of the Existence of God in the Light of Modern Science», delivered at a meeting of the Vatican Academy of Sciences on September 28, 1951, stated the following: «The creation of the world in time, and therefore the Creator of the World, and therefore, God is the word that we demand from science and which the contemporary generation (churchmen) expects from it». According to him, «true scientists» are only those who scientifi ally substantiate and prove «the infi te harmony of the Almighty God». The creationism (creatio − creation) is such a trend in the natural sciences, which explains the origin of the world through an act of the supernatural creation and denies evolution. His supporters claim that scientifi evidence of the biblical creation act and biblical history can be obtained. Henry Morris who is de facto considered the founder of the modern «scientifi creationism» (Creation Science), established the Creation Research Institute, which has become the main center of this trend.
A religious worldview advocates argue that if matter is eternal, then God granted it the ability to move and change. Life occurred as a result of a supernatural event in the past.
Creationists of the past centuries, describing various animals and plants’ species, assumed that the species are unchanged, and the number of existing species equals the number of originally created ones by God with the exception of the deleted species. From the point of view of creationism, no accidental genes recombination could produce such a huge number of the living creatures’ species, each of which is so well adapted to its environment. The evolutionary theory’s opponents put forward a hypothesis according to which representatives of each originally created genera were created with a set of certain characteristics and the potential for a limited number of changes.
The creationism supporters also claim that conditions on the ancient Earth ruled out the possibility of abiogenesis (spontaneous generation). In particular, the absence of oxygen and its recovery nature in the early atmosphere is denied.
According to the «Flood Geology» supporters, representatives of all taxa occur «fully formed» in the fossil record, which refutes evolution. Moreover, the occurrence of fossils in stratigraphic layers reflects not the sequence of flora and fauna that had been succeeding each other for many millions of years, but the sequence of ecosystems tied to different geographical depths and heights. The extremely slow speeds of geological processes such as erosion, sedimentation and mountain building cannot ensure the preservation of fossils, as well as the intersection of several layers of sedimentary rocks with some fossils (usually tree trunks).
The scientific creationism’s advocates believe that if one analyzes any process of change that possesses the global nature, one will find out that almost all such calculations will indicate the much younger age of Earth than is necessary for the life and man’s occurrence through evolutionary processes. Usually, young-Earth creationists consider this age to be approximately 6 or 7.5 thousand years. The old-Earth creationists on the contrary acknowledge modern scientific estimations of the age of Earth − 4.6 billion years and the Universe – 13.7 billion years.
Creationists claim that certain evidences do not provide reliable information about the past. Radiocarbon analysis, which is based on a comparison of the stable carbon isotopes’ content in the materials with the amount of the 14C radioactive isotope, is the most often criticized one. In their opinion, radioisotope dating methods based on some isotopes half-life’s constancy may be inaccurate and provide unreliable results. However, independent methods have confirmed the radioisotope method’s accuracy, and some of these provisions have been defined more precisely during the method’s development. In addition to the carbon isotopes, there are a number of other isotopic elements that refine and correct the analysis results.
On the contrary to the modern synthetic evolutionary theory’s advocates who make no differentiation between macroevolution and microevolution, considering one of them the continuation of the other, creationists claim that microevolution and super macroevolution are different. According to creationists, experimental evolution study used microorganisms and the data obtained cannot be transferred to more highly developed organisms. Such processes indicate the microevolution only, and thus, cannot be extended to macroevolution. The creationists do not deny the existence of microevolution, and it can easily be confirmed: its existence is indisputable on the example of the dog breeds’ variety of.
Creationists have established museums in four countries of the world: 21 museums in the USA, 5 museums in Canada, one in the UK and one in Turkey. «The Creation Testimony Museum» was established by Carl Baugh in Texas. In the American city of Cincinnati, there is one larger museum of creationism, in which a special section is dedicated to the Flood, Noah’s Ark and the substantiation of the idea that the world was created no more than 10 thousand years ago. Creationism does not provide a satisfactory answer to the question about the causes of the very Creator or the Supreme Being’s occurrence and existence, postulating its eternity. In addition, the question arises: if the world has been created by God, then where has God himself come from? One has to assume that there is a creator for the very God («Who created God?»). This disputes the claim that God is the first cause of everything («chicken-and-egg problem»).
According to Karl Popper’s criterion of scientific character, creationism is not a scientific theory; it is a metaphysical concept and religious faith, since the introduction of concepts untestable by scientific methods (such as the Creator God) does not meet the principles of verifiability / falsifiability.
In 2011, 42 Nobel Prize winners in Chemistry, Physics, and Medicine wrote an open letter supporting the repeal of the Louisiana Science Education Act, which actually allowed the school to teach creationist views instead of scientific ones. Creationists in Kansas demanded the evolutionary theory’s teaching in schools because of its controversial nature. In their view, students should be taught alternative points of view in secondary schools. Such a proposal was supported by the then US President George W. Bush. It served as the basis for the «Teach the Controversy» campaign, launched by the «Discovery Institute» public organization. The purpose of this campaign was to popularize the «Intelligent Design» doctrine. However, the US academic circles and judicial bodies rejected these arguments.
On October 4, 2007, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe issued a resolution titled «The Danger of Creationism in Education», which stated that «creationism in all its forms, such as «intelligent design» or «higher intelligence», is not a scientific discipline and is not subject to scientific study in European schools along with the theory of evolution or even instead of it». By this resolution, MPs called on the governments of 47 Council of Europe member states to «strongly oppose» the teaching of creationism as a scientific discipline.
1.6. INTELLIGENT DESIGN THEORY
The earliest logical arguments for intelligent design’s substantiation were laid out as far back as 1806 by William Paley in the book «Natural Theology». The author proposed a «watchmaker concept,» which is called «argument from design». It is grounded on the following example: imagine that we have found a watch in a field. It would never occur to anyone to speculate that this watch had occurred itself as a result of a chain of random interactions of molecules. It is quite evident that the watch occurred as a result of the intelligent design, with a watchmaker as the author of it. The Universe and biological systems are much more complicated than watches. Paley argued that life obviously could not have existed if it had not been created by a «watchmaker» with an immeasurably more powerful mind than that of simple watches’ creator. The popularity of this analogy has prompted Clinton Richard Dawkins, an American biologist and distinguished Darwinist popularizer, to continue arguing with Paley in his book «The Blind Watchmaker». He showed that the blind process of evolution acts as the «creator» of complex organisms observed by people. Dawkins’s position is that natural selection fully explains the apparent practicality and complexity of biological diversity, and even if we draw an analogy with a watchmaker, we mean a soulless, unreasonable and blind watchmaker. In his opinion, the human genom «contains a huge amount of «garbage», idle and even deadly genes, such as, for example, oncogenes. Only a blind watchmaker but not a
