Creationism in a South Korean Culture: Science, Religion, and the Stru

Creationism in a South Korean Culture: Science, Religion, and the Stru



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1st Edition
Creationism in a South Korean CultureScience, Religion, and the Struggle against Evolution
By Hyung Wook Park 2024

ISBN 9781032757148
236 Pages 8 B/W Illustrations
Published June 12, 2024 by Routledge

Description

Park investigates the unexpected success of early Korean creationists, who were mostly scientists, and argues that creationism is not a product of the lack of intelligence or proper scientific education but a consequence of more profound social developments in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Known as the religious belief rejecting evolutionary theory, creationism has become a global issue. Although it was often known as a problem unique among fundamentalist Protestants in the United States, it has been appropriated by people with diverse religions around the world, including Asia, Africa, Europe, and South America. Many scientists and educators perceive this dissemination as a threat to modern pedagogy and scholarship, although few of them are aware of its historical and cultural contexts. Through an intensive study of the birth and growth of the anti-evolutionary movement in South Korea during the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, this book traces an important part of this worldwide movement against evolution. 

The author argues that South Korean creationism started from the country's past as a developmental state during the Cold War but proliferated further amid subsequent democratization and globalization. Creationism reflected the new identifications of some Korean scientists and engineers with evangelical faith, who actively formed their own domain outside of the state hegemony and authority.

This book is a valuable reference for scholars interested in the dynamic interaction between science and religion in East Asia.



Table of Contents

Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1
Christianity, Evolution, and the Koreans’ Struggle for Existence

Chapter 2
Nation Building with Religion and Science

Chapter 3
Being a Christian Intellectual

Chapter 4
Creationists in Wonderland

Chapter 5
Worshipping the Creator in Exotic Scenery

Chapter 6
Biology without Darwin

Chapter 7
Situating Creation in History and Philosophy

Chapter 8
Creationists in the Public Sphere after the Cold War

Conclusion

Bibliography

Author(s)

Biography



Hyung Wook Park  Science, State, and Spirituality

is a historian based in Singapore. He has extensively studied the histories of biomedical research, evolutionary ideas, and the science–religion interfaces. His papers include “Science, State, and Spirituality” (2018). Along with Ronald Numbers, Park edited “Creationism in Asia, Oceania, and Eastern Europe” (2021).

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See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/321851697

Science, state, and spirituality: Stories of four creationists in South Korea

Article  in  History of Science; an Annual Review of Literature, Research and Teaching · December 2018

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Nanyang Technological University University of Regina

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Published in History of Science 56:1 (2018), pp. 35-71. This is the accepted version of the manuscript before publication.

Science, state, and spirituality: Stories of four creationists in South Korea 

Hyung Wook Park (Nanyang Technological University) 

Abstract

” This paper analyses the birth and growth of scientific creationism in South Korea by focusing on the lives of four major contributors. After creationism landed on Korea in 1980 through the global campaign of leading American creationists, including Henry Morris and Duane Gish, it steadily grew in the country reflecting its historical and social conditions, especially its developmental state with its structured mode of managing science and appropriating religion. We argue that while South Korea’s creationism started with the statecentered conservative Christianity under the government that also vigilantly managed scientists it subsequently constituted some technical experts’ efforts to move away from the state and its religion and science through their negotiation of a new identity as Christian intellectuals 

(chisigin). Our historical study will thus explain why South Korea became what Ronald Numbers has called “the creationist capital of the world.” 

Key words: scientific creationism, South Korea, developmental state, religion, conservative 

Christianity, intellectuals 

Introduction 

In 2001, Kim Young-Gil, the Korean metallurgist and founding president of the Korean 

Association for Creation Research (KACR, Han’guk ch’angchokwahak’oe), said how “ironic” it was for his school to be the birthplace of scientific creationism (ch’angjokwahak) in the country.1 As Kim mentioned, the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), for which he worked as a professor of materials engineering, was founded in 1971 as the Korea Advanced Institute of Science (KAIS) by President Park Chung Hee (1917-1979). Park, the military dictator, supported the institution as a leverage to “boost economic growth” of his impoverished country through science and technology. 

According to Kim, however, “God starts and finishes His work in a mysterious way that ordinary people 

may not understand.” “In an era of scientism,” God urged Christian scientists in a national research establishment to “oppose evolutionism and promote creationism.” Responding to this divine mandate, 

Kim and other KAIST professors, along with several scholars in various schools, established KACR in 1981, after the American creationist Henry M. Morris (1918-2006) visited Korea a year earlier. This was the beginning of Korea’s rise as “the creationist capital of the world, in density if not in influence,” as 

Ronald Numbers wrote.2 

Since its arrival, scientific creationism underwent a persistent growth in South Korea, at least among non-scientists. An increasing number of Korean Christians came to accept the creationist theory that denied evolution in the name of God’s benevolent creation of the world in just six days, as written in the Bible. While KACR started with just 117 members in 1981, it boasted 1,125 fee-paying members 

constituting eight regional and five overseas branches in 2015 (table 1).  

Did this growth affect the public perception of evolutionism? A 2009 survey showed that about 31 percent of Koreans rejected evolutionism, because it either had insufficient evidential support (41 percent) or contradicted their religious conviction (39 percent).3 Although this proportion was smaller than that of the United States (about 40 percent), it seemed higher than most of the European countries’ proportions, except for those of Greece and Turkey.4 Admittedly, it is difficult to measure the contribution of creationists to this situation in Korea. Among other possible factors, the underdevelopment of the evolutionary science in Korea must be one, as seen in the Korean Society for Integrative Biology, which had only 31 professional members studying evolution.5 In any case, the public perception on evolution in Korea might help creationists advance their agenda of ‘balanced treatment’ of both evolution and creation in education. Indeed, 63 percent of all surveyed Koreans stated that evolution 

and creation must simultaneously be taught in schools.6  

  

<Table 1> 

 

This situation incurred a persistent cultural warfare in the country. The Reverend Kim Joon Gon 

(1925-2009), who played a crucial role in starting KACR, argued that its establishment was one of the 

“three major events in the history of Korean Christianity” along with the “introduction of the Gospel into the country” and the “complete translation of the Bible into Korean.”7 However, creationism never became the mainstream creed among Korean scientists. To many of them, creationism remained a pseudoscience. For instance, Jang Dayk, an evolutionary biologist, claimed that the “bad influence” of 

KACR on the scientific culture was “not small,” as its activity was just an “occult” phenomenon.8 Choe Jae Chun, a Harvard-trained scientist of animal behavior, was also highly critical toward creationism, but regretted that his academic community was not systematically challenging it. To him, this was due to the fact that evolution did not attract much attention among Korean life scientists, as most of them dealt with 

“physico-chemical” problems rather than “big questions” on life that could not be addressed without referring to evolution.9 Under these circumstances, the Korean creationists almost succeeded in removing evolution from school textbooks in 2012, before they were eventually stopped by the Korean Academy of 

Science and Technology and a special panel including five scientists of evolution.10  

Then, it seems unclear why Kim Young-Gil thought that the establishment of KACR was 

“ironic.” Did he imply that KACR was not a scientific organization? Did he mean that science and religion were polar opposites? Perhaps few creationists will answer in the affirmative to such questions, because they stress that their claims are firmly grounded in science. One of the main agendas of scientific creationists in South Korea, as well as the United States, is that creationism and evolutionism must be 

equally treated in academia and science textbooks, because these are comparable scientific theories.  

The meaning of what Kim referred to as an “irony” must be sought in Korea’s historical context. 

Indeed, his mention of KAIST and President Park insinuates the cultural and political landscape in which Korean creationism was born. In an institution representing a state-controlled scientific growth, Kim and his fellow Christians forged something that betrayed the will of the dictator. The Korean advocates of scientific creationism did not follow the behavioral norms imposed by President Park under the slogan of 

“A Country Built on Science” (kwahakipkuk). To Park, technical experts had to be faithful subjects of the nation and contribute their full time to the nation-building through their groundbreaking research rather than intense religious activities that incurred second thoughts on contemporary science. Obviously, Kim was doing something that was not highly encouraged in the dictator’s country. 

This aspect of KACR entails another layer of irony. Strikingly, President Park was quite 

favorable to the Korean Protestant church. Although he was an atheist-turned Buddhist, he regularly participated in the National Prayer Breakfast (Kukga choch’an’kidohoe), initiated by Reverend Kim in 

1965. He also allowed Christian pastors to proselytize their religion to military officers in the country. 

Kim’s subsequent work for KACR after Park’s death thus reveals the complexity of problems surrounding the nationhood, religion, and science in South Korea. The Korean state, which actively patronized scientific research and enforced a strict discipline upon practitioners for rapid industrial growth, somehow came to allow for an activity that could possibly hinder a part of its scientific enterprise. How, then, did the state support for science in Korea come along with the support for Christianity? What 

were the contexts of their cohabitation? How did this patronage promote the growth of creationism? 

We find our answers to these questions in the characteristics of the developmental state in Korea. Although the notion of the developmental state has complex lineages, it usually means a centralized state mobilizing its political, social, and cultural resources systematically for rapid economic and industrial growth. Historically, this state could be found in twentieth-century East Asia, including Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea, which actively maintained their strong state bureaucracy for controlling, shaping, and disciplining their industries, technologies, and citizens.11 After Japan initially constructed its developmental state in response to the Western domination, its postcolonial progenies, South Korea and Taiwan, built their own under the American sponsorship during the Cold War.12 In Korea, President Park’s regime showcased the birth of a developmental state under a military dictatorship, which was closely associated with chaebŏls—the family-owned Korean conglomerates. How, then, did Korea 

manage science and religion in its efforts to foster its developmental state?  

In President Park’s state, science was important. As many historians and sociologists have documented, science was the foundation of his export-oriented economic and industrial policies. Most of all, Sheila Jasanoff and Sang-Hyun Kim have argued that Korea’s “sociotechnical imaginaries” enabled and fostered the discourse of state-driven modernization and industrialization through science and technology.13 Dong-Won Kim and Stuart W. Leslie have also illustrated the significance of the centralized government and its authoritarian ruler in the birth and development of KAIST. During the Cold War, Park Chung Hee cooperated with the United States federal government to construct the major research institute as a governmental initiative for “winning markets” in the world.14 In other words, 

Korean science under Park’s rule exemplified how a developmental state constructed its research institutions as political and economic instruments. Even after the dictator’s death, the legacy of his work 

enjoyed a long life, shaping South Korea’s science policies.  

Remarkably, religion, especially Christianity, was not unimportant at this time. In retrospect, Korea had long associated religion with the matters of the state (kukga), since the term, religion, was translated into “chonggyo” in the late nineteenth century. As the Korean religious studies scholar Jang Suk-Man has shown, the basic unit of Korean religious belief was largely considered the state or the ethnic nation (minjok) rather than each individual at the turn of the twentieth century. Indeed, many Koreans thought that the rise and fall of kingdoms, ethnic groups, or modern nation-states were deeply engaged with religions.15 Most prominently, Koreans surmised that the rise of Western countries in modern times partly stemmed from their religion—Christianity—which Koreans also needed for their survival in the age of colonialism. After Korea became independent, Christianity became even more important, as it seemed to function as a psychological shield against North Korea’s communism that encouraged atheism. During the Cold War, religion became as important as science in the nation-state. 

We argue that while South Korea’s creationism started with the state-centered conservative Christianity under the government that also vigilantly managed scientists it subsequently constituted some technical experts’ efforts to move away from the state and its religion and science through their negotiation of a new identity as Christian intellectuals (chisigin). By accepting and promoting scientific creationism, the scientists and engineers in KACR stepped out of the nationalistic discourses and conventional roles imposed by the state. In their ‘divine’ science, they found a novel means to cope with their problems and satisfy their own—rather than the state’s—desire, which enabled them to form their identities as Christian literati. But Korean creationists did not refuse all conventions imposed on them in their country and church. Rather, they selectively appropriated certain religious discourses and scientific 

practices in the state, and invented their new roles as intellectuals in their Christian communities.  

