The notion of creationism, in the field of theology, refers to the doctrine that holds that God created the universe out of nothing, in addition to having directly intervened in the creation of the soul of the human being to differentiate us from the rest of the beings alive.
According to creationism, everything starts from God. Since God is eternal, the creationist position involves certain philosophical dilemmas: What was there before the world? How do you create something from nothing?
According to creationism, God started from nothing to create the universe.
Creationism, metaphysics and the theory of evolution
According to abbreviationfinder.org, there is a metaphysical principle that states that “nothing comes from nothing”. If the universe, which encompasses everything that exists, had an origin, it would have arisen precisely from nothing, contradicting the aforementioned principle. To overcome this contradiction, it would be necessary to accept that the universe always existed. For creationism, that existence is given by God, who is eternal and has always existed.
It is often claimed that creationism is opposed to the theory of evolution proposed by Charles Darwin. This scientist explained that the species, including the human being, derive from others. This would therefore mean that God did not create man out of nothing. For creationists, on the other hand, each species is the fruit of an act of divine creation.
Advocates of creationism take the content of Genesis literally.
Genesis and science
The idea of creationism, in short, is used to refer to any act of creation carried out by a divinity. Creationists usually take Genesis (the first book of the Bible) literally and do not accept the existence of an evolution of the species. Creationism, moreover, contradicts the dating of the Earth carried out by science.
A part of the Christian creationists assure that our planet is young, so young that it is not even 10,000 years old ; more specifically, they often state that it was created by the god Yahweh 6,000 years ago, as described in the Ussher-Lightfoot Calendar. In other words, this ideology does not take into account the scientifically based theories of the emergence of the universe and the Earth.
Creationism today
Many Protestant churches in North America support the Young Earth view: statistically, it is estimated that this is the theory that is respected by about 47% of North Americans, and about 10% of Christian universities teach it in their classrooms. Some Christian organizations, such as the Creation Research Institute and the Creation Research Society also believe in this ideology.
To find the age of our planet mentioned above, which does not exceed six thousand years, the followers of this branch of creationism rely on deductions and calculations based on the ages of the characters in the Bible, as mentioned in Genesis and Other books.
Movement variants
Young Earth creationism is divided into three views:
* The one that categorically rejects the theory of the evolution of the species, as well as any indication of the evolution of the planet Earth, according to the studies of geology. This is the most common form of ideology;
* the one subtitled «ambiguous», which considers the possibility that all living beings except human beings have evolved;
* the so-called “rapid evolution”, according to which the god Yahweh carried out the creation in a few days, so that the evolution did take place but it happened in just one week.
In the field of literature, finally, creationism is the name of a poetic movement that emerged at the beginning of the 20th century, postulating the absolute autonomy of the poem. According to this movement, the poem does not reflect the appearance of nature, but follows its internal logic and impulses.