Anti-evolutionary "Scientific Creationists" invoke the memory and beliefs of America's Founding Fathers to further their cause. It is an exercise in anachronisms. Creationists say that because the Founding Fathers sometimes spoke of a Creator, then the Founding Fathers were Creationists, as they are. This is quoting people out of context of historical surrounding and circumstance, to support something far removed from their time. The creationism of the Founding Fathers was not the same as the Creationism of the Twentieth Century.
The Founding Fathers' attitudes on the origins of the earth and the rest of the universe were formed from the religious and scientific knowledge of the Eighteenth Century. As such, they cannot be analogous to the beliefs of the "Scientific Creationists" of the Twentieth Century, who hold to their beliefs in defiance of all scientific and theological historical knowledge gained since then. Religion in Eighteenth Century America was divided into a variety of Protestant denominations, with Roman Catholic and Jewish minorities. Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish theologies were moving away from Biblical literalism, due to the scientific revolutions of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries which showed that the earth was not the center of the universe. Measurable natural, not untestable supernatural, forces governed the earth. The "clockmaker" analogy of a creator, who created and set in motion the earth and universe and left it alone, was more popular among educated people than the literal Biblical notion of an all-powerful maker of heaven and earth who constantly intervened. This was the creator the Founding Fathers spoke of, not the Biblical God. Thomas Paine's The Age of Reason clearly illustrates this. The scientists of the eighteenth century, such as Buffon, DeMaillet, Hutton, Lamarck, La Mettrie, and La Place, were finding in nature evidences different from strict Biblical literalism. The Founding Fathers, particularly Thomas Jefferson, were a scientifically literate set of people who would have been informed of the current scientific thinking of their time, which did not support the literal Biblical view. The Founding Fathers were not Biblical literalists and fundamentalists.
Another consideration was that this was before evolution was widely popularized. If eighteenth-century naturalists had done the work that Cuvier, Lyell, Sedgewick, Henslow, and Darwin did in the Nineteenth Century, and if such work had been as widely popularized as The Origin of the Species was in its time, perhaps the Founding Fathers, who, as has been shown, were not wedded to Biblical literalism, would have been evolutionists and not creationists. Twentieth-century creationists hold their views in total defiance of the ample scientific evidence amassed for evolution since the eighteenth century. Can we say the Founding Fathers would have stayed creationists if the scientific knowledge available today would have been known to them? This is what twentieth-century Creationists try to imply.
Home | Search | Meeting Program | Feedback | Skeptical Blurbs | Newsletters | Skeptical Links | Send E-mail
Copyright 1992-2005, The Association for Rational Thought