Christian Creationism is often caricatured as pure Biblical literalism: the faith that God made the world in six days. Many do believe this, but there is a bewildering array of more complex views about God’s intervention, and creationists have increasingly tried to give their ideas a scientific basis. This has been highly controversial, particularly in America, where the scientific establishment complains that science is being hijacked by religious ideology.

When Darwin expounded his ideas, many educated Christians already believed the world was much older than the Bible claimed, and that a "day" of creation’ might be taken metaphorically. However, when the teaching of evolution grew widespread in American public schools, Christian theologians started to worry that it would erode belief. There was a wave of fundamentalism in the 1920s, which formed the background for the famous Scopes monkey trial of 1925, where a public school teacher was jailed in Tennessee for teaching about evolution. However, during the trial no serious professional scientist supported the creationists.

However, one amateur geologist of the period, George Macready Price, was to influence future creation science by reviving the idea that the geological evidence that scientists used to argue for an ancient earth was based on faulty dating, and could be explained as results of the Great Flood.

The Sixties onwards

Modern creation science was born in 1961, with the publication of Genesis Flood, by John C Whitcomb, Jr. and Henry M Morris, and the subsequent foundation of the Creation Research Society in 1963, five of whose ten initial members had PhDs in biological science from reputable universities. Genesis Flood picked up on Price’s ideas, and also claimed that natural selection is a bogus theory for which no concrete evidence exits, that it does not explain gaps in the fossil record, and that very complex biological structures could not have evolved by chance.

This last idea is called "Intelligent Design". Michael J Behe claimed in Darwin’s Black Box (1996) that the process of blood clotting is "irreducibly complex", and the myriad little evolutions involved would have been impossible, because none would have been useful until the whole process was complete. Biologists, however, are increasingly finding that systems which seem "irreducibly complex" can come into being through changes which, although extraordinary, can be explained.

In 1981, the state of Arkansas signed into law that creation science had to be taught alongside evolution, but the law was struck down in 1982 on the basis that creationism was not scientific: science must relate to what we see in nature, it must admit that it is only the best current hypothesis, and there must be ways in which future scientists might test it and prove it wrong. Similarly, in 2004, the Dover Area School Board in Pennsylvania insisted that Intelligent Design be taught alongside evolution. The board was challenged by parents, and the parents won. Judge John E Jones said that Intelligent Design was an obvious relabelling of creationism, it was religion, and it had no place in a science class.