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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by ChrisO~enwiki (talk | contribs) at 16:56, 25 August 2004 (→Is "creationism" a ''belief,'' an ''explanation,'' or a ''theory''?). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

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Capitalisation

Should all of the See also links be capitalised? I have already changed them before but someone keeps changing e.g. gap creationism to Gap Creationism, young Earth creationism to Young Earth Creationism, day-age creationism to Day-Age Creationism etc. I was trying to follow /Archive 8#Capitalisation but now I see that there is no consensus at all and that issue needs to be discussed again. Rafał Pocztarski 00:19, 24 Aug 2004 (UTC)

The capitalisation across this article is very inconsistent and keeps changing quite chaoticly (not without my own fault of course) so I suggest making a short list of words to capitalise. If anyone thinks “creationism” should always be capitalised, please add it to the list below before changing the article, so everyone could discuss it and agree upon a common, consistent spelling. Thanks. Rafał Pocztarski 16:45, 24 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Which words should always be capitalised

• God, Earth, Bible (just a few for a good start—please add more)
• names of religions but not names of theories (Is that correct?)

When other words should be capitalised

• beginning of a sentence but not in a list when there is no real sentence (Is that correct?)

"Creationism" is not the name of a group or affiliation, as with Catholicism, Buddhism, and Republicanism (big "R"). It is the name of a specific belief or opinion, as with theism, holism, or republicanism (small "r"). It should not be capitalized except where any other common noun would be. Terms like "day-age creationism" get the same treatment. The capitalization of "Earth" is variable -- when the planet as a whole is meant, it usually is capitalized. Thus, young-Earth creationism.

The word "god" is capitalized when one is writing in a solely monotheist context. Thus, "Catholics believe that God sent the Archangel Gabriel to Mary," but "The Greek god Zeus wields a thunderbolt." It can be argued that when comparing monotheist and non-monotheist religions, the lowercase form should be used for both so as to not appear to be favoring the former: "The Greek god Zeus did thus-and-so, while the Christian god Jehovah did this-and-that." This isn't meant to imply that Christians have multiple gods (though a Muslim would say so!) but rather that the Christian view is not being favored over the Greek. --FOo 03:23, 25 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Is "creationism" a belief, an explanation, or a theory?

<<User:Rfl subtlely inserted the following reader-invisible comment into the Creationism page, I am resisting the temptation of inserting a response similarly into the hidden code of the Creationism page, and I am taking the liberty of cutting that comment below, celebrated in green here for the historical record.>>

Creationism is the explanation <!-- was the word "belief" really an "evolutionist bias"? --> that the universe and all life were created by the deliberate act of God.

In looking through the historical record at the competition between creation and evolution in Darwin's day, I was impressed by Thomas Huxley's 1887 account of how Origin of Species provided the first explanation that in Huxley's view was a better explanation than creation. Huxley describes the sense in which he rejected creation as an explanation.

If Agassiz told me that the forms of life which had successively tenanted the globe were the incarnations of successive thoughts of the Deity; and that he had wiped out one set of these embodiments by an appalling geological catastrophe as soon as His ideas took a more advanced shape, I found myself not only unable to admit the accuracy of the deductions from the facts of paleontology, upon which this astounding hypothesis was founded, but I had to confess my want of any means of testing the correctness of his explanation of them. And besides that, I could by no means see what the explanation explained.

Huxley describes his similar rejection of the explanations of the evolutionists prior to Darwin.

And, by way of being perfectly fair, I had exactly the same answer to give to the evolutionists of 1851-8. . . . thorough-going evolutionist, was Mr. Herbert Spencer, whose acquaintance I made, I think, in 1852. . . . Many and prolonged were the battles we fought on this topic. But even my friend's rare dialectic skill and copiousness of illustration could not drive me from my agnostic position. I took my stand upon two grounds: firstly, that up to that time, the evidence in favor of transmutation was wholly insufficient; and, secondly, that no suggestion respecting the causes of the transmutation assumed, which had been made, was in any way adequate to explain the phenomena. Looking back at the state of knowledge at that time, I really do not see that any other conclusion was justifiable.

Furthermore, any self-respecting religion-neutral anthropologist, such as Robert L. Carneiro, Curator of the American Museum of Natural History, would classify creation and evolution as mere successive stages of incomplete but improving explanations in a universe where there is no God to assist the women and men who attempt to discover the truth of their origins.

From all of the above, I suggest that it is more accurate to define creationism as an explanation rather than a belief. After all, the survival of the belief derives from the usefulness of the belief, and a primary use of creationism is explaining how we all got here. According to Thomas Huxley, until Origin of Species, creationism was as good an explanation as evolutionism. And for the majority of American voters who cannot understand the evolutionists' explanations, creationism is a better explanation than evolutionism even yet today. ---Rednblu 16:08, 25 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Considering that "Belief in the psychological sense is a representational mental state that takes the form of a propositional attitude and in the religious sense, belief refers to a part of a wider spiritual or moral foundation, generally called faith, and that creationism is part and parcel of the christian faith, I think the use of the term "belief" was completely justified. Creationism is indeed an explanation, but it is an explanation founded on belief, hence it is a belief. It is not founded on knowledge or evidence; to imply otherwise, which is what you're doing, is to create a false impression that Creationism shares some sort of parity with other explanations which do not require belief in the supernatural. It does not. You seem to be substituting your own personal bias for this imputed "evolutionist bias" you claim is on the Creationism page. --FM 16:48, 25 Aug 2004 (UTC)

I think what the Bloomsbury Guide to Human Thought has to say on the nature of belief is distinctly relevant here:

Belief is the direct mirror image of knowledge. To know something is to have experienced proof of it; to believe something is to sidestep the need for proof. To know that black is white would be a very different thing from believing that black is white. And yet believers consistently behave as if what they have is knowledge, and claim their belief as such. This is the case in matters both great and small, but is particularly so in our attitude to the supernatural. If one believes in the existence of supernatural beings, the next stage is to make that belief into a faith (belief with imperatives for action), and the step after that is to claim that proofs exist (miracles, personal revelations and so on). A scientist can prove the existence of, say, black-body radiation or ripples in space - the process of proof may be laborious, but the end result is sure knowledge which the outsider is bound to accept. In the same way, religious believers down the ages have offered laborious and meticulous proofs - but here, in the final analysis, the outsider must share the revelation, accept the irrational, in order to share the belief. I do not need to believe in the existence of black-body radiation to know that it exists; I do need to believe in God to know that He exists. In the same way, unless I am a fool or a charlatan, disproof will change what I know; someone else's disbelief, by contrast, will have no effect at all on what I believe.

I agree with FM that creationism, on this standard, clearly is a belief rather than a theory. Or if you want to be generous, perhaps call it a conjecture. -- ChrisO 16:56, 25 Aug 2004 (UTC)

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