Creation as the result of the Creator’s work and the act of creating
Creationism in a philosophical/scientific context was first propounded by Socrates (David Sedley, Creationism and its Critics in Antiquity, 2007). Socrates did not provide specifics but it is often said that Plato and Aristotle did: biological species were like logical species and so did not change — species were fixed — and purportedly this is what creationists have […]
Google’s Ngram Viewer is a fascinating look at word usage since about 1800. For example, the story of how the term natural history declined and the terms biology and geology increased is told in a simple chart. Let’s look at the etymologies first, via the Online Etymology Dictionary: biology (n.) 1819, from Greek bios “life” (see bio-)
Petteri Nieminen et al. have written two similar papers analyzing creationist writings: Argumentation and fallacies in creationist writings against evolutionary theory (Evolution: Education and Outreach, 2014, 7:11) and Experiential Thinking in Creationism–A Textual Analysis (PLOS ONE, March 3, 2015). These are welcome additions to the literature that try to shed some light and reduce the heat of debate. They
The first issue that arises in developing a typology for ideas about creation and evolution are the terms themselves: they are sufficiently ambiguous that their meaning differs even by the same author in the same work. This can be part of a fallacy of equivocation or it can simply mean the terms are general and should not
‘Nature’ is the world conceived without reference to God. A natural rock is a rock as if it exists on its own or as part of a world that exists on its own. It has no absolute origin. Its only ‘origin’ is from other rocks, other existing substances. It is all transformation. This presupposes a
Let’s distinguish three approaches to the study of universal origins: Philosophical naturalism with natural science Biblical creationism with creation science or Philosophical creationism with universal history Autonomous Humanism: naturalism with natural history and science
The term “paradigm” shall be used to indicate what Imré Lakatos called “research programmes.” For Lakatos, what we think of as a ‘theory’ may actually be a succession of slightly different theories and experimental techniques developed over time, that share some common idea, or what Lakatos called their ‘hard core’. Lakatos called such changing collections
In their book “What is Creation Science?” Henry Morris and Gary Parker contrast the evolution and creation world views/models and state: “The second world view–creation–maintains that the universe is not self-contained, but that it must have been created by processes which are not continuing as natural processes in the present.” They go on to say:
The word “creation” in theological and philosophical circles means (1) “creation from nothing”, that is, the transcendent and self-existing God producing other entities without starting from something pre-existing. However, that is not the only meaning of “creation” in the Bible or common usage. The other meaning is (2) making something from something, particularly, making something more
Scientism asserts the superiority of natural science over all other sciences, disciplines, or teachings. Mikael Stenmark proposed the expression scientific expansionism as a synonym for scientism. That’s a good suggestion because scientism is essentially a boundary-breaker. Scientism says that science is superior wherever it goes and it goes anywhere it wants. (That’s analogous to the word
