not a biologist and he presumably because the Biblical side of that is so evidently silly—if he had tried to describe how Noah brought two mosquitoes or two fleas aboard he might have got away with it, but the whole panoply of billions of species of submicroscopic creatures was obviously a problem. Instead he concentrated on the physical side, in particular on the age of the earth, and that was fine with me. As noted in the previous chapters, the earth’s age is central to Darwin’s argument. A strict interpretation of the Bible gives a limit of thousands of years, which is clearly not enough time for evolution to take place. Radioactive dating, on the other hand, gives Darwin his needed time span of billions of years, and so a cornerstone of the creationist argument is its necessary destruction. Morris was a wonderful motivational speaker, and spent a long introduction wandering through the Bible to show how wonderfully reasonable it is.