Creationism

'Creationism' usually refers to one or more of the following--1. The description, presented in Genesis I, of the origin of the universe; 2. The description, presented in Genesis I, of the origin of the human race; 3. The description, presented in Genesis II, of the origin of the human race. While Creationism is most frequently invoked as a challenge to Darwinism, that only #3 is effective in that respect seems rarely to be recognized. For, Darwinism is not a thesis about the origin of the universe, and while #3 describes God's creation of Adam directly 'out of dust', #2 only notes that humans were created in 'God's image', not how they were created, i. e. it does not explicitly rule out God's use of an evolutionary procedure for deriving humans from already existing animals. Furthermore, Creationists tend to not acknowledge the apparent inconsistencies between #2 and #3, e. g. that one and the same event occurred on two different occasions, under two different conditions. So, regardless of the fervor of the contemporary controversies, the doctrine that Creationism most directly opposes is, not Darwinism, but the Big Bang theory. And, since there is no clear structural relation between #1 and either #2 or #3, 'Creationism' is more accurately 'Creatorism', i. e. a thesis that posits the existence of a creator of the universe that is independent of the latter.