See more from this Division: Topical Sessions
See more from this Session: History of the Influence of Religion on Geology and Geology on Religion
Abstract:
This paper aims to facilitate understanding of the most radical form of contemporary creationism by, 1) relating its apologetic strategies to historically important views of the relationship of God to the world, and 2) placing the methods of its practitioners into dialogue with influential theories of scientific theory change. The alleged superiority of God to nature was historically important for the development of empirical methods of inquiry that are used alike by conventional scientists and creationist evidentialists, and creationists who incline toward the evidentialist end of the apologetic spectrum are relatively responsive to empirical considerations. Creationist presuppositionalists, however, find in divine omnipotence both infinite conceptual resources for their apologetics and infinite physical possibilities for nature; they are therefore even more likely than evidentialist creationists to interpret nature in light of their religion. These differing attitudes toward evidence carry implications for historicist theories that would assess the worth or recount the development of creationist thought. Toward exploring these implications, creationism is placed into a critical dialectic with the theories of Kuhn, Lakatos, and Neville.
See more from this Division: Topical Sessions
See more from this Session: History of the Influence of Religion on Geology and Geology on Religion