Intelligent designs: A corpus-assisted study of creationist discourse

,

Jan Buts

Unsettling Translation: Studies in Honour of Theo Hermans, edited by Mona Baker

https://doi.org/DOI:10.1163/9789004697324_010

Abstract

Drawing on a specialized subcorpus of Christian creationist publications that forms part of the Genealogies of Knowledge Internet corpus, this chapter documents the textual positioning of creationist authors in relation to the natural sciences. The corpus-assisted analysis focuses on referencing strategies such as Biblical and scholarly citation, and on concepts such as evidence and truth. It is accompanied by a discussion of the textual strategies on which creationists draw to gain the upper hand over their perceived adversaries, adherents of evolutionary theory. The aim is to illustrate how creationist texts establish both opposition and correspondence between the verses of scripture and the findings of scientific research, and to explain this phenomenon with recourse to Hermans’s assertion that equivalence is ultimately declared rather than inferred.