Creationism
The easiest of the ‘fringe’
areas to deal with is a belief system generally known as
creationism, as it is the one that early archaeologists had to
confront and it has consequently been refuted many times.
Creationism, in its broadest sense, is the belief that the entire
universe was created by a divine being rather than by processes
that can be explained by the laws of physics. The term covers a
wide range of convictions, although it is most often used in a
restricted sense to refer to the beliefs of protestant
fundamentalist Christians, especially in the United States of
America. The full gamut of creationist beliefs cannot be
described here and most are mutually exclusive (it is a peculiar
arrogance of the protestant fundamentalist Christian creationists
that they have set the agenda for the debate to be between their
narrow version of creationism and their somewhat unusual view of
science). Creationist beliefs range from the frankly bizarre (one
example of ancient Egyptian cosmogony has the creation of the
world proceeding from the masturbation of the god Atum) to the
charmingly naive (a Finnish legend has it that a teal built her
nest on the Mother of the Primeval Water’s knee; when one
of her eggs fell to the ground and broke after the Mother
twitched as she slept, the earth formed from one half of the
shell, and the sky from the other). There are few, if any, people
today who would demand that these sorts of accounts ought to be
taught in schools as part of a science lesson, yet the Christian
fundamentalists have occasionally been able to persuade various
American state legislatures to accept that their particular
creation story should be taught in this way. Elsewhere in the
world, they campaign to have their beliefs taught in state
schools and, where this is not possible, set up their own schools
to promote their beliefs as with various religious schools set up
in the United Kingdom since the late 1990s under a scheme
promoted by Tony Blair’s government.
Protestant fundamentalist Christian creationism is the most prominent form in the western world (and in particular, the so-called ‘Bible Belt’ of the USA), because of the privileged position held by the numerous different forms of Christianity in these states. In some Middle Eastern states, fundamentalist Islamic creationism is also a major force (in Taleban-ruled Afghanistan, for instance, it was the only permitted account of the origins of the world, and there are extreme Jewish or Hindu fundamentalists amongst others whose religious schools teach their particular versions). Outside the USA, creationism was not an important phenomenon or even widely debated until the early twenty-first century, something that may surprise many Americans, for whom the debate has been long running and often acrimonious.
The more extreme creationists believe that divine creation took place as little as 6000 years ago (following the chronology established by James Ussher (1581-1656; Archbishop of Armagh, 1625-56), who in 1650 published his calculation of the date of creation as nightfall preceding Sunday 23 October 4004 BC); so-called ‘scientific creationism’ developed from the 1960s on in an attempt to provide evidence that this chronology is correct. Other creationists are more subtle; some allow the earth to be considerably older than 6000 years, even as old as 4.3 billion years – which is what conventional science says – and restrict their beliefs to a denial that the universe can exist without a creating god. Since the early 1990s, a variant of creationism known as Intelligent Design has grown up in the USA, ostensibly a non-religious and scientific movement aiming to demonstrate that the complexities of the universe cannot be explained without recourse to a Designer existing outside the natural world. However, it is obvious from the writings of Intelligent Design proponents as well as their institutional affiliations that they belong – for the most part – to the same protestant Christian tradition as the Scientific Creationists. Moreover, in the 1990s, the Center for Science and Culture (formerly The Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture) circulated an internal memo that has come to be known as the “Wedge Document” that claims that the Center “… seeks nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies… To replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God”. This makes it abundantly apparent that the aims of the Intelligent Design movement are not scientific but religious. Use of the term God (the capitalisation implies the Judaeo-Christian god) rather than, say, Allah, Brahman or simply ‘a divinity’ is a good indication of the origins of the strategy in protestant fundamentalism, precisely the source of Scientific Creationism. Indeed, it is now known that the seminal work of Intelligent Design – a textbook intended for schools, Of Pandas and People – was drafted as a work of creationism, only to be changed after a legal ruling in the USA during 1987 that creationism could not be taught in public schools. The question of creationism is something that has exercised American educators for many years, with numerous controversies about what can and cannot be taught in schools; it is not taken quite so seriously on the eastern side of the Atlantic but there is a growing trend in the UK towards the establishment of ‘faith-based’ schools, in which the particular version of divine creation espoused by those faiths would be taught as literally true. This is a dangerous trend and one that ought to concern archaeologists, educators and parents in Britain.