In investigating this development, we have been inspired by historical literature on creationism. In particular, we are indebted to Ronald Numbers’s masterful study of the birth and growth of scientific creationism and intelligent design theories in the American context, along with Edward Larson’s thorough analysis of creationists’ court battles.16 The studies of the relation of creationism to race, education, and public representations have also guided our writing.17 As these studies have discussed, creationism grew in America due to a series of threats perceived by Protestant Christians, including theological liberalism, higher criticism, fascism, communism, labor unrest, secular education, and the atrocities of the two world wars. But most creationists before the 1960s tried to accommodate recent scientific discoveries, especially facts on geological ages. In contrast, Morris and John Whitcomb— inspired by the Canadian Seventh-day Adventist George McCready Price (1870-1963)—were hyperliteralists, whose ‘scientific creationism’ proposed in the 1960s was based on a strictly literal reading of the Bible, which prompted them to argue that the earth was young with less than ten thousand years of history. South Koreans’ incorporation of creationism reflected this American development, because KACR was organized partly due to the efforts of Morris and others to globalize their ministry 

through the Institute for Creation Research (ICR).18 

As Simon Coleman, Stefaan Blancke, and other scholars have shown, however, the story of the 

receiving side is equally important.19 This paper traces how the sociocultural position of Christianity and science in the nation-state formed a condition for the reception and development of creationism during the twentieth century. We thus accounts for how some Korean scientists and engineers accepted creationism, despite, or because of, their government’s longstanding efforts to use its science and religion for its strategic resources. In uncovering this process, our paper concentrates on four key people—Kim Joon 

Gon, Kim Young-Gil, Kim Jung Wk, and Paul Yang (Yang Seung-Hun). Although this number may not be enough, we think that it is meaningful to analyze the work of these creationists as representative figures in KACR. They were the major contributors to Korean creationism, and three among them (except 

Reverend Kim) were affiliated with KAIST or KIST. While these institutions were not the centers of Korean creationism, some of their professors, researchers, and students—excluding the majority of scholars with no relation to creationism—played some roles in KACR’s early years before the 1995 founding of Handong Global University (HGU) with Kin Young-Gil as the first president. Indeed, Kim 

Young-Gil wrote that KACR “was founded within….KIST and KAIST” that “God chose….to do His work.”20 In 1981, for example, 10 out of 19 charter executives of KACR were affiliated with KAIST or KIST, and the first student organization, the Research Association of Creation Science, also started in 

KAIST in 1992.21 Even HGU’s faculty included some KAIST creationists, such Chang Soon Heung and 

Hyun Chang-Kee. Furthermore, KACR’s Creation Science Exhibition Hall (CSEH) stayed within the KAIST campus from 2002 to 2010.22 To Korean creationists in these institutions, what Kim called “His work” could substantially differ from President Park’s work. 

Unraveling the stories of these Korean creationists, we, like Numbers, have tried to be respectful 

toward their religious stance.23 However, we hope to make clear that we do not accept their theories. As a historian of science (Park) and a religious studies scholar (Cho), we try to keep our own opinions apart from those we analyze. Nonetheless, we think that their activities and thoughts deserve serious academic attention, as they are a product of Korea’s arduous journey in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We are grateful for the creationists who frankly shared their memories with us.    

 

Christianity, evolution, and the Koreans’ struggle for existence  

 

Arriving in Korea in the seventeenth century, Christianity had a troublesome history before 

being fully integrated into Korea. Catholicism, which came earlier than Protestantism into the Korean peninsula, faced a series of brutal persecutions during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries due to its perceived threat to Confucianism, the ruling philosophy and religion in Chosŏn Korea (1392-1897). 

Having observed the numerous Catholic casualties in this period, Protestant churches tried to get adapted to Korean society when they came to the country in the late nineteenth century. They offered tangible benefits such as schools and hospitals to Koreans, including those in the nascent nationalist community. 

Among these nationalists was Syngman Rhee (1875-1965), the first South Korean president and a Methodist, who finished his graduate education at Princeton University with the funding from the church.24 The schools built by Protestant missionaries also became significant places for young Koreans to pursue nationalism and learn modern scholarship during the Japanese Colonial Rule (1910-1945). For example, the Korean nationalist poet Yun Tongju (1917-1945) was a Presbyterian and was educated at Yonhi College, established by the American missionary, Horace Grant Underwood (1859-1916). Yonhi and other schools built by Western Protestants, such as Ewha and Soongsil, grew into major private 

institutions of higher education. 

At the time, Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution also came to Korea in the form of social Darwinism, when there were few scientists pursuing Darwinism as a theory for their research.25 As many historians have shown, most early nationalists, including Yu Kilchun (1856-1914), Pak Ŭnsik (1859-

1925), Yun Ch’iho (1864-1945), Sin Ch’aeho (1880-1936), and Syngman Rhee, were exposed to social Darwinism in Japan, China, and the United States.26 Yu, for example, learned it from the American zoologist Edward Sylvester Morse (1838-1925) during his American stay, as well as the Japanese writer and educator Fukuzawa Yukichi (1835-1901), who advocated Japan’s rapid modernization as a way to empower his motherland in preparation for the Western expansionism.27 Remarkably, few of them ever read or even knew of Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859). Among the people we mentioned, only Pak briefly discussed Darwin.28 In a sense, social Darwinism in Korea seemed to stem not so much from Darwin as Herbert Spencer and others concerned about political economy at the time.29 But this does not mean that biological Darwinism failed to land on Korea. From the 1900s, Darwin’s theory was also gradually introduced into the country and was occasionally discussed in magazines and newspapers, although there were still few researchers interested in it.30  

To Koreans, Darwinism held ambivalent meanings. It was inspiring, because it taught them that 

they should strengthen their country through education, industrialization, and hard work in order to survive. Yet it was also troubling, because it could justify Japan’s increasing dominance in East Asia and its eventual colonization of Korea. While some nationalists, such as Sin, tried to resolve this contradiction by incorporating different brands of naturalism, including the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin’s theory of “mutual aid,” others, like Yun, ultimately came to comply with the Japanese rule in colonial Korea.31  

Darwinism brought mild anxiety to some Korean Christians, too. In 1926, two articles were published in Kidok shinbo (Christian Gazette), a Korean-language newspaper managed by the Methodist and Presbyterian Churches in Korea. One of these papers noted a recent “debate between progressives and conservatives on the interpretation of the Bible,” which was spurred by “the modern scientific development in evolutionism.”32 It is unclear whether there was any debate on this matter in Korea. 

Rather, this article seemed to discuss the Scopes Trial in 1925, which was known to Koreans through 

Chosun ilbo, a major Korean newspaper. The reporter wrote that “John Scopes, a middle school teacher, was found guilty….in the Tennessee Court for teaching Darwin’s evolutionary theory that humans came 

from lower animals.”33  

But these reports did not intend to arouse conflicts. The author of the Kidok shinbo article 

stressed that modern science did not violate the truth of the Holy Scriptures. Scientists, including those believing in God, discovered wonders of nature that could not have been observed had it not been for the omniscient creator. For example, microbes living in extreme environments, such as hot springs and the South Pole, demonstrated the existence of a designer that could make organisms tolerate such harsh conditions. The “gradual evolution from lower to higher organisms” was just another instance showing evidence of God’s benevolent creation.34 How could such a great transformation of living organisms be possible without a supreme architect, who had already established the path toward the ultimate perfection 

of all life on the earth? Obviously, God created the world through evolution.  

Korean Christians attempted to find a middle course between religion and evolution. For example, another article in Kidok shinbo explained the Book of Genesis using the day-age and gap theories, in line with the dominant views among American antievolutionists during the 1920s: a “day” in Genesis might not literally mean a day but a geological age that lasted millions of years. Equally plausible was the possibility of an “empty and confusing” period after God had created the earth.35 The Lord apparently began to forge animals and humans only upon the end of this long “gap.” Similar perspective is found in the Reverend Oh Chun Young’s translation of The Bible Confirmed by Science (1932) by the 

Canadian creationist William Bell Dawson (1854-1944), who was an advocate of the day-age theory. To Korean readers, Dawson argued that God created the world according to scientific laws throughout the long “geological ages.”36  

Likewise, Christian nationalists in Korea were not troubled by evolution, even after they accepted social Darwinism. Most notably, Syngman Rhee understood social Darwinism just as an explanation for the reality of international politics. Weaker countries, including Korea, could be plundered and looted by stronger countries. Yet this still did not prompt Rhee to question God’s role in the world, because it was obvious that Christian countries like Britain and America were much stronger than others pursuing Buddhism, Islam, or Confucianism.37 Far from contradicting science, Christianity was then the cause of success in the world of social Darwinism. From this point, Rhee construed that the best bet for Korea was to induce all its citizens to convert to Christianity as soon as possible. If all Koreans would become Christians, they could secure a mental and religious foundation for their 

modernization and industrialization.  

Rhee tried to implement this vision, when Korea was released from the Japanese Rule in 1945. As he was elected the first president of South Korea with the backing of the United States, he determined to build a “Christian state” following his religious and political conviction.38 Above all, he strengthened his ties with Protestant Christians in the Southern half of the peninsula by hiring a large number of Christians in his new administration. The proportion of Protestant Christians in his government was 38 percent among ministers and vice-ministers, and 47 percent among ministers, when less than 10 percent of South Koreans were churchgoers.39 He also assisted in launching Christian mass media, starting with 

Kukmin ilbo, the first Protestant daily newspaper in South Korea. Simultaneously, he designated Christmas as a public holiday, and settled down the formats of various state rituals in the Christian way, 

while appointing official chaplains in barracks and prisons.  

Indeed, Protestant Christians were highly empowered during this period. Some Presbyterians’ 

refusal to pay ritual homage to the Japanese shrines in the 1940s enhanced their nationalistic reputation after the liberation, as opposed to the Catholics who had conformed to the colonial master’s demands.40 

Korean Protestant organizations also became the medium connecting Koreans to American evangelical 

Christians who were eager to help their indigent fellows through their financial support and other means. To Rhee, this support was a valuable asset, as he had little resources under his command except for those supplied by Americans.41 Furthermore, after the Korean War—that had started with the North’s invasion in 1950—various Protestant groups worked for Koreans’ education and cared for people who lost their family amid the warfare, when Shamanism and Buddhism could do little for the devastated country’s reconstruction. As one of us (Cho) has argued elsewhere, Protestantism thus became a “model religion” in 

South Korea.42 According to Don Baker, Christianity, especially Protestantism, became the paradigm of 

“chonggyo,” whose practices and rituals were soon imitated by other aspiring religious groups. To be regarded as chonggyo tanch’e (religious organizations), they had to be similar to Christians by satisfying 

a set of conditions under an institutional framework, permitted and authorized by the state.43  

Protestantism was significant to the state in another sense. In the Cold War, South Korea 

occupied a strategic place in East Asia, facing the North as well as two communist superpowers, the 

Soviet Union and People’s Republic of China. Under these circumstances, Korean Protestant churches became a stronghold of anticommunism, a core ideology of South Korea as well as its patron, the United 

States. During Rhee’s regime, the Christian refugees from the communist North became eye witnesses to the political oppression under Kim Il Sung, the North Korean dictator. As the Korean sociologist Kang 

Inch’ŏl has shown, some of these people became successful South Korean businessmen constituting as large as 27 percent of South Korean chaebŏls in the early 1960s, while others spearheaded the Rhee government’s violent crackdown on communists in the peninsula.44 Although numerous civilian casualties during this quasi-military campaign—including more than thirty thousand deaths during the Cheju April Third Incident and other carnages like the Bodo League Massacre—tarnished their and 

Rhee’s reputation, there was little opposition under his authoritarian regime.45  

In this situation, Christianity became important in ordinary South Koreans’ everyday lives, too. 

A regular attendance to churches demonstrated that they were not communists, who tended to be atheists. Their church activities demonstrated that they did not follow Karl Marx and his condemnation of religion as “the opiate of the masses.” During the red hunt after the Korean War, the churches thus guaranteed at least a partial protection from unwarranted arrest, investigation, or even imprisonment. 

   

New nation with religion and science: Kim Joon Gon, anticommunism, and the developmental state 

 

Reverend Kim became a staunch anticommunist around this time. Born in Shinan, Chŏlla Province in 1925, he migrated to Mudanjiang, Manchuria, where he worked as an agricultural engineer and attended a local Korean church. In 1944, however, he returned to his hometown, because he did not want to be conscripted into the Kwantung Army of Manchukuo, the military force of Japan’s puppet state in Manchuria.46 Yet Japan, after their surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, was desperately searching for young people everywhere in its imperial territory, including Chŏlla Province. Although he initially tried to avoid the draft, he turned himself in to the army after finding that his father was already arrested because of him. But he never wished to die in the battlefield for the empire. He thus managed to escape to Machang, a northern city bordering the Soviet Union. He lived there for a year, but saw terrible atrocities, 

when the Russians crossed the border in 1945. He recollected, 

 

At last, three hundred Soviet soldiers came to the village, headed by a captain. Their job was to disarm the Japanese Army and spread communism. As I heard from imprisoned soldiers, however, they were literally beasts. Rape and pillage….they got drunk, and shot and raped whenever they wanted, like a horde of beats in a jungle. Deeply terrified, some women took off their dress by themselves and allowed the Russians to molest them. The Soviets hunted women and stole everything, wearing tens of watches 

around their wrists and carrying a sack full of large bread, salted pork, and mackerel.47 

 

Kim and his family eventually left the city and moved to the South. Their journey was dangerous, full of 

“rape and death.” But even in South Korea controlled by the United States, he could not find peace, because the Korean War soon broke out. During this war, the island where he stayed came to be ruled by communist partisans for three months. In this period, he painfully recalled, “my father, wife, and family members were all killed in front of me, and I myself was also waiting for death.”48 Although he fortunately escaped and survived, he became deeply grief-stricken, and doubted the existence of God. But Jesus miraculously called Kim in “the valley of death.” In a desperate situation, Kim’s belief in God became ever stronger after hearing His voice. Kim said, “I recalled my Savior—God heard my crying. As 

I looked upon my Savior on the cross, I renewed my fellowship with Him.”49 

This tale should be read with caution, considering the recent historiography on crimes and massacres committed by South Koreans and Americans, who might have been even more ruthless and violent during the Korean War.50 On the other hand, the Russians may have been less outrageous than 

what Kim described.51 Probably, Kim projected his current anticommunism to his recollection of the past. 

