Stated simply, creationism is the belief that the cosmos is the deliberate work of a divine being. Though the specific content of the belief may differ, the belief is common to many religions. By definition, all Christians, who hold that the Bible is the authoritative Word of God (including liberal ones), are 'creationists.' In the last century or so, however, the term has evolved into several clades, species and subspecies of beliefs by different groups of Christians (particularly in north America) to apply to it to their own formulations, all of which (except for 'progressive creationism' and 'evolutionary creationism') may be identified by their 1) common opposition to and refusal to countenance any form of evolutionary explanations for the origin of biological diversity we see in the living world, and 2) insistance of a literalistic reading of Gen 1.
The debate over evolution among Christians in the last one plus century has produced a whole series and gradations of 'creationism,' including 'scientific creationism,' 'old age creationism,' 'young earth creationism,' 'episodic creations,' and some, such as 'intelligent design,' which do not include the noun in their self-identition but are in all essence, creationistic. This has, to say the least, caused a great deal of confusion. As if intending to make things more complicated, there is, e.g., even a group who advocates evolution as the means by which the living world as we know it is created, calling themselves 'evolutionary creationism.' We cannot require who others are to do, but in ALBERITH we will try to minimize this confusion by restricting the label 'creationism' or 'creationistic' only to those ideas that asserts non-evolutionary means by which the living world came into being. Evolutionary creationism which believes that God has used evolutionary means by which to 'create' the living world, we will term theistic evolutionism.
Having defined the terms, we may now note that both the title and subtitle of Henry Morris's book, The Long War against God: The History and Impact of the Creation/Evolution Conflict, sums up pretty much how almost all creationists (see definition below) apprehend evolution. If there is such a conflict, it is the creationists who are doing most of the fighting, and those most tragically lost in the fights are their own children who grew up to discover that their parents had confused what their parents had insisted upon was just their interpretation of Scriptures.
Further Reading & Resources:
Ronald Numbers,"Creation Science," Christian Century 112/18 (1995): 574-75.
Henry Morris, The Long War against God: The History and Impact of the Creation/Evolution Conflict Grand Rapids: Baker, 1989.
Ronald Numbers, The Creationists, Exp. ed., (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006). Numbers grew up "in a fundamentalist Seventh-day Aventist family of ministers" but eventually decided in favour of evolution.
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