The Creationists:  From Scientific Creationism to Intelligent Design by Roland Numbers (c. 1992, 2006) is a long and detailed history of creationism from the time of Darwin (mid 1800s) through the present day.  I found it to be fascinating, if sometimes difficult, reading. Here are some things that struck me:

Christians responded with creationist ideas very quickly after the publication of The Origin of the Species by Charles Darwin.  This was not, however, due to a perceived threat to the Bible’s chronology, but rather for the more fundamental reason that Christians saw in evolution a materialistic challenge to God, a way of explaining nature without Him.

Many of the creationist ideas floating around today date back to the mid-1800s.  For example, the day-age theory, which says that the six days of Creation in Genesis are six ages of indeterminate length, appeared on the scene early.  So did the gap theory, which suggests that thousands or millions of years may have lapsed between Genesis 1:1 (”In the beginning…”) and Genesis 1:2 (”Now the earth was formless and empty…”)  Both of these ideas are attempts to harmonize the Genesis record with the age of the earth suggested by geology and with the fossil record.

Surprisingly, most Christians in the first half of the 20th century were not young earth creationists.  The gap and day-age theories were by far the most popular ways of understanding Genesis during this time.  Even the fundamentalist movement of the early 1900s, with its goals of combating theological liberalism and reasserting the literal meaning of Scripture, generally did not teach Genesis as the history of a 6,000 year-old earth.  Young earth creationism did have a notable advocate during this time:  George McCready Price, a Seventh-Day Adventist, who won a committed following for “flood geology” among the Adventists and Missouri-Synod Lutherans.

Young-earth creationism began to flood the evangelical world in 1961 with the publication of The Genesis Flood by John C. Whitcomb and Henry M. Morris.  Since that time, it has gained a huge following in the evangelical world, where some Christians tout it as the only faithful way to understand Genesis.  The Genesis Flood was based heavily on the earlier writings of George McCready Price, and attempted to explain the fossil record and other geological features as the result of Noah’s flood.  It is important to point out what Whitcomb and Morris claimed as their frame of reference.  “We take the revealed framework of history (the Genesis account) as our basic datum”, they said, “and then try to see how all the pertinent data can be understood in this context” (p. 232 of The Creationists).

The Intelligent Design (ID) movement took off in the 1990s with authors like Philip Johnson (Darwin on Trial) and Michael Behe (Darwin’s Black Box).  ID seeks to show that nature’s design - from the universe to the cell - is so intricate and balanced that it implies a Designer rather than random forces.  ID seems to place little emphasis on the age of the earth or the interpretation of Genesis.

The Creationists is a decent history of a long-running and diverse movement.  I understand why Roland Numbers began his study around the time of Darwin (that’s when creationism took shape as a cultural force) but I wish he had included an overview of Christian and Jewish thought before Darwin, as well as a survey of the thinking of scientists like, Newton, Galileo, etc.  Still, The Creationists offers a valuable perspective on how a powerful and controversial area of Biblical interpretation has, well, evolved.