However, Kim’s account graphically illustrates the formation of his inner space: his motherland 

was colonized and invaded by foreigners. It also suffered a tragic civil war perpetrated by communist traitors, who befriended the beastly Russians. In order not to see the same national calamity again, Korea should be reunited and stronger, and the sole way to achieve this was to pursue anticommunism, nationalism, and Christianity, all under the sponsorship of the United States representing the ‘Free World’. With this grand aim in mind, he studied theology at the Presbyterian Seminary in Seoul and was ordained as a minister in 1951. He then went to America to pursue advanced education at Fuller Theological Seminary. There he met Bill Bright (1921-2003), who founded the Campus Crusade for Christ (CCC) at the University of California, Los Angeles in 1951. According to Bright, Reverend Kim learned that 

CCC’s “simple, basic message was the key that God could use to open the hearts of men.”52 Evangelizing young college students was important, because they were the very people who would rebuild and reunite the nation. Returning to Korea in 1958, Reverend Kim thus established the Korean Branch of CCC (KCCC) that became the institutional base of his ministry. 

Reverend Kim and his KCCC were highly successful, partly because the time was favorable. Indeed, he preached to a large number of young postwar baby boomers searching for their spiritual wellbeing during the rapid industrial growth. Starting with Kwangju and Daegu, Kim constructed a nationwide network of KCCC’s local chapters in the 1960s and the 1970s.53  

To his young audience, Kim could account for Korea’s troubles and their possible solutions from 

a Christian standpoint. In 1976, for example, he described Koreans’ past hardship in the Japanese concentration camp during the colonial era, and asserted that “God gives power to the nation to whom He entrusts His Gospel.”54 For example, he wrote, “the unification of Rome” was God’s “preparation for disseminating the Gospel.” Likewise, “the Britons colonized every country of the world,” because “God gave them a power to spread the Gospel.” Why, then, did Korea fail to become a country like Rome or 

Britain? Why was it utterly humiliated by foreigners in the twentieth century? The answer was obvious: Koreans stayed away from Christianity. The “evangelization of the ethnic nation” (minjok bokumhwa) was thus urgently necessary in order for Korea to join the league of the world’s leading powers.55 Every 

Korean must be Christian to save the ethnic nation (minjok).56 

The nationalist credential that Reverend Kim earned through this activity enabled him to start the National Prayer Breakfast in 1965. Although prayer meetings were occasionally held by some Christians in the Korean government as early as the late 1940s, it was Reverend Kim who started a more formal politico-religious event involving the head of the government.57 Initially, Kim heard about the 

“Presidential Prayer Breakfast” from Bill Bright, while studying at Fuller Seminary. Thinking that there should be a Korean counterpart to this event, Kim met several notables, including Kim Jong Pil, the founding chair of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency. According to Reverend Kim, they 

“wholeheartedly agreed” with this idea and gave him the list of Christian members of the National 

Assembly (NA), which included Kim Young Sam, who would become the fourteenth president of South Korea.58 Reverend Kim was also able to invite the big shot, President Park Chung Hee, after recruiting 

NA members. Surprisingly, Park “gladly accepted” Kim’s invitation. Although President Park did not come to the first event in 1965 due to some “unforeseen circumstances,” he attended the second meeting in 1966 along with 250 national elites, including members of NA, Christian ministers, and heads of major chaebŏls. Thereafter, Park kept attending the annual breakfast event (figure 1). 

 

<Figure 1> 

 

However, President Park and Reverend Kim had different experiences in the past. Most of all, Kim ran away from Manchuria, because he did not want to be conscripted into the Kwantung Army, while Park had been on the other side, serving the army as a lieutenant. This part of Park’s past led many Koreans to question his patriotism, but their voice was utterly silenced under his dictatorial regime.  

The rest of Park’s career was also entangled with problems that Christian nationalists like 

Reverend Kim would not like. After the Kwantung Army collapsed upon the end of the Second World War, Park returned to Korea as a military officer and joined the left-wing movement in the South, which resulted in his temporary imprisonment under Rhee’s anticommunist regime. Although Park was not yet known as a major political figure, most Christians, including refugees from the North, must have disapproved his further involvement in politics. Yet Park saw a great opportunity when Rhee stepped down after the Student Revolution in 1960. The ensuing political chaos under Chang Myŏn’s (1899-1966) incompetent administration prompted Park to stage a military coup in 1961 to become the dictator of South Korea, whose power became stronger after launching the 1972 Yushin Constitution, which made his regime virtually permanent. During these periods, some Christians were unhappy to see several 

Buddhists employed in Park’s administration.59  

 However, all these issues did not appear to trouble Kim, probably because his aims and ideals overlapped with those of Park. Like other anticommunist pastors like the Reverend Han Kyung-Chik (1902-2000), Reverend Kim eagerly championed the military government as the agency capable of controlling social chaos and modernizing the country under a charismatic leadership.60 Park’s regime was a means to realize Kim’s dream of national rebuilding and evangelization. Above all, Park, while hiring some Buddhists in his government, was also highly supportive of Protestant churches, because of their ardent anticommunist stance. Fearing political attacks on his leftist past, Park put forth strong anticommunism as the most important national agenda, which most churches strongly approved. Park also accepted Kim’s proposal to preach sermons regularly to military officers over the rank of lieutenant colonel, because Park agreed with Kim that the evangelization of the military would fortify its “mental armament” against infiltration of communist thoughts into the barracks.61  

Reverend Kim repeatedly expressed his anticommunism through his sermons during the 

National Prayer Breakfast that Park attended. In 1969, he said, “People tend to think that poverty causes communism.” But that was not true, because communism actually stemmed from “atheism and the materialistic way of thinking.”62 Yet this “materialistic way of thinking” had nothing to do with rich people and their pursuit for money in capitalist society. The rich became rich, because “God made their wealth.” The poor were poor, because they were “lazy.” One may wonder why almighty God let these poor people go lazy, but Kim, who probably believed in the Calvinistic Predestination theory, did not 

provide any clarification.  

Reverend Kim also offered a theological justification for his anticommunist state’s obsession, 

the export-led economic development. In effect, the promotion of export was the core part of President 

Park’s vision of a developmental state. Korea’s economic growth should be driven by its chaebŏl groups, which, under the patronage and guidance of the state, would produce and sell a continuing stream of 

merchandise in international markets. Considering this vision, Kim said, 

   

Korea, the country of Jesus and the holy people of the East, was blessed by devout prayers during the 

Cabinet meetings and other conferences discussing all affairs of the state…. the belief, honesty, and sincerity of this divine Korea shall guarantee even a screw spike or button sold in global markets, like a certified cheque.63 

   

This remark partly reflected the reality of the state. A major portion of South Korea’s business leaders were Christians, constituting 32 percent among the Korean chaebŏls in 1962.64 Forming a core part of the country’s elites—alongside those in the “Cabinet meetings” of the government—Korean Christians’ activities in the developmental state seemed to realize what Kim declared: “The Bible teaches that God blesses the body and soul of all conforming people or nations.”  

Koreans should conform not only to God, but also to Americans, because God now gave them a means to govern the world after the fall of the Romans and the Britons. “The United States of America,” Kim wrote, “is the country that can wield the greatest power in history.”65 But “what is the cause of this power?” He noted that their money had an answer, because their confession of faith—“In God We Trust”—was printed on every dollar note. To him, Americans were the power creating the modern civilization across the world, including Korea. He later asserted that American missionaries in Korea 

“built churches, hospitals, welfare institutions, and schools, and brought modernization, democracy, human rights, freedom, market economy, and the modern era itself.”66  

That science was missing in this long list of ‘America’s gift of modernity’ insinuates Reverend 

Kim’s ambiguous attitude toward it. He stated that “scientific truth, even if it is based on statistics, cannot explain everything and can never become the ultimate and final discovery.”67 During the 1970 National 

Prayer Breakfast, he also claimed that “humans learned the limitation of science through the Apollo 13 Incident.”68 While the science of the spacecraft totally failed, “the prayer of President Nixon and all 

Americans” eventually saved the astronauts. But Kim did not ignore the power of science, as he was deeply wary of its “stunning speed of growth” and moral implications. He wrote that he was concerned about the rumor of the “bio-factory” that someone might build in the future. He also said that “no area on the earth is free from the upheaval and challenge” brought through the rapid scientific development.69 To him, science was powerful, but was fundamentally limited at the same time. In any case, prayer was more powerful.  

Although there is no evidence that Park openly disagreed with Kim, Park’s view of science and technology was very different. Unlike Kim, Park was a “true believer in modern science.”70 While he was not favorable to all kinds of American influences, he was convinced that science and technology should be actively promoted with the patronage of the United States for Korea’s modernization and industrialization.71 During the Cold War, this conviction led him to cooperate with the United States federal government, which wanted to stop communists’ territorial ambition. For this purpose, Americans gave a substantial financial backing as well as education to South Koreans, as the country was the Far 

Eastern outpost of the capitalistic world. Under this situation, however, there emerged a problem: many South Korean scientists trained in the United States never returned, probably because poor research facility and dire funding situation in their country. To Park, this problem, so-called “brain drain,” pointed to another reason why the development of the nation’s scientific infrastructure was necessary.72 By creating an adequate research environment, Park had to facilitate the return of Korean scientists who should become “industrial fighters” (sanŏpch’ŏnsa) for the ethnic nation. 

For this purpose, Park built Korea’s institutional infrastructure of science and technology. Initially, even before his coup, the International Cooperation Administration within the United States federal government had implemented a “Minnesota Project” to retrain Seoul National University (SNU) professors in engineering, medicine, and agriculture.73 Upon the end of this project in 1962, Park, with grants and loans of the federal government and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), incorporated the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) in 1966. While KIST, by cooperating with chaebŏls like Hyundai or Samsung, was becoming a power house for Koreans’ industrial growth, Park launched another major institution. In 1971, he founded KAIS as a graduate school in science and technology and appointed a large number of American-trained scholars as the founding faculty members. After undergoing a series of reorganization, KAIS became KAIST, a major 

Korean research university.74 

Under the military dictator’s rule, these institutions represented what Seungsook Moon has called “militarized modernity.” As Moon has articulated, students at KAIS or KAIST—most of whom were male—were exempt from the military service under the “Military Service Special Cases Law,” but had to work in defense industries for three years after graduation.75 This law resulted from Park and his bureaucrats’ view that there was a close correlation between scientific modernity and military power. In this environment, the culture of science education was also militarized, as Dong-Won Kim and Stuart Leslie have mentioned. A KAIS alumnus recollected,  

 

After the entrance ceremony, we were “captured” by Prof. Park Song Bai and led to the laboratory: we were not allowed to greet our families or even to take photos. That very night we were forced to attend a seminar until 11 o’clock where our seniors presented their work, and Prof. Park gave us homework which was due the day after. When we were finally allowed to return to the dormitory after midnight, we wondered whether it was easier to go to the army. We usually went to bed around 2 or 3 a.m., and many students found themselves bleeding from the nose in the morning. After a year, we found that we really learned a lot….76 

 

This process of disciplining often accompanied scientists’ “apolitical stance.” As Kim has 

described, Korean scientists and engineers trained during the military regime remained apolitical on almost all matters of the state, as far as the government provided enough resources for their research.77 Of course, this stance did not mean that they were disengaged from the nation’s politics. They were faithful subjects of the nation and the key components of the developmental state’s growth engine, unlike scholars in other academic fields including the humanities, who had different opinions on Korea’s future.78 

It is difficult to know what Park, standing at the center of all these matters, would have thought about Reverend Kim when he hosted the 1980 World Evangelization Crusade (WEC), inviting several scientific creationists from America. Park might have perceived that these antievolutionists’ visit posed a threat to the state science he sponsored. However, evolutionary biology was not one of the major disciplines of the developmental state. The Park regime’s support focused on electrical, chemical, metallurgical, and mechanical engineering, together with some basic sciences related to these fields.79 As Sungook Hong has commented, when Park promoted the slogan, “A Country Built on Science” 

(kwahakipkuk), he actually meant a country built on technology (kisul), because science (kwahak) in 

Park’s era usually meant engineering disciplines.80 In any case, Park could not do anything about Kim’s event, because he was assassinated by one of his men on October 26, 1979.  

This incident obviously shocked Reverend Kim, but he saw an occasion for a further Christian 

activity in his death. In the next month, he said that “we saw a national upheaval when the ethnic nation is still suffering harsh ordeal.”81 Park’s death was a substantial loss to the nation, yet this implied that Korean Christians should try harder to evangelize the country. WEC was a great opportunity in this regard, because ordinary “elders, deacons, and their wives” in every church could demonstrate their ability to carry out their Christian mission in front of international participants.  

Kim’s invitation of American scientific creationists was a significant part of this event of 1980. 

As a fundamentalist skeptic on science, Kim came to know of the problems of evolution in the United 

States, and occasionally discussed them in his writings. For instance, one of his essays criticized “science textbooks,” which taught that “everything….was an accident rather than a product of intelligent design.”82 

He then asked, “Who pumps the heart and controls trillions of cells in the human body,” if there was no God. To him, evolutionism also encouraged sexual corruption, possibly thanks to its excessive attention to reproduction as a key factor. As it taught people that “sex is an instinct,” it furthered sexual debauchery that would encourage “nihilism, insomnia, global madness, and the mood for suicide.”83 Therefore, as he attempted evangelize every facet of Koreans’ lives during WEC, the problems of evolutionism must be addressed by experts, especially those invited from the United States.84 At that time, the American creationists welcomed Kim’s invitation, because they were already globalizing their mission.85 Hence, four scholars, including Morris, Duane Gish, Walter Bradley, and Charles Thaxton, came and held a meeting—titled, “The Origin of Life: Evolution or Creation?”—at KCCC’s main conference hall in Seoul from August 13 to 15. A number of Korean Christian scientists also attended the meeting, where they first saw the advocates of young-earth creationism that had not yet spread into the country.86 

That this conference eventually brought about the establishment of KACR does not mean that Reverend Kim would subsequently become the leader of antievolutionism in Korea. Learning scientific creationism from Americans, he certainly thought that evolutionism was a great menace to Koreans’ faith, but it never became a main subject of his own speeches and writings, in which he continued to deal with his usual topics, such as faith, morality, politics, and sexuality. Kim played a key role in starting scientific creationism in Korea, and kept working for it as a member of KACR’s advisory board. But the leadership had to be given to younger Christians with scientific credentials, who inherited only a part of Kim’s legacy. Kim Young-Gil, a KAIST professor, was one of them.  

 

Kim Young-Gil and the making of a Christian intellectual 

 

Kim Young-Gil was born in Andong, Korea in 1939.87 His family belonged to yangban, the 

traditional aristocratic class, ruling Korea based on their landownership as well as Confucian scholarship. 

Like his forebears, Kim’s father thus taught Confucian philosophy to his son. However, Young-Gil was more interested in science and technology. After finishing his high school education, he chose 

metallurgical engineering as his major, when he entered the College of Engineering at SNU.  

As Sungook Hong has shown, SNU’s College of Engineering produced young students 

acquiescing to the state. Unlike the College of Arts and Sciences in downtown Seoul, the College of Engineering was located in Kongrung-tong, a suburban district far from the city center. There, engineering students’ lives were considerably different from those of other SNU students, who enjoyed a vibrant intellectual life of the capital city that often encouraged political radicalism against the authoritarian government.88 Hence, alumni of SNU’s College of Engineering were similar to later KAIS or KAIST graduates, since both were expected to be apolitical and compliant. As Hong has mentioned, these engineers were often called in derogatory terms like “kongdori” (engineering boys), which could also mean low-paid factory workers.89 Their college itself was dubbed as “yushin kongdae” (the Yushin Engineering School), when its students did not join other SNU students’ protest against President Park’s Yushin Constitution.  

In a sense, both the faculty and students in the College of Engineering were far from what 

Koreans conventionally meant by the term, “chisigin” (literati or intellectuals).90 Korean engineers were not literati, because they were not considered able to, or at least not expected to, address presumably broader and deeper problems regarding morality, politics, and human relations, which were the traditional subjects of Confucian philosophy. Perhaps this may not look like a unique Korean problem, as a similar distinction between the humanities and the sciences can be found in Britain, described in Charles Percy Snow’s The Two Cultures (1959). But the Korean context was different. According to Yung Sik Kim, modern Korean engineers were thought to be the heirs of “chungin” (the middle people) in Chosŏn Korea.91 Just as the middle people dealt with practical matters rather than morals and politics that only yangban could handle, modern engineers were not supposed to intervene into problems of contemporary 

literati, mostly educated in liberal arts.  

Indeed, Kim Young-Gil was an exemplary engineering student under Park’s regime. When he came to America upon finishing his undergraduate education at SNU, he was a hard-working and dedicated young engineer, willing to contribute to the home country through his technical expertise without troubling himself with radical politics in downtown Seoul. As he later recalled, his ultimate aim at the time was to “learn world-class technology and apply his knowledge to actual problems at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), before returning to Korea.”92 In effect, he realized this aim, at least partly: after earning his master’s degree at the University of Missouri, he finished his doctoral training at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in just three years. He then worked briefly at the Ministry of Defense of the United States, before landing on his dream job at NASA in 1973. The problem was that he did not immediately return to Korea even after learning enough at NASA, partly 

due to his religion. 

Kim became a Christian during his training as an engineer. Initially, his fiancée urged him to go to church, as she said that she would not marry a nonbeliever. He had to comply, because his marriage was already arranged by his conservative parents. But he did not really believe in God even after his honeymoon. He, along with his wife, went to a nearby Korean church, but it was merely a place of meeting his countrymen and eating Korean foods. According to his autobiography, he could not understand the miracles described in the Bible, because these seemed scientifically impossible. However, his autobiography also stresses, he later became a very serious Christian, owing to two major factors. First, he came to join a prayer meeting in NASA, where he found a large number of scientists and engineers praying fervently to God. They obviously knew science well, but their scientific education did not appear to hinder their belief. Second, he came across Hal Lindsey’s The Liberation of Planet Earth (1974) in a local bookstore, which made him “see the spiritual world opening up before” him.93 Lindsey, an American evangelical, vividly illustrated the formation of his belief through his own life story. Kim was highly impressed by this uneducated American who, despite his birth in a Christian family, became a true 

Christian only after an accident that led him to end his obsession with “sex and booze.”94 Lindsey, a “born again believer,” then explained the nature of sin, propitiation, and redemption with easy analogies that persuaded Kim. In a sense, Kim also became a “born again believer,” because he truly embraced Christianity long after he had begun to go to church.  

Thereafter, Kim started to change, as his autobiography articulated. He realized the “aim of life 

and value of his existence” through Christ. In the church, he sang the hymn, “In the Name of Jesus,” while clapping loudly, full of joy. While praying, he also “sweat like a pig,” as he “entered an unfathomable spiritual world.”95 But more important in his spiritual awakening was his shifting selfidentification. In effect, he deliberately tried to depart from his past. As we have written, he had been educated in a Confucian family and earned his bachelor’s degree in engineering at yushin kongdae. But his Christian belief, he thought, changed his way of identifying himself. For example, Kim wrote that he had “learned the Confucian drinking etiquette from his father,” but his acceptance of Christianity prompted him to quit alcoholic beverages by “emptying out all his wine bottles into a sink,” because the 

Bible, he believed, forbade drunkenness. The Confucian father’s teaching became less important to the awakened Christian, even though the legacy of his past never completely disappeared. He also wrote that he was somehow “living a cut-and-dried life as an engineer,” in contrast to his emotional and compassionate wife. After his awakening, however, he and his wife could share their thoughts within their common belief. According to Kim, they were “truly united by finding Christ between” them. Yet what might be more striking than this change was a stereotype of engineers that he projected on his own life and his declaration of departure from it. He no longer lived a “cut-and-dried life,” although he was still an engineer. 

Kim identified himself as a different kind of engineer. First of all, he did not return to Korea, even though he already acquired sufficient engineering knowledge at NASA. Although the brain drain never ceased to be a problem to President Park, Kim chose to satisfy his own “desire of working at a company where he could apply his knowledge” rather than conforming to the state’s desire of facilitating economic growth after returning to Korea.96 Curiously, he wrote, his God came to assist in satisfying his personal desire at the right moment. When he was searching for a new job, he happened to meet a vice president of the International Nickel Company (INCO) during his NASA visit. Kim wrote that the vice president was impressed not just by his technical achievement but also his quasi-scientific explanation of the nature of the Trinity. When the vice president—who was also a Christian—asked how he could account for the Trinity, Kim explained, “Water’s molecular structure is H2O, but when it freezes it becomes solid ice. In room temperature, it turns into liquid water and when it evaporates, it becomes a gas or vapor.” Likewise, God had three different manifestations in the form of the Trinity. They might look different, but nevertheless belonged to the same deity. Fortunately, the vice president was quite happy with this answer and came to like him. Kim wrote that even though he was not entirely sure if this conversation was significant in his job application it “took place in [his] journey as a Christian.”97 INCO soon hired him as a researcher, in spite of the requirement for a permanent resident status of its employees. Then, the company even used its lawyers to submit a petition to the federal government. According to 

Kim, the petition claimed that “Dr. Kim’s return to Korea due to his visa issue means a loss to the United 

States.” Although it is unclear how much loss Americans could suffer because of his return, it is clear that Kim cared less about the loss to Korea that might be incurred because of his nonreturn.  

However, Kim did eventually return to Korea, but this still had little to do with concerns for the nation. After working at INCO for four years, he suffered “homesickness,” and wanted to save his parents and brothers who did not yet believe in Jesus Christ. He then prayed earnestly in the church to ask what 

God urged him to do. Replying to Kim, God suddenly told him using the mouth of a pastor in the church: 

“My beloved son, go….without hesitation. I have prepared the way for you.”98 In 1978, he thus returned to Korea as a faculty member in the materials engineering department at KAIST.  

As a KAIST professor, Kim met a number of Christian scientists who would later become the charter members of KACR. Initially, he joined a bible study group led by the Reverend Hah Yong-Jo (1946-2011), which included a number of future creationists, such as Noh Ch’ŏngku, Song Mansuk, Harriet Kim, and Kim Jung Wk.99 At KAIST, the metallurgist also found several junior scholars who would soon lead KACR—Suh Byung-Sun, Kwon Hyuk Sang, Chang Soon Heung, and Paul Yang.100 

When Reverend Kim and KCCC held the first Korean conference on scientific creationism during the World Evangelization Crusade (WEC) in 1980, many of these people showed up, and Kim Young-Gil 

himself delivered a speech. In the next year, they formally started KACR, with Kim as the first president.  

Kim’s leadership of the fledgling organization furthered the transformation of his self-

identification. He became a Christian intellectual, as he could now talk about broader issues beyond his narrow specialty. However, he initially hesitated when he was asked to speak as a Korean representative in the 1980 conference. When an assistant administrator of KCCC approached him on behalf of Reverend Kim, Kim Young-Gil refused to be a speaker, because he had no expertise in biology.101 When Kim finally accepted the invitation owing to KCCC’s persistent request, he was given “ten foreign books on creation and evolution,” which highly surprised him. To him, these books—written by American youngearth creationists at ICR—taught him the ‘scientific basis’ of God’s creation that he had not known of.102 During the conference, he accounted for several problems of evolutionism that these Americans had addressed, including its apparent violation of the second law of thermodynamics and the incomplete fossil records. He then asserted, “People say that science is the only hope that can solve numerous problems of humanity, yet there is a limitation.” Science could not explain the “reason for humans’ existence and moral problems.”103 

Thereafter, with his strong evangelical enthusiasm, Kim extensively discussed these “moral 

problems” related to evolutionism and “scientism.” In a short essay, he pointed to scientific fallacy of evolutionary biology and argued that it was morally wrong as well. To him, evolutionism encouraged 

“atheism, Nazism, racism, laissez-faire capitalism, imperialism, all sorts of pantheistic philosophies and religions, and pseudosciences.”104 He also wrote that the Scopes Trial in 1925 allowed for the 

“domination of evolutionary philosophy” that fostered “naturalism, humanism, socialism, and animalistic ethics.”105 But Kim was neither consistent nor original in putting forth these arguments. If scientism was wrong, how, then, could creationism rely on science to make it more trustworthy? How could evolutionism simultaneously promote humanism and Nazism, which should be very different? How were socialism and laissez-faire capitalism compatible to each other? Some people might even ask if the Bible could also sanction racism.106 In any case, none of these ideas were his own. Although he never cited the sources, his arguments were no different from what many American creationists had asserted since the early twentieth century.107  

However, a more important point was not what Kim achieved but what Kim thought about himself. After accepting young-earth creationism, he did not so much become anti-intellectual—as seen by most people who did not share his creed—as identified himself as an intellectual (chisigin), qualified to discuss all social, political, and philosophical problems, at least within his church and KACR.108 No matter what problems should be found in his remark, it implied that he became a scholar willing to discuss a topic that his fellow engineers in Korea might not like to talk about. He entered a discursive 

domain that had traditionally excluded technical experts.  

Kim’s shifting self-identification can also be found in his later publications. In his autobiography, he discussed the “historical changes of human thoughts” by synthesizing thermodynamics and intellectual history. Accompanying a figure illustrating these changes (figure 2), he reviewed ideas of major 

European philosophers, including Francis Bacon, Immanuel Kant, and Friedrich Nietzsche, whom 

ordinary Korean engineers might not feel confident to deal with. 

