What became of more mainstream ideas that “God created…” An overview of the development of the recent, literalistic “Creationist” mindset by PZ Meyers on his blog, entitled, “Ron Numbers—Anti-evolution in America, from creation science to Intelligent Design.” He puts the beginnings of current day literalists around the 1920’s. My dad is a “gap-theory” adherent (or at least was, I haven’t talk to him about it in quite a while).

“These early creationists had no bone to pick with geology at all, and were unperturbed at the thought that the world was hundreds of millions of years old. The two dominant explanations were the day-age theory, which stretched out the time-span of creation week to cover the whole of geological time, and gap theory, which argued that between the creation of the world mentioned at the beginning of Genesis, and the account of the 6 creation days, there was a long undocumented period of time in which geological history occurred.
“The mainstreaming of literalist creationism occurred in the 1960s, when John Whitcomb and Henry Morris wrote The Genesis Flood. It’s basically the same nonsense he Seventh Day Adventists were peddling, but Whitcomb and Morris were not SDAs, making it possible for conservative Christians, who regarded Seventh Day Adventism as a freaky cult, to coalesce in the formation of the Creation Research Society. These people had no ambition to convert the research community, but instead wanted to wean bible-believers away from what they considered the compromises of day-age and gap theory.”

Just to be clear, my stand on evolution vs. creationism is that “God created…” How God created and the means or processes or time-lines He used in beyond my pay grade, and frankly we simply do not know beyond faith in a theory. I have no problem with evolution. I don’t think it impinges on “God created…”
Via: Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish