Whereas scholarly study of Creationism usually places it in the context of religion and the history or philosophy of science, The Creationist Debate, here revised and completely updated in its second edition, has been written in the conviction that creationism is ultimately about the status of the Bible in the modern world. Creationism as a modern ideology exists in order to defend the authority of the Bible as a repository of transhistorical truth from the challenges of any and all historical sciences. It belongs to and is inseparable from Protestant Fundamentalists' desire to resubject the modern world to the authority of the inerrant Bible. Intelligent Design creationism, to the extent that it distinguishes itself from reactionary biblicism, is a program advocating a supernaturalist, providentialist understanding of the world. Accordingly, The Creationist Debate situates Creationism and Intelligent Design in relation to the rise, from the early modern period onwards, of historical thinking in various scientific and scholarly disciplines (including theories of the earth, chronology, civil history, geology, biblical criticism, paleontology, evolutionary biology, and anthropology) in their complex relationship to the status of the Bible as an historical authority. It argues that the debate over Creationism is at bottom a debate over how to interpret the biblical text rather than over how to interpret the world.

Originally published in 1995, Creation-Evolution Debates is the second volume in the series, Creationism in Twentieth Century America, reissued in 2021. The volume comprises eight debates from the early 1920s and 1930s between prominent evolutionists and creationists of the time. The original sources detail debates that took place either orally or in print, as well as active debates between creationists over the true meaning of Genesis I. The essays in this volume feature prominent discussions between the likes of Edwin Grant Conklin, Henry Fairfield Osbourne and William Jennings Bryan, John Roach Francis and Charles Francis Potter, George McCready Price and Joseph McCabe and William Bell Riley versus Charles Smith, amongst many others. The collection will be of especial interest to natural historians, and theologians as well as academics of philosophy, and history.

Presents the scientific evidence for evolution and reasons why it should be taught in schools, provides various religious points of view, and offers insight to the evolution-creationism controversy.

Gives a description of evolutionary theory and analyzes the arguments of the creationists.

Why isn't the evolution of flight shown in the fossil record? Bugs, birds, bats and dinosaurs flew and are shown fully formed in the fossil record, but there are no animals with halfway wings in the fossil record leading from ground based animals to flying animals. What is desperately wrong with the Grand Canyon if evolution is true? Where are the massive signs of erosion between the sedimentary layers of the Grand Canyon if they were laid down a "million years" at a time? Why does massive erosion only show up at the top? Animals with well-developed eyes show up suddenly in the fossil record as do flying animals. It's the norm for plants and animals to show up in the fossil record with the same separations as we see in different types of living animals and plants today. The "second law of thermodynamics" is a law of science that says everything left to its own will wear out, run down. It is a fundamental law of science. So how did evolution accidentally go up? How could a DNA molecule fumble together? The cell needs DNA; DNA needs the cell ñ which came first? 'Beneficial' mutations also weaken in other areas, and don't write evolutionary advancing DNA code. Spiral galaxies (which have the shape of a star fish that is spinning quickly) throughout our universe, like our Milky Way galaxy, are supposed to be over 10 billion years old. If they were over a billion years old they would lose their spiral arm shape. The arms of our galaxy, the Milky Way, only show a maximum age of 0.3 billion years. People want to know why they're here now and where they're going to go. They want surety of truth also. Read this book and see how well evolution holds up in all the sciences. Read this book and see if life can have meaning, direction and hope ñ with surety. For those who claim to be open minded, put on your seatbelts and keep your arms inside as you ride the roller coaster of your own value systems!

A renowned apologist and Bible teacher delivers this helpful guide that clearly demonstrates why the two sides of the debate are mutually exclusive, and gives readers the information they need to form their own convictions and answer other people's questions.

In light of the embattled status of evolutionary theory, particularly as 'intelligent design' makes headway against Darwinism in the schools and in the courts, this account of the roots of creationism assumes new relevance. This edition offers an overview of the arguments and figures at the heart of the debate.

A stunning revision of our founding document’s evolving history that forces us to confront anew the question that animated the founders so long ago: What is our Constitution? Americans widely believe that the United States Constitution was created when it was drafted in 1787 and ratified in 1788. But in a shrewd rereading of the Founding era, Jonathan Gienapp upends this long-held assumption, recovering the unknown story of American constitutional creation in the decade after its adoption—a story with explosive implications for current debates over constitutional originalism and interpretation. When the Constitution first appeared, it was shrouded in uncertainty. Not only was its meaning unclear, but so too was its essential nature. Was the American Constitution a written text, or something else? Was it a legal text? Was it finished or unfinished? What rules would guide its interpretation? Who would adjudicate competing readings? As political leaders put the Constitution to work, none of these questions had answers. Through vigorous debates they confronted the document’s uncertainty, and—over time—how these leaders imagined the Constitution radically changed. They had begun trying to fix, or resolve, an imperfect document, but they ended up fixing, or cementing, a very particular notion of the Constitution as a distinctively textual and historical artifact circumscribed in space and time. This means that some of the Constitution’s most definitive characteristics, ones which are often treated as innate, were only added later and were thus contingent and optional.

Modern readers often assume that Genesis 1 depicts the creation of the earth and sky as we know it. Yet in an appeal for textual honesty, Steven DiMattei shows that such beliefs are more representative of modern views about this ancient text than the actual claims and beliefs of its author. Through a culturally contextualized and objective reading of the texts of Genesis 1 and 2, this study not only introduces readers to the textual data that convincingly demonstrate that Genesis' two creation accounts were penned by different authors who held contradictory views and beliefs about the origin of the world and of man and woman, but also establishes on textual grounds that what the author of Genesis 1 portrayed God creating was the world as its author and culture perceived and experienced it--not the objective world, but a subjective world, subject to the culturally conditioned views and beliefs of its author. In the end, this book clearly illustrates that the Bible's ancient texts do in fact represent the beliefs and worldviews of ancient peoples and cultures--not those of God, not those of later readers, and especially not those of modern-day Creationists.