 

<Figure 2> 

 

From a paradise in Genesis, humanity consistently fell into ever deeper moral corruption with the ascendency of humanism, rationalism, and materialism, just as steadily increasing entropy furthered the degree of disorder in the universe. More recently, humanity conceived socialism and capitalism, which aggravated their difficulties. After Britain started the Industrial Revolution, the class strife became a serious social problem, and some people promoted socialism as a response, contributing further to the chaos. On this issue, Kim was not unbiased. Despite his earlier diatribe against “laissez-faire capitalism,” he appeared to favor capitalism over socialism. While he refrained from criticizing capitalism—especially that of his own country, whose growth relied on many underpaid workers’ backbreaking labor for long hours under unhealthy condition—he never hesitated to denounce socialism as a menace to human salvation, especially because it was fostered by evolutionism. He wrote, “Marx’s materialism was reinforced by the theory of evolution which was introduced by….Darwin.”109  

Kim thought that his role was crucial in this situation, as he explained through an image made up 

of the Chinese character standing for “engineering” (kong,工) (figure 3). 

 

<Figure 3> 

 

This character stood between the “entropic fall” and “syntropic restoration,” indicating that engineers like him should alter the course of human history.110 Although humanity continued to “fall” after Adam’s disobedience, engineers should stop this fall and place humans back to God’s “New World.” In this task, engineering somehow encompassed traditional Confucian virtues that he was familiar with, such as honesty, integrity, and knowledge, as well as a new buzzword, “globalization.” It is unclear how engineering could facilitate all these things, but this image depicted what he had in mind when he discussed what a “Christian leader” should be like.111 With an academic background in engineering, he became a Christian leader by fostering a new identity that filled his mental space formed in his childhood in a Confucian family but was left vacant after he became an engineer. Being a creationist and Christian intellectual, he fulfilled his Confucian father’s moral expectation, while remaining an engineer. His new identity made sense of his past and present. 

In this way, Kim Young-Gil became similar to Reverend Kim. Both were politically 

conservative and tried to offer a general solution to what they perceived as the social evil. In doing this, however, they did not care much about actual mechanisms of social problems, because they tried to find the cause of all troubles in bad ideologies or mysterious evil forces. In particular, the two Kims avoided tracing the complexity and dynamics in ideological confrontation between capitalism and communism in the twentieth century. To them, the confrontation was a consequence of either the inevitable increase of social entropy or the spread of materialism. The two Kims’ standpoint thus differed significantly from that of Korean champions of civil society, who struggled to build participatory democracy by 

concentrating on internal problems of industrial capitalism.112  

Despite this shared view, Kim Young-Gil was not entirely the same as Reverend Kim. Whereas Reverend Kim tried to reform the ethnic nation, Kim Young-Gil did not worry much about it. He certainly became politically motivated, as he fully embraced Christianity and creationism. He came to sympathize with the right-wing politics of conservative Korean Protestants like Reverend Kim. However, Kim Young-Gil did not mention any specific political figures or issues in Korea. Discussing socialism and capitalism in highly schematic terms, Kim’s politics was rather abstract without being rooted in the country’s situation in its modern history. In this regard, his earlier condemnation of “laissez-faire capitalism” and his later change of mind were very revealing, because most conservative Christians like Reverend Kim were more consistent on this matter. Although the political economy of the Korean developmental state was far from “laissez-faire capitalism,” few church ministers raised concerns about it due to their common hatred toward its perceived enemy, communism. As such, Kim Young-Gil’s political vision became personal rather than national, as his own political awakening was more important 

than the reality of his country.  

This dimension of Kim’s self-identification could also be seen in his responses to his critics. When his work for KACR began to provoke criticism, he drew on his academic resources to defend himself without referring to its nationalistic relevance. Indeed, Ha Tubong, an SNU biologist, claimed that “it is a serious illusion to regard creation as a scientific fact.”113 Likewise, Paek Kwangho criticized 

Kim by stressing that evolution was “an objective fact” supported by “numerous pieces of paleontological evidence.”114 At the time, Kim’s work for the association also prompted questions on his job as a KAIST professor, as it indicated that he did not spend his full time in scientific research for the ethnic nation, which was still taken for granted even after President Park’s death.115 Fortunately, he received a NASA 

Tech Briefs Award in 1981 for his contribution to NASA’s efforts to commercialize its space technology.116 To other KAIST professors, even this modest American award—which recognized any invention approved for publication in NASA’s official magazine, NASA Tech Briefs with a small cash prize—was a contribution to the nation’s glory, because it implied that a Korean’s work made an international impact.117 To Kim, however, it had nothing to do with such a nationalistic celebration. 

According to him, more important was the fact that “many journalists who had been critical of me….became supportive friends.”118 As many newspaper articles praised his achievement, he felt secure from the critiques of his digression from the role that he was supposed to play in the ethnic nation. 

Thereafter, Kim’s research continued, producing additional means for protecting him. He 

invented new alloys with interesting properties, which attracted the Korean engineers’ and politicians’ attention as a possible benefit to Korea’s export industry. He thus received the King Sejong Cultural Award in 1986 and became a “Scientist of the Year” in 1987.119 For him, however, the real significance of these awards was not found in his contribution to the country, but its side effect. Due to the awards, few questioned his scientific credentials. He thus wrote that his enemies were silenced, as “God placed medals on my shoulder.” Kim’s god took care of his own difficulties rather than his nation. 

In a sense, however, these attacks were not so much a real trouble that needed God’s help as the events revealing His true intention. In KACR’s Twenty-Year History (2001), Kim proudly described all the critical comments and KACR’s responses in a section titled “Nonjaengdŭl” (debates), as if there were actual scientific controversies between two expert groups advocating equivalent theories.120 He believed that God led him and other creationists to participate in serious academic debates, which would contribute to letting the public know of creationism. As such, Kim did not think that he and his colleagues were scientifically discredited by their critics, just as the public criticism on creationism broadcast in the United States during the 1960s even furthered its spread.121 Perhaps some evangelical Christians might have seriously considered creationism, but more important was that Kim himself reconfirmed his identity 

as a learned guardian of faith. 

Seen from this angle, Kim’s career and shifting identity was an exemplar of the impact of creationism. Starting from an engineering student under Park’s military regime, he transformed himself into a member of Christian literati, who would supposedly make a central contribution to saving the world from corruption and debauchery. Apparently, his efforts were similar to those of natural scientists in Victorian Britain, who—as Frank Turner has shown—promoted the conflict between religion and science as a means to establish themselves as new cultural authorities.122 However, while the Victorian British scientists provoked the conflict as a way to secure their cultural identity as secular intellectuals, Kim aroused controversy from the side of creationism during his changing self-identification into a Christian intellectual. Other creationists’ lives were similar, but not entirely the same. 

 

Environmentalism and creationism: Kim Jung Wk as a Christian civil activist 

 

KACR’s growth is geared to the cooperation of conservative Korean megachurches and their leading pastors who shared their political and evangelical outlook with Reverend Kim. Among them, Reverend Hah and his Onnuri Church were highly important, as they provided both financial and institutional support for creationism. Offering monetary assistance to KACR, Onnuri Church also hosted a number of KACR’s meetings and prompted some of its believers to become active leaders, including Jeong Kye-Heon (fourth president) and Lee Eunil (sixth president).123 Other major churches and their ministers also welcomed creationism, as they were advocates of literalism.124 In particular, the cooperation of major Protestant leaders, such as Han Kyung-Chik and David Yonggi Cho, in KACR’s board of trustees was significant in legitimating creationism in Korean churches.125  

Yet Korean creationists with scientific backgrounds were not entirely the same as these pastors. Experiencing identity change at a critical period of their lives, many, if not most, of these creationists came to live different lives with distinct identities as literati. During this change, some of them became different from their anticommunist pastors who still supported Korea’s conservative government.   

Kim Jung Wk’s career is a pertinent case illustrating this change. During his youth, he recalled, he was a smart yet conceited boy, since his exam scores were always outstanding.126 He thus entered SNU with little trouble and studied environmental engineering in the Graduate School at the University of 

Texas. In 1977, he successfully finished all his education and returned to Korea as a researcher at KIST. 

At the same time, he became a Christian after marrying a Christian woman, and joined KACR through 

Kim Young-Gil’s ministry in KIST and KAIST. However, Kim Jung Wk recollected that he, at the time, did not change much: he still had a very secular outlook and was deeply arrogant. He was confident that he just “finished the basics of life, and was ready to be famous and earn money.” The problem was that the life at KIST, with its strict staff hierarchy, was never easy to this arrogant young man. According to him, he failed to curry favor with his boss, although he kept publishing important papers in major journals. He wrote, 

 

I came to know that my hard work was not properly compensated for. Exploding in anger, I asked [to my boss] why he was ignoring such a capable and sincere man as me. I also made a petition and tried to find a new job, but all these efforts got nowhere. The harder I tried to do so, the more severe my pain became.127  

 

When the boss finally attempted to lay off Kim, he met the pastor in his church, and made this promise: 

“if God really exists, He should show up before me, and I will pray hard for six months.” He also wrote, 

“Of course, I did not believe in the power of prayer, so I did everything possible while praying to God.” 

Miraculously, he wrote, God listened to this skeptical man, and led him to get a new post at SNU’s Graduate School of Environmental Studies in 1982. Thereafter, he became not only a real Christian but also a critic. He now projected his former self to science as a whole, as he claimed that science should not be arrogant. As he had done, people tended to worship science like “an idol” and expect that it would enable men to cope with all their problems. But he now thought that science could “not reveal the essence” of important matters. It could always fail, as his former self as well as Darwinism exemplified.  

This awareness transformed him into a Christian environmental activist. In a sense, this was a 

reflection of his field. However, he stressed, not all environmental engineers would become environmental activists. Since few of his SNU colleagues became activists like him, it was his spiritual awakening rather than his discipline that prompted him to criticize the government’s civil engineering projects that appeared to destroy “the order of God’s creation.” Denouncing the country’s 

developmentalism since President Park, he indeed argued that Koreans “ignored environmental problems owing to their obsession with economic growth” and blamed environmentalism as “treason.”128 The worst one among all governmental projects was probably the nuclear program initiated by Presidents Rhee and 

Park, as it could irreversibly destroy nature created by Him. The Saeman’gŭm Project (1991-2010) also exerted a highly destructive influence on the ecosystem in the mudflat facing the Yellow Sea. Yet this activity prompted the government to label Kim as a troublesome intellectual. He painfully recalled that his lectures were often under police surveillance.129 Undaunted, he became a leader of the Christian Alliance for Environmental Movement (CAEM) in Korea, and became similar to left-wing political 

activists, whom most conservative evangelical pastors in the country condemned. 

Kim’s activities illustrate a correspondence between environmentalism and young-earth 

creationism, which was far stronger in Korea than the United States. Inspired probably by Kim, several leaders in KACR stressed the significance of environment as a product of God’s creation in six days. Kim Young-Gil, for example, discussed the importance of “the ecosystem and the creation order,” threatened by humans’ unbridled exploitation.130 CSEH also had some panels illustrating environmental problems, including the 2007 T’aean Oil Spill Incident, caused by a ship collision on the Yellow Sea. The theory of the young earth stressed in other parts of the hall showed how closely the concerns on environment were interlaced with KACR’s main agenda as well as the standpoint of the member who primarily contributed to establishing this relation. Indeed, Kim Jung Wk rejected geological uniformitarianism and questioned the validity of radiocarbon dating, while stating his view that the earth was probably created between 

7,000 and 12,000 years ago.131  

But the promotion of environmentalism using creationism was not very convincing to some. Most of all, the Korean theologian Shin Jae-Shik wondered how scientific creationists could ever contribute anything to protecting nature if their God was so almighty.132 Wasn’t their God able to eliminate all sorts of pollution in less than a minute, just as He had created the world in just six days? If 

this miraculous restoration ever occurred, would all human efforts become irrelevant? 

To Kim Jung Wk, however, his self-identification and motivation were more important than this 

theological problem. He identified himself as a chisigin, as his recent book illustrates: Na nŭn pandaehanda (I oppose, 2010) reveals his firm determination to promote his own voice as a learned critic of Korea’s developmental state. Attacking the controversial project of “Four Major River Restoration” (2008-2012) spurred by President Lee Myung-bak, a conservative politician, Kim claimed that this project would totally disrupt the natural balance of the rivers’ wildlife. Lee’s project was deeply sinister, since the rivers were the products of God’s careful design. Obviously, Kim’s deity designed two important things—the beautiful natural world and his own identity and career as a Christian intellectual. 

Since both were threatened by the state, he had to struggle hard. 

 

Creationism and the history of science in Paul Yang’s career 

 

Paul Yang’s career illustrated a more dramatic change. As a physicist trained at KAIST, Yang was one of the earliest members of KACR. Together with Kim Young-Gil, Kim Jung Wk, and Song Mansuk, he was the most active lecturer in the association. He delivered his speech almost everywhere around the country, including churches, secondary schools, technical colleges, universities, and even governmental research institutes.133 At the same time, he, along with other KACR members, coauthored several major books on creationism, including Chinhwa nŭn kwahakchŏk sasilinka? (Is Evolution a Scientific Fact?, 1981) and Chayŏnkwahak (Natural Science, 1990). Moreover, he frequently contributed 

his articles to Ch’angjo (Creation), the official journal of KACR.  

