CREATIONISM

also called Creation Science, or Scientific Creationism, counterevolutionary, fundamentalist theory or doctrine that postulates that matter, the various forms of life, and the world were created by God out of nothing. Creationism grew as a result of the advancement of evolution that was evident after the publication in 1859 of Darwin's Origin of Species. Within two decades, most of the scientific community had accepted some form of organic evolution. Many religious leaders, however, feared that a less-than-literal reading of the biblical story of creation would result in a loss of faith; and well-known spokesmen for the causesuch as William Jennings Bryansaw modern war and other purported signs of moral decay to be evidence of the damage brought about by the teaching of godless evolution. The issue was argued on a number of platforms, one of the most famous being the Scopes Trial (1925), in which a high school teacher was convicted of unlawfully teaching the theory of evolution. In the United States, creationism faced a strong denialin legal termsin 1987, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that states may not require public schools to teach the creationist theory of human origin alongside evolution if such requirements are intended to promote religious belief. It was further determined that those states that had sought to alter the science curriculum to reflect endorsement of a religious view that is antagonistic to the theory of evolution were breaking the First Amendment ban on the establishment of religion.