Creationism Revisited

I spent some time last night with my concordance and a couple translations of the Bible in English looking up references for my "Creationism" post yesterday. They're still sitting on my bed at home, but I was really struck by something. There are hundreds of references to "foundations". Job 38 is the passage I was thinking of yesterday when I mentioned the "God as Architect" creation story, but throughout Psalms and the prophets, the imagery of God building the earth upon some firm bedrock is used. Mountains have foundations which shake.

It's definitely written from the perspective that the earth, the ground, is the stable common element in life and the heavens and events on the earth pass by. How profoundly unsettling the observations of Copernicus must have been in that world view!

Which recalls the emotional content of the struggle over creationism today. The story that most parallels evolution -- the progressive creation of the world -- is a kind of last bastion. No wonder the struggle is so intense.