Significantly, these writings illustrated his view of science and religion based on his study of the 

history of science, which began with his acceptance of scientific creationism in the early 1980s. 

According to his own recollection, Yang’s interest in the historical dimensions of science led him to think that “science is not value-free.”134 Initially, he read Hendrik van Riessen’s The Christian Approach to Science (1960) after defending his doctoral dissertation at KAIST in December, 1982. The book prompted him to think that in science there were certain important factors that lay behind observation and experimentation, and among these factors, Christianity appeared the most significant. He soon read other well-known monographs, including Herbert Butterfield’s The Origins of Modern Science (1949) and Stephen Finney Mason’s A History of the Sciences (1962). But perhaps the most impressive book to him was Reijer Hooykaas’s Religion and the Rise of Modern Science (1972). Yang absorbed Hooykaas’s argument that Christianity played a crucial role in the birth of modern science during the Scientific 

Revolution. From Hooykaas’s book, Yang learned that the Europeans’ empirical approach to nature stemmed from their religion, which eventually led them to overcome Aristotelian rationalism to seek empirical evidence for God’s handiwork in nature.135 To Yang, Hooykaas explained why modern science was born in Europe despite its persistent persecution of “unorthodox” sciences, such as the heliocentric astronomy of Galileo Galilei. Modern science was a product of the European civilization with its longstanding Christian values. 

However, more important to him was the relevance of this past to the contemporary world. If Christianity was so significant in securing the methodological and epistemological foundation of modern science in the seventeenth century, then it would be equally vital for the contemporary sciences. Among them, scientific creationism was the most successful, because it fully embraced Christianity as its core 

value.  

Yang wrote several papers to propound this idea. He defended young-earth creationism, which, he thought, could be demonstrated through current scientific methods. All other theories were wrong, including the gap and day-age theories. He stated that the gap theory was conceived to make the Genesis creation story compatible with the long history of the cosmos stipulated by contemporary astronomers. 

However, he claimed, these astronomers’ estimation of the age of the cosmos was based on a set of questionable assumptions that he did not detail. To him, there were also many pieces of evidence for the young earth, which failed to be accepted in academia due to their conflict with evolutionism. Likewise, he criticized the day-age theory. Yang asserted that it seemed right to interpret a day in the Bible as an actual day, because this interpretation was “biblically acceptable and scientifically unproblematic.”136 Theistic evolutionism was similarly wrong, since it could not account for humans’ depravation and expiation, which were the main themes in the Book of Genesis.  

But this standpoint could entail a question: was Yang not supposed to follow experimental 

protocols rather than the Scriptures in his own laboratory work? To what extent was his research Christian, and how did this Christian dimension affect its validity? Not surprisingly, he did not seem to worry much about these questions. As he was already a devout Christian, his exploration into the Christian foundation of science in both history and the contemporary world allowed him to harmonize his activities in laboratory and church. Moreover, he later stated, his awareness of the historical role of Christianity in scientific growth enabled him to approach the problem in a different way. He said that he could avoid the “idolatry of science” through the history of science, which was a “story of humans rather than that of cold-blooded machines.”137 As he viewed science as a construct of “humans,” its cultural, philosophical, and religious complications became manifest.  

Since Yang found the problems in science as a cultural activity, he recognized the culture of contemporary Korean churches as another problem, which originated from their “dualism.” He wrote that the churches’ dualistic standpoint led believers to separate their Christian activities from their quotidian lives. Consequently, they tended to focus on the one while neglecting the other. A typical example of this separation was found among those who virtually “abandoned their Christian viewpoint and became nominal believer,” as they faced severe competition and complicated human relations in their workplaces. On the other hand, many churches were interested only in “increasing the number of believers, purchasing church buses, and extending their buildings” rather than a well-rounded education of all believers and a broader understanding of God’s world.138 In this situation, some Christian students were excessively engrossed in their missionary work, even though they were failing in their schools. Furthermore, most churches “defined their mission so narrowly that they emphasized only individuals’ redemption of their souls, but did not have a proper understanding of humanity and society” as a whole.  

In this argument, Yang identified himself as a radical commentator on Korean Protestant churches. He recognized the multiple problems of major megachurches and wanted to do something as a Christian critic. For him, many, if not most, Korean Protestant churches were obsessed with external growth and failed to lead their believers to have a more comprehensive outlook on the role of Christianity 

in broader social contexts. 

Overall, however, Yang remained conservative, as he articulated in his paper, “The Illegitimate 

Children of Evolutionism.” This paper denounced a number of politicians and political theorists, whom he thought were heavily influenced by evolutionary ideas, including Adolf Hitler, Karl Marx, and Vladimir Lenin.139 The target of his criticism did not exclude less radical thinkers and literary figures, such as Sidney and Beatrice Webb, John Maynard Keynes, and George Bernard Shaw. Associated with social Darwinism, these people—Yang claimed—were all materialists championing the view that power and competition were the fundamental principles of organizing society. They extended the rationale of 

Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection to entire society by assuming that the struggle for existence was the only valid force in nature. Yang asserted that Korean Christians should stay away from their 

antibiblical ideologies.  

This remark reveals that Yang did a job that only nationalists—rather than anybody in the 

nascent scientific community—did in the formative phase of the Korean nation, namely, a critical engagement with social Darwinism. Admittedly, Yang did not have an accurate historical understanding of social Darwinism, whose nature, impact, and even reality have been controversial.140 Moreover, Yang, like Kim Young-Gil, was not very original, since he merely reiterated American creationists’ longstanding critiques on social Darwinism. However, he proposed an idea on a topic that had concerned nationalists many years ago but declined as a discursive subject after Korea regained its sovereignty.141 Notably, he then placed social Darwinism in a different context. While the nationalists had grappled with social Darwinism with a deep concern over their nation, he flatly rejected it due to its moral implication. Furthermore, he totally ignored the nationalistic meanings in Koreans’ social Darwinism. The reason why social Darwinism was bad should be found not in its relation to the ethnic nation, but its influence on each 

churchgoer.  

With all these ideas, Yang became much more than what he was supposed to be through his 

training at KAIST. Rather than a technocrat, he became a conservative intellectual, qualified to comment on a broad array of topics, including history, philosophy, church activities, and science education. Most of all, he taught scientific creationism in the College of Humanities at Kyungpook National University, which had initially hired him as a physics professor.142 He also introduced a history of science course at the same university, with his strong belief that a historical perspective would be useful for broadening students’ understanding of science. With this belief, he later edited and published Kwahaksa wa kwahakkyoyuk (History of Science and Science Education, 1996), which compiled several Korean experts’ works on the value of historical lessons in scientific training.   

But the most important turning point in Yang’s career was his establishment of the Vancouver Institute for Evangelical Worldview (VIEW) in Canada. Initially, he wanted to broaden his activity beyond the discipline of physics, and tried to create a graduate school for a new kind of Christian education in Korea. However, he found that most Korean Christian universities were too conservative to consider his plan. Hence, he approached other schools outside of the country, including the Trinity 

Western University in Canada, which agreed to cooperate with him in establishing VIEW. Leaving 

Kyungpook National University in 1997, he thus quit his work in physics altogether to become VIEW’s first president and professor in charge of various courses, including creationism, history of science, and the “foundation of evangelical worldview.” Interestingly, most of his students at this school were Koreans, although the school awarded Canadian university degrees. 

However, Yang’s transforming identity ultimately led him to modify his original creationist 

creed. For this change of mind, his work in the history of science played a vital role again. Indeed, he kept studying the history of science, while continuing his activities for KACR. He met a number of Korean historians and even became a regular member of the Korean History of Science Society. But he realized that he needed to learn more through a more formal education, preferably in the United States. This was the reason that he went to the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1990, where he earned his master’s degree under the tutelage of Ronald Numbers. According to Yang, he and Numbers had different views of creationism, but he successfully finished his thesis—which dealt with American creationists’ debate on radiocarbon dating during the 1950s—possibly because he then studied history, not science.143 Yet this history did make an impact on his science: although he initially “chose the topic on radiocarbon dating to demonstrate that it was nonsense,” his close reading of the relevant literature prompted him to realize that he did not know enough.144 Henceforth, he decided to scrutinize scientific evidence by himself, especially after establishing his new school in Vancouver. But all his efforts showed that his previous belief could not be substantiated. After a long and painful deliberation, he thus determined to give up Henry Morris’s theory based on his flood geology, which remained orthodox in KACR.  

Yang proposed a new theory by appropriating the French naturalist George Cuvier’s (1769-1832) 

old idea, which he called the “Theory of Multiple Catastrophe.” By interpreting Cuvier’s theory in Biblical terms, Yang claimed that continued catastrophes were the means that God employed in His creation. He created new species after each instance of repetitive destructions, among which the Genesis Flood was the most recent one. Postulating the earth’s long history as well as many catastrophes, this theory, Yang asserted, had an advantage of explaining the data from the radiocarbon dating as well as the records of the Bible.145    

Yang’s theory did not please other KACR members. He discussed his theory in front of 

scientific creationists as well as lay Christians, but it led them to suspect that another serious heresy appeared within the association. While tolerating Yang’s argument for a while, KACR decided to reconfirm its members’ allegiance to young-earth creationism by circulating a “form of declaration” among them.146 Probably based on the result of this declaration, KACR notified him that he should be discharged unless he would immediately retract his theory. According to Yang, KACR wrote to him that he exerted a “very negative influence on KACR and substantially damaged their honor.”147 But he said that his theory, like other scientific theories, could be subject to rigorous testing. If anybody should find that it failed to account for empirical evidence, he would discard it at any time. Unfortunately, KACR did not want to do anything about it. In September, 2008, Yang left KACR, which had occupied “a crucial part of [his] life” for thirty years, from his twenties to fifties.  

This episode reveals an irony. In the early 1980s, Yang embraced scientific creationism and the 

history of science almost at the same time. Thereafter, his historical study of science bolstered his belief in creationism and assisted in his transformation into a conservative Christian intellectual. However, his historical perspective also led to his ultimate rejection of the orthodox theory of KACR, which henceforth 

had to lay him off. 

 

Conclusion 

 

How can we explain the rise of creationism in Korea? Korea appears to have established its 

scientific institutions, but it has simultaneously come to have a sizeable group of scientific creationists who deny one of the core theories of contemporary science. This may look curious, because Korea has never been a Christian country. However, evangelical Protestantism was highly important in Korea’s nation-building since the late nineteenth century, and the roles of Protestantism in the country can account for why creationism, with its origin in American evangelicalism, proliferated. Indeed, creationism started when four American creationists were invited in 1980 by Reverend Kim, a conservative evangelical pastor and fervent nationalist. Thereafter, creationism steadily grew in Korea with the support of its Protestant churches.  

Yet this paper uncovers another facet of this phenomenon. While creationism initially came to 

Korea through Reverend Kim, KACR’s scientists and engineers thereafter became its leading figures. 

Unlike Reverend Kim, the creationists with scientific backgrounds distanced themselves from the state. Creationism guided them, when their desire did not tally with that of the state, which managed both religion and science in the country. To KACR members, creationism should be ‘scientific,’ because it could then entitle them to contribute to their Christian communities as technical experts. Simultaneously, creationism prompted them to cope with their limitations as technical experts and forging their new identities. In a sense, these creationists were not anti-intellectual, as some critics argued.148 Despite all their attempts at denying the conventional rules in contemporary scientific communities, they became intellectuals, at least from their own perspective and within their own Christian organizations and 

institutions, such as KACR, VIEW, CAEM, and Onnuri Church.  

Of course, the creationists were all different. Although all the early regular members of KACR had to have a “master’s degree or higher” in science and technology, they differed from one another due to their distinct education, career, and social experiences.149 Among the people we have reviewed, Kim 

Jung Wk’s liberal civil activism was poles apart from Kim Young-Gil’s conservative evangelicalism. 

Yang’s interest in the history of science led him to develop his own creation theory rejected by other KACR members. The few women in KACR—whom we will deal with in another paper—also had 

different experiences. On the one hand, they remained minorities in the conservative Christian organization. On the other hand, they successfully negotiated their roles in KACR, which happened to make leeway for some women to become active leaders.150  

However, we claim, there were certain experiences shared by at least some major members in KACR. They forged their new roles and identities in a developmental state, whose structures and imperatives never discontinued despite a substantial modification after 1980.151 They also became at least partially different from leaders in many conservative Korean Protestant churches, which supported the state’s conservative politics.152 We thus think that their stories can partly explain why it has been so hard to dismantle creationism in Korea. In spite of many scholars’ continuing attacks on its logical fallacy and narrow religious purview, creationism not only survived but also flourished in the country, because it 

gave its believers what their state did not offer.  

 

1 Kim Young-Gil, “Looking Back on the Ministry of Creation Science for Twenty Years,” in Twenty-Year History of the Korean Association for Creation Research (Seoul: KACR, 2001), pp. 55-76, 56. In this paper, we follow the usual East Asian order in writing names, with the last name first, followed by given names. We also use the rules of McCune–Reischauer romanization. Exceptions are the names of people who are internationally known (including authors of works in English) and those who consistently used their own spelling and style in writing their names.  

