Creationism, historically defined
The term “creationism” seems to have appeared in French at the end of the 19th century. The Trésor de la langue française quotes Ernest Renan[2][1]: “Science [...] will keep surprising us by its revelations which will, in place of a narrow-minded creationism no longer equal even to the imagination of a child, put the infinite of space and time” (Feuilles detachées, 1892). In English, the term had a longer history in its theological import referring to the theory that God creates a soul for every human being at conception or birth (viz. the 1840 edition of the Oxford English Dictionary). With the meaning that we are going to use here of “a doctrine crediting with scientific value the Biblical account of creation, in its literality”, the word was first used in English in 1860.
Thus, broadly speaking, in Western Christianity[3], creationism can boast a long history: for the most part, medieval and 16th and 17th century thinkers unquestioningly accepted that the Bible provided reliable information regarding the natural sciences and cosmology. Thus a great many English Bibles of the 18th and 19th century (the Authorized Version or King James Version[4] ) carried in its marginal annotations and cross-references the chronology of events as calculated by Irish bishop James Ussher[5], which set the creation of the world in 4004 before Christ (to be precise, on 23 October at around 11 p.m....). This said when, in the second half of the 19th century, or in the 20th, creationists claim Augustine[6], or Pascal[7], or Leibniz[8] as heir own, they are guilty of anachronism.
The fact that the English term creationism was formed in 1860 is no accident since the previous year had witnessed the publication of the first edition of Charles Darwin[9]'s book, On the Origin of Species. Darwin's theory relegates to the category of mythological accounts the idea that the world was somehow created at a recent date (a few thousand years) and in a short space of time (six days). Given that he appeared to call the integrity and authority of the Bible into question, Darwin was seen, as from 1859 as Christianity's public enemy number one. It is thus legitimate to conceive of creationism as a doctrine seeking to answer the Darwinian theory. Or paradoxically put, without Darwin, no creationism.
