Almagest

This paper explains how young-earth creationism -which was also called “scientific creationism” or “creation science”- prospered in South Korea after the early 1980s. I show that young-earth creationism came to Koreans, when their country and churches were undergoing a transformation in the 1980s and 1990s. As Korean churches were trying to refashion themselves through novel entertainment and media relations, creation science was incorporated as a new mode of ministry that crafted a novel practice for Korean Protestantism. Through this process, the creationists with scientific credentials recrafted their roles different from their conventional ones within the country. Promulgating their faith through the mass media, creation museums, amusement parks, and the internet lines, they reformulated what they could do in relation to their churches and the Korean developmental state.

While there is widespread Muslim resistance to biological evolution, this resistance does not always manifest itself as varieties of creationism that pretend to enjoy scientific support. Turkey is the Muslim country where such a pseudoscientific form of creationism has been most successful, penetrating into public debates and gaining influence over science education at all levels. Turkish creationism has roots in modernizing religious movements and the emergence and then dominance of political Islam, erasing much of the imposed secularism that had characterized the earlier decades of the Turkish Republic. The history of Turkish creationism, including the forms creationism took in the educational establishment and in the media spectacles put on by the Harun Yahya enterprise, illuminates some of the possibilities open to Muslim communities worldwide.

In Japan of the 1930s and 1940s, a rise in nationalism and an ideological backlash against both the West and modernization provided the backdrop for the rise of antievolutionary thought. Ideologues affiliated with the government led an antievolution campaign and tried to push evolution out of the classroom. Antievolutionary thought in this period in Japan was characterized by associating evolution with individualism, capitalism, and left-wing thought, all seen as products of Western culture.

This essay argues that creation-evolution debates have been more common and contentious in New Zealand’s past than many of its historians, following a progressive nationalist paradigm, have recognized. I begin by exploring how Maori incorporated Christianity into tribal whakapapa (genealogies) that explained the creation of the world by the atua (gods, divine powers). Between the 1830s and 1860s, British Anglican creationists forged an alliance with Christian chiefs to defend Maori land and political rights. Settler-critics attacked this alliance as an obstacle to progress, using as weapons evolutionary materialism and determinist claims that the natives were doomed to extinction. After 1859, many read Darwin’s Origin of Species similarly, to rationalize the wars of the 1860s, the triumph of the “fitter” British, and to consign Maori -and their creationist defenders- to oblivion. Lively debates over the social, ethical, and political implications of evolution regularly divided settler society after the land wars, especially when freethinking politicians invested evolution with secularist values that many church people disliked. Governments introduced evolution into primary school curricula from the 1920s, while taking care not to identify it with the metaphysical naturalism or materialism likely to alienate religious voters. The state mostly preserved a position of liberal neutrality toward citizens’ diverse worldviews as secularization accelerated from the 1970s. New American-originated varieties of creationism and intelligent design found footholds in a society that remained respectful, within limits, of Maori, Pasifika, and new Asian spiritualities.

In 2002 Ronald Numbers noted that few countries have been as receptive to creationism as Australia. This paper follows up Numbers’s observations by providing an updated look at the vicissitudes of Australian Darwin-skepticism and its global influences. To do this it revisits the rise of creationism Down Under in relation to the Creation Science Foundation and its goal of reforming US antievolutionism, as well as the American market share drives that helped catalyze Answers in Genesis’s acrimonious legal split. The study further examines the socio-political conditions of the Joh Bjelke-Petersen state government that helped antievolutionism to mobilize in Queensland, which were reflected in the banning of MACOS and SEMP school curricula. Additionally, the history and contemporary peculiarities of Australia’s educational system are explored, as avenues for teaching creationism in both public and private schools still exist across the country. Finally, more recent political controversies associated with creationism are surveyed, including news reports scrutinizing the beliefs of Australian policymakers. Together, these lines of inquiry provide key insights into how creationism with an Australian accent has succeeded both in its home country and as an export abroad.

The Hindu tradition is often cited as more in harmony with modern science, and with Darwinian evolution in particular, than the Abrahamic traditions. Such a view is bolstered by the many Hindus who claim to accept evolution, but who do so apparently without much awareness of the vast differences and irreconcilable tensions between the organic evolution of Darwin and the traditional Hindu idea of spiritual evolution through karma and rebirth. Such Hindus are often dismissive of Christian creationism as evidence of Christian gullibility and superstition. This essay will show that creationism -in a variety of modes some of which are foreign to the West- has a long and esteemed history within Hinduism, and far from withering away, is finding renewed life in India under the current nationalist government of Narendra Modi. The essay begins with a brief look at the recent anti-Darwinian proclamations of a junior minister for university education in India, Satyapal Singh, before turning to consideration of the different forms that creationism has taken in India, from the ancient Vedas to the teachings of contemporary Hindu gurus, apologists, and politicians. The essay concludes with further reflection on Satyapal Singh’s creationism and his agenda for Vedicizing education within the context of current cultural and political developments in India.

In this article, I have traced the process of the spreading, acceptance, and rejection of Darwin’s theory of evolution in China from the late 19^th to the early 21^st century. First, I illuminate the reception of Yan Fu’s Tian Yan Lun and its critics, as well as the translation of Darwin’s works and their acceptance in Chinese scienti5c community. Second, I analyze the controversies over Kenneth Hsu's The Great Dying and the Chinese versions of intelligent design books. Third, I investigate the creation-evolution controversies in several main Chinese social media, such as Sina Weibo, Wechat, Douban, and Zhihu. We conclude that these intelligent design books have considerably in.uenced the Chinese public. The books also became the main resources of objections to Darwin’s theory of evolution in Chinese social media. My research provides a case for Ronald Numbers’s observation that “creationism goes global” (Numbers 2006, 399-431).

The article aims at presenting an overview of the contemporary creationist views in Orthodox Christianity that constitutes the dominant religion in eastern Europe and northern Asia. Because Orthodox Christianity is an aggregation of independent churches related to countries with di6erent cultures, I have chosen to present 5ve important case-studies: Russian Federation, Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania, and Greece. In Russia, a dynamic creationist movement exists backed by creationist institutions that publish creationist literature, organize conferences, and put pressure on the state to introduce creationism in school curricula. In Serbia, where the creationist movement is not so strong, there are claims from organized creationists to remove evolution from textbooks. In Bulgaria and Romania, creationism seems not to be an issue, and creationist literature has been developed mainly from American creationists who visited these countries. In Greece, o7cials of the Orthodox Church have propagated intelligent-design creationism, mainly based on creationist literature imported from the Christian West. Orthodox creationists claim that evolutionism is a theory alien to their religion because it has been developed in Western countries. But they use Western sources and, except for Russia, there appears to be no purely indigenous creationist discourses.