2 Ronald L. Numbers, The Creationists: From Scientific Creationism to Intelligent Design (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006), p. 418. 

3 “The Era of God and Darwin,” EBS Docuprime, 9 March 2009; Soo Bin Park, “South Korea Surrenders to Creationist Demands,” Nature 486 (2012): 14. 

 

4 In a 2005 survey, 32 percent in Greece and 51 percent in Turkey denied human evolution. Of course, this survey may not be entirely comparable to the 2009 Korean survey, due to differences in survey wordings and sampling method. Stefaan Blancke, Hans Hjermitslev, and Peter Kjærgaard, “Creationism in Europe or European Creationism?,” in Stefaan Blancke, Hans Hjermitslev, and Peter Kjærgaard (eds.) Creationism in Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), pp. 1-14, 7.  

5 Inquiry on 16 December 2016. The society has a total of 544 professional members. The count includes only those with doctoral degrees. 

6 “Era of God” (note 3).  

7 Kim Joon Gon, interview, 29 September 2009. 

<http://www.kacr.or.kr/library/itemview.asp?no=3238&type=C&authorname=%C0%AF%C1%BE%C8 %A3&category=K02&orderby_1=subject&page=4> (5 August 2016). Also see Kim Young-Gil, See the Invisible, Change the World (Maitland, FL: Xulon Press, 2006), p. 43. 

8 Shin Jae-Shik, Kim Yunseong, and Jang Dayk, Religion War (Seoul: Science Books, 2013), p. 384. 

9 Email from Choe, 9 August 2016. 

10 Soon Bin Park, “Science Wins over Creationism in South Korea,” Nature, 6 September 2012. 11 See Meredith Woo-Cumings, “Introduction,” in Meredith Woo-Cumings (ed.) The Developmental State (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), pp. 1-31. 

12 On Japan, see Chalmers Johnson, MITI and the Japanese Miracle (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 

1982). On Taiwan, see J. Megan Greene, The Origins of the Developmental State in Taiwan (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008). On South Korea, see Jung-en Woo, Race to the Swift (New York: 

Columbia University Press, 1991). 

13 Sheila Jasanoff and Sang-Hyun Kim, “Containing the Atom: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and Nuclear 

Power in the United States and South Korea,” Minerva 47 (2009): 119-46; Sheila Jasanoff and SangHyun Kim (eds.), Dreamscapes of Modernity: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the Fabrication of Power 

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 

14 Dong-Won Kim and Stuart W. Leslie, “Winning Markets or Winning Nobel Prizes? KAIST and the Challenges of Late Industrialization,” Osiris 13 (1998): 154-85. 

15 Jang Suk-Man, “A Historical Study of the Concept of ‘Chong Kyo’ in the Modern Korean Society,” Ph.D. Dissertation, Seoul National University, 1991. 

16 Numbers, The Creationists; Edward J. Larson, Trial and Error: The American Controversy over Creation and Evolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate over Science and Religion (New York: Basic Books, 2006).  

17 Jeffrey Moran, “Reading Race into the Scopes Trial,” Journal of American History 90 (2003): 891-911; 

Constance Clark, “Evolution for John Doe,” Journal of American History 87 (2001): 1275-303; Jon 

Roberts, “Conservative Evangelicals and Science Education in American Colleges and Universities, 

1890-1940,” Journal of the Historical Society 3 (2005): 297-329. See also Amanda Rees, “The Undead 

Darwin: Iconic Narrative, Scientific Controversy, and the History of Science,” History of Science 47 (2009): 445-57, 448-51. 

18 From America, Koreans also imported intelligent design creationism, when the Korean Research 

Association for Intelligent Design was established in 2004. Yet this association remained marginal among Korean creationists. With its young-earth creationism, KACR continued to be the mainstream creationist organization, probably reflecting strict literalism espoused in a majority of the Korean Protestant churches. 

For the Korean intelligent design movement, see Kim Sŏngchŏl, “Those Following Noah’s Belief,” in Twenty-Year History, pp. 308-19.  

19 Simon Coleman and Leslie Carlin (eds.), The Cultures of Creationism (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004); 

Stefaan Blancke, Hans Hjermitslev, and Peter Kjærgaard, “Creationism in Europe” (note 4). See also 

Peter Bowler, Reconciling Science and Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Ralph O’Connor, “Young-Earth Creationists in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain? Towards a Reassessment of 

‘Scriptural Geology’,” History of Science 45 (2007): 357-403.   

20 Kim Young-Gil, Syntropy Drama: From Entropy to Syntropy (Seoul: Duranno, 2014), p. 82. 

21 “Announcement of Executives,” Ch’angjo 1 (1981): 2; “Introduction to KRACS,” Ch’angjo 82 (1992): 

8. 

22 “CSEH’s Relocation: A New Step,” Ch’angjo 132 (2002): 54-5. In 2010, CSEH moved out due to the faculty protest. 

23 Numbers, The Creationists, pp. 13-4. 

24 Ch’oe Chongwŏn, Syngman Rhee’s Reception of Christianity and His Theory for a Christian State (Seoul: Booklab, 2014), pp. 94-9; Jung Byung Joon, A Study of Syngman Rhee (Seoul: Yŏksa bip’yŏngsa, 2005), pp. 87-91.   

25 Pak Sangyun, “Reception of Darwinism in Korea,” Hankuk kwahaksa hakhoechi 4 (1982): 145-6; Yi 

Sŏng Kyu, “Reception of Evolutionism in Korea and Japan,” Kwahak kwa kisul, October 1991.   

26 For social Darwinism in Korea from the 1890s to the 1940s, see Andre Schmid, Korea between 

Empires (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), p. 183; Rune Svarverud, “Social Darwinism and 

China’s Relationship with Korea and Japan in the Late 19th and Early 20th Century,” International Journal of Korean History 2 (2001): 99-122; Ch’oe Kiyŏng, “Social Darwinism,” Hankuksa simin kangchua 25 (1999): 23-40; Pak Ch’ansŭng, “The Characteristics and Influence of Social Darwinism in the Late Chosŏn Dynasty and the Japanese Colonial Rule,” Yŏksa bip’yŏng 32 (1996): 339-54. 

27 Sung Ho Kim and Whi Chang, “Making of a Korean Patriot,” Journal of American Studies [Miguk’angnonjip] 31 (2005): 95-130; Her Dong-Hyun, “Forms of Acceptance of Social Darwinism by the Korean Progressives of 1880s—on the Materials of Yu Giljun and Yun Ch’iho,” Sachong 55 (2002): 

169-93, 176-82.   

28 Pak Ŭnsik, Ch’ŏnkaesomunchŏn and Mongpaekŭmt’aecho (Seoul: Koryŏsŏchŭk, 1989), p. 132. This is a reprint of the original text of 1911. 

29 This partly reflects the immense popularity of Spencer in Japan, where many Korean intellectuals studied. See Yi, “Reception of Evolutionism” (note 25). For Korean nationalists’ discussion on Spencer, see Yu Kilchun, Sŏyukyŏnmun (1895), reprinted as Yukilchun chŏnsŏ, vol. 1 (Seoul: Ilchokak, 1971), p. 

352; “Kamhwap’yŏn,” Taehan chakanghoewŏlpo 1 (1906), pp. 18-26, 20. 

30 The earliest article we found is Kang Sŭngok, “Theories on the Formation of Animal Species,” Kongsuhakpo 2 (1907): 30-1. 

31 J. Michael Allen, “Ambivalent Social Darwinism in Korea,” International Journal of Korean History 2 (2001): 1-24. 

32 “Science and Religion,” Kidok shinbo, 11 April 1926. 

33 “Debates on Teaching Darwinian Evolution,” Chosun ilbo, 23 July 1925. 

34 “Science and Religion” (note 32). 

35 “Belief Seen from Science,” Kidok shinbo, 6 January 1926; Numbers, The Creationists, pp. 55-87. 

36 William Bell Dawson, The Bible Confirmed by Science, trans. into Korean by Oh Chun Young (Seoul: 

Christian Literature Society of Korea, 1936), pp. 37, 115; Numbers, The Creationists, p. 131.  

37 Ch’oe, Syngman Rhee’s Reception of Christianity, pp. 147-9; Jung, Study of Syngman Rhee, pp. 106-11. 

38 For his pro-Christian policies, see Ch’oe, Syngman Rhee’s Reception of Christianity, pp. 221-7. 

39 Ch’oe, Syngman Rhee’s Reception of Christianity, p. 225. 

40 Don Baker, “The Transformation of the Catholic Church in Korea,” Journal of Korean Religion 4 (2013): 11-42, 17. 

41 Gregg Brazinsky, Nation Building in South Korea (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), pp. 13-4, 38-9. 

42 Kyuhoon Cho, “Another Christian Right? The Politicization of Korean Protestantism in Contemporary Global Society,” Social Compass 61 (2014): 310-27, 314-5. 

43 Don Baker, “A Slippery, Changing Concept: How Korean New Religions Define Religion,” Journal of 

Korean Religion 1 (2010): 57-84, 61-4; Korean Spirituality (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 

2008), p. 5; Jang, “Historical Study,” p. 97 (note 15). 

44 Kang Inch’ŏl, Protestant Churches and Anticommunism in Korea (Seoul: Chungshim, 2007), pp. 516, 

543.  

45 The April Third Incident was the genocide in the Cheju Island that took place from 1948 to 1954. Under the banner of wiping out the leftist guerrillas in the island, the South Korean armed forces, alongside the refugees from the North, ended up killing more than 10 percent of the island’s civilians until the end of the Korean War. The Bodo League Massacre was a similar anti-communist genocide that started by Rhee’s order of the execution of members of the Bodo League, created for converting former communists and possible sympathizers before the Korean War. With the outbreak of the war, Rhee, fearing a possible insurgency by the members, ordered a rapid execution that led to a massacre of numerous people, including those who joined the league due to the government’s food rations without any relation to communism. See Hun Joon Kim, The Massacres at Mt. Halla (Ithaca: Cornell University 

Press, 2014); Dong Chun Kim, “Forgotten War, Forgotten Massacre—the Korean War (1950-1953) as Licensed Mass Killings,” Journal of Genocide Research 6 (2004): 523-44.   

46 Nils Becker, Fireseeds from Korea to the World (Singapore: Campus Crusade Asia Limited-Mass 

Media, 2007), pp. 5-8. 

47 Kim Joon Gon, “The Liberation of 15 August and I,” in The C.C.C. and the Movement for the Evangelization of the Ethnic Nation (Seoul: Shun, 2005), pp. 323-9, 326. 

48 Kim Joon Gon, “The Movement for the Complete Evangelization of Korea,” 29 January 1980, in C.C.C. and the Movement, pp. 208-29, 209. 

49 Bill Bright, “Heart and Seoul,” in John Woodbridge (ed.) More Than Conquerors (Chicago: Moody, 1992), pp. 186-90, 188. 

50 See Kim, Massacres at Mt. Halla; Kim, “Forgotten War, Forgotten Massacre” (note 45); Charles Hanley, Sang-Hun Choe, and Martha Mendoza, The Bridge at No Gun Ri: A Hidden Nightmare from the 

Korean War (New York: Holt, 2001). 

51 See Charles Armstrong, The North Korean Revolution, 1945-1950 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 

2003), pp. 38-57. 

52 Bright, “Heart and Seoul,” p. 188 (note 49).  

53 “CCC History and Vision.” <http://hisvision.kccc.org/> (8 August 2017). 

54 Kim Joon Gon, “Adolescents as the Driving Force of the Evangelization of the Ethnic Nation,” 19 January 1976, in C.C.C. and the Movement, pp. 129-45, 142. 

55 Kim wrote that he first saw the vision of the “evangelization of the ethnic nation” in 1962. See Kim 

Joon Gon, “The Vision of the Evangelization of the Ethnic Nation and Prayer,” February 1962, in C.C.C. 

and the Movement, pp. 496-7. 

56 For Koreans’ notion of ethnic nationhood, see Gi-Wook Shin, Ethnic Nationalism in Korea (Stanford: 

Stanford University Press, 2006).    

57 Kang, Protestant Churches, p. 387. 

58 Kim Ch’ŏryŏng, “Reflections on the History and Root of the National Prayer Breakfast,” in Messages for the National Prayer Breakfast (Seoul: Shun, 2006), pp. 132-42, 133. 

59 Kang, Protestant Churches, p. 536. 

60 On Reverend Han’s career as a leader of the Korean Presbyterian Church and Christian refugees from the North, see Nadine Brozan, “Chronicle,” New York Times, 12 March 1992; Kang, Protestant Churches, pp. 528-29, 536-7. 

61 Kim Joon Gon, “The Movement for the Evangelization of the Military,” 1969, in C.C.C. and the Movement, pp. 499-500. 

62 Kim Joon Gon, “Let’s Bow to God’s Sovereignty,” May 1969, in Messages, pp. 19-29, 22. 

63 Kim, “Movement,” p. 213 (note 48). 

64 Kang, Protestant Churches, p. 547. 

65 Kim, “Let’s Bow,” p. 24 (note 62). 

66 Kim, interview (note 7). 

67 Kim Joon Gon, “The Resurrection and Science,” in CCC (ed.) The Jesus Column: The Third Movement (Seoul: Kyuchang, 1983), p. 42. This is a collection of newspaper essays Kim wrote from 1979 to 1981. 

