The Bible and Creationism

Biblical creationism emerged in the late nineteenth century among conservative Protestants who were unable to square a plain, commonsensical, “literal” reading of the Bible with Charles Darwin’s theory of organic evolution. As this chapter details, over time a variety of increasingly literal “creationisms” have emerged. For the first century after Origin of Species (1859), old Earth creationism—which accepted mainstream geology—held sway. But with the 1961 publication of The Genesis Flood—Noah’s flood explains the geological strata—young Earth creationism took center stage. Waiting in the wings, however, is a geocentric creationism that rejects mainstream biology, geology, and cosmology.