Molly Worthen traces them back to “the theological feuds of the seventeenth century” when Christians developed doctrines that continue to inform evangelical and fundamentalist critiques of evolution:
The basic idea of biblical inerrancy is ancient. Christians have always been eager to defend the Bible as a source of perfect truth. But they did not necessarily use scripture to explain the intricacies of the natural world. The Protestant Reformer John Calvin believed that God created the earth in six days, but at the same time he discouraged Christians from trying to extract scientific details from the Bible: “Nothing is here treated of but the visible form of the world,” he wrote in his commentary on Genesis. “He who would learn astronomy and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere.”
A couple of generations later, conservative Protestant theologians—mostly Reformed Christians who followed the teachings of Calvin and his colleagues—found themselves hemmed in by intellectual challenges on both sides. Catholic theologians critiqued Protestantism using the relentless logic of scholastic theology, while philosophers and scientists of the Enlightenment debunked Christ’s miracles. These embattled Protestants responded by trying to out-rationalize both the scientists and the scholastics in order to solve the great epistemological problem of modern times: to keep faith and reason fused as one single way of knowing the world.
Recent Dish on creationism here.
The Dish 