68 Kim Joon Gon, “Let’s See God,” in Messages, pp. 30-42, 32.  

69 Kim Joon Gon, “Declaration of the Evangelization of the Ethnic Nation,” in C.C.C. and the Movement, pp. 83-9, 83. 

70 Kim and Leslie, “Winning Markets,” p. 157 (note 14). 

71 Tae Gyun Park, “The Roles of the United States and Japan in the Development of South Korea’s Science and Technology during the Cold War,” Korea Journal 52 (2012): 206-31. 

72 Moon Manyong, The Formation of a Modern Research Establishment in South Korea: The Birth and 

Growth of KIST, 1966-1980 (Seoul: Sŏnin, 2010), pp. 117-58.  

73 For the “Minnesota Project,” see John DiMoia, Reconstructing Bodies: Biomedicine, Health, and 

Nation-Building in South Korea since 1945 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013), pp. 72-106. 

74 Moon Manyong, “Reorganization of Government-Supported Research Institutes in 1980: Focusing on the Merger of KIST and KAIS,” Hankuk kwahaksa hakhoechi 31 (2009): 505-43. 

75 Seungsook Moon, Militarized Modernity and Gendered Citizenship in South Korea (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), pp. 55-64. 

76 Kyŏng Chongmin, “No Youth without Challenge,” in Toward Nobel Prizes (Seoul: Dong-a ilbo, 1994), pp. 131-45, 137. Translated and quoted in Kim and Leslie, “Winning Markets,” p. 170 (note 14). 

77 Dong-Won Kim, “Two Chemists in Two Koreas,” Ambix 52 (2005): 67-84, 79, 84. 

78 For the political activities of “scholars in other academic fields,” see Namhee Lee, The Making of 

Minjung: Democracy and the Politics of Representation in South Korea (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 

2007). Also see Myung-Lim Park, “The Chaeya,” in Byung-Kook Kim and Ezra F. Vogel (eds.) The Park Chung Hee Era (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013), pp. 373-400. 

79 Kim and Leslie, “Winning Markets,” pp. 161-9 (note 14). 

80 Sungook Hong, “The Relationship between Science and Technology in Korea from the 1960s to the Present Day,” East Asian Science, Technology and Society 6 (2012): 259-65, 263. 

81 Kim Joon Gon, “Let’s Save this Ethnic Nation through Contrition and Confession,” in C.C.C. and the Movement, pp. 175-80, 175. 

82 Kim Joon Gon, “Monkey’s Report,” in CCC (ed.) The Jesus Column: Eternal First Love (Seoul: 

Kyuchang, 1983), p. 115. This is a collection of newspaper essays Kim wrote from 1979 to 1981. 

83 Kim Joon Gon, “Religion of Evolutionism and Humans,” The Jesus Column (Seoul: Shun, 1999), p. 

249. 

84 Lee Eunil, interview, 23 December 2015; Kim Joon Gon, “Observing KACR’s Twenty Years,” in Twenty-Year History, pp. 52-4, 52. 

85 Numbers, The Creationists, pp. 399-431. 

86 Kim, See the Invisible, pp. 33-4. It is unclear whether Thaxton and Bradley also argued for young-earth creationism at the time. Most books on creationism published in Korea before 1980 did not endorse young-earth creationism, even though some of them mentioned it. For some post-liberation literature, See 

Han Haksu, Kidokkyo wa kwahak (Seoul: Yŏngŭmsa, 1973), p. 386; Fritz Ridenour, Who Says God 

Created?, trans. into Korean by Ch’oe Hanggyu (Seoul: Saengmyŏng ŭi malssŭmsa, 1973), pp. 187-90.  

87 Kim, Syntropy Drama, pp. 39, 80. 

88 Lee, Making of Minjung. 

89 Hong, “Relationship between Science and Technology,” p. 260 (note 80). 

90 Yung Sik Kim, “Some Reflections on Science and Technology in Contemporary Korean Society,” Korea Journal 28 (1988): 4-15; “Natural Knowledge in a Traditional Culture,” Minerva 20 (1982): 83104. 

91 Kim, “Some Reflections” (note 90). 

92 Kim Young-Gil, “Riddles of Miracle,” in KACR (ed.) Opening the Spiritual World (Seoul: Kukmin ilbo, 1991), pp. 11-34, 12. 

93 Kim, Syntropy Drama, p. 51. Also see Paul Seung-Hun Yang, “Creation Science and Caring for the 

Creation in Korea,” Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith 50 (1998): 279-83.. 

94 Hal Lindsey, The Liberation of Planet Earth (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1974), p. 14. 

95 Kim, “Riddles of Miracle,” p. 21 (note 92). 

96 Ibid., p. 22. 

97 Kim, Syntropy Drama, p. 69. 

98 Ibid., p. 73. 

99 Kim, “Riddles of Miracle,” p. 26 (note 92). 

100 This was confirmed by our interview with them in December 2015 and May 2016. 

101 Kim, Syntropy Drama, pp. 83-4. For an account by the assistant administrator of CCC, see Shim 

Young Ki, “How Can We Not Believe in Creation?,” in Twenty-Year History, pp. 179-85. Shim simultaneously approached several people, but only Kim accepted the invitation. 

102 Kim, See the Invisible, p. 35. 

103 Kim, “Riddles of Miracle,” p. 28 (note 92). 

104 Kim Young-Gil, “Creation Science Column,” Ch’angjo 29 (1986): 16. 

105 Kim Young-Gil, “At the Frontier of Creationism,” Ch’angjo 22 (1985): 1-5, 1. 

106 Ronald Numbers, “That Social Darwinism Has Had a Profound Influence on Social Thought and 

Policy, Especially in the United States of America,” in Ronald L. Numbers and Kostas Kampourakis (eds.) Newton’s Apple and Other Myths about Science (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2015), pp. 

139-46, 143; Susan Trollinger and William Trollinger, Jr., Righting America at the Creation Museum (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), pp. 185-6. 

107 Larson, Summer for the Gods, pp. 27, 34-5, 215-7; Numbers, The Creationists, pp. 55-9, 81, 103, 247, 

368-70. 

108 Kim, “At the Frontier,” p. 5 (note 105).   

109 Kim, Syntropy Drama, p. 163. 

110 Ibid., pp. 207-8. 

111 Ibid., p. 238. 

112 See essays in Charles Armstrong (ed.), Korean Society: Civil Society, Democracy, and the State (London: Routledge, 2007). Also see Lee, Making of Minjung; David Steinberg, “Civil Society and Human Rights in Korea,” Korea Journal 37 (1997): 145-65. 

113 Kang Sin’gu, “Life: Product of Evolution or God’s Creation?,” Kyunghyang shinmun, 17 February 1981. 

114 Yi, Kwangyŏng, “The Root of Humanity Is Not Creation,” Hankuk ilbo, 2 November 1982. 

115 Kim Yŏngae, “Those Invited to the Ministry of Scientific Creationism,” in Twenty-Year History, pp. 255-92, 266. 

116 “Oxide-Dispersion-Strengthened Superalloy,” NASA Tech Briefs 5 (1980): 320; “About This NASA Publication,” NASA Tech Briefs 5 (1980): A2.  

117 “NASA’s ICB Awards,” Tech Transfer 3 (2010): 12. In 2010, the prize came with $350 per inventor. 

118 Kim, See the Invisible, p. 44. 

119 “Korean Cutting-edge Technology Exported to an Advanced Country,” Kyunghyang shinmun, 19 

February 1986; Chang Chaeyŏl, “Mysterious Metal That Becomes Stronger at Cryogenic Temperatures,” Joongang ilbo, 17 August 1986; “Five Recipients of the Sejong Cultural Award Announced,” Chosun ilbo, 9 October 1986; “Scientist of the Year,” Chosun ilbo, 20 December 1987. 

120 Kim, “Looking Back,” pp 68-9. (note 1). 

121 Hee-Joo Park, “The Creation–Evolution Debate,” Public Understanding of Science 10 (2001): 173-86. 

122 Frank Turner, Contesting Cultural Authority (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 

171-200.  

123 Kim, Syntropy Drama, p. 114; Lee Eunil, interview, 23 December 2015; Jeong Kye-Heon, 28 May 

2016. Most of KACR’s international conferences were held at Onnuri Church, including the All Asian Creation Conference of 2016. <https://www.allasiancreation.com/1st-aacc-1> (7 August 2017). 

124 Jang Sukman, “Historical Currents and Characteristics of Korean Protestantism after Liberation,” 

Korea Journal 44 (2004): 133-56; Timothy Lee, “Beleaguered Success: Korean Evangelicalism in the 

Last Decade of the Twentieth Century,” in Robert E. Buswell and Timothy Lee (eds.) Christianity in Korea (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2006), pp. 330-50. 

125 “List of Executives,” Ch’angjo 2 (1981): 3; Kim Kyŏng. “Continuing Acts of the Apostles,” in Twenty-Year History, pp. 200-26. 

126 Kim Jung Wk, “Arrogance and Blind Faith in Science,” in Opening the Spiritual World, pp. 73-80, 73. 

127 Ibid., p. 76. 

128 Kim Jung Wk, “Crying for the Preservation of the Order of Creation,” Kidok shinmun, 17 February 2014. 

129 Kim Jung Wk, interview, 19 December 2016. 

130 Kim, Syntropy Drama, p. 207. 

131 Kim Jung Wk, “When and How Was the Earth Created,” Ch’angjo 40 (1987): 2-7. 

132 Shin Jae-Shik, interview, 28 December 2015. 

133 See for example, “Current State of Activities,” Ch’angjo 3 (1981): 4. 

134 Email from Yang Seung-Hun, 10 August 2016. 

135 Yang Seung-Hun, “Christian Faith and the Development of Natural Science,” Ch’angjo 13 (1984): 8-

11. 

136 Yang Seung-Hun, “Biblical Creationism,” Ch’angjo 16 (1985): 4-9, 5. But he did not show any details of why this interpretation was right. 

137 Email from Yang Seung-Hun, 10 August 2016. 

138 Yang Seung-Hun, “Scholarship and Faith,” Ch’angjo 14 (1984): 4-11, 6. 

139 Yang Seung-Hun, “The Illegitimate Children of Evolutionism,” Ch’angjo 21 (1985): 1-5, 3. 

140 Numbers, “That Social Darwinism” (note 106); Paul Weindling, “Genetics, Eugenics, and the 

Holocaust,” in Denis Alexander and Ronald Numbers (eds.) Biology and Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), pp. 192-214; Mark Francis, Herbert Spencer and the Invention of Modern Life 

(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007).  

141 Ch’oe, “Social Darwinism,” pp. 39-40 (note 26). 

142 “Open Lecture on Creation Science,” Ch’angjo 20 (1985): 15. 

143 Yang’s thesis was published in Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith, an official journal of the 

American Scientific Affiliation (ASA) supporting theistic evolutionism that he did not accept. See Yang 

Seung-Hun, “Radiocarbon Dating and American Evangelical Christians,” Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith 45 (1993): 229-40. ASA’s turn to theistic evolutionism had its origin in the 1940s. See, 

Numbers, The Creationists, pp. 194-204.  

144 Yang Seung-Hun, “Four Reasons Why I Left Creation Science,” NewsM, 21 December 2014. 

145 Yang Seung-Hun, “Reconsidering the Multiple Catastrophism,” T’onghap yŏnku17 (2004): 24-80.  146 Pak Chiho, “Focus on Research Rather Than Public Campaign,” NewsM, 6 October 2008; Kim Jung Wk, interview, 19 December 2016. 

147 Yang Seung-Hun, “Leaving the Korean Association for Creation Research,” Christian Today, 13 September 2008.  

148 The historical precedent can be found in the American journalist H. L. Mencken, who viewed the 

Scopes Trial as a development of the evangelical Americans’ anti-intellectualism. See Larson, Summer for the Gods. Numbers also says that creationism did not belong to an “anti-intellectual” tradition. See Numbers, The Creationists, p. 369. 

149 Kim, “Looking Back,” p. 59 (note 1). Around the mid-1990s, KACR abolished this requirement. 

150 Harriet Kim’s role was quite notable. See, for example, Kim, “Those Invited,” pp. 255-92, 262-65 (note 115); Kim, “Looking Back,” p. 61 (note 1). 

151 Joseph Wong, “The Adaptive Developmental State in East Asia,” Journal of East Asian Studies 4 

(2004): 345-62. Those who argue for the decline of the developmental state do not say that it came to an end. See Yun Tae Kim, “Neoliberalism and the Decline of the Developmental State,” Journal of Contemporary Asia 29 (1999): 441-61. 

152 Many Korean Protestant churches became even more conservative and politicized in the early twentyfirst century, although there were a number of progressive churches. See Kang, Protestant Churches, pp. 

26-32; Cho, “Another Christian Right” (note 42). Timothy Lee stated that “within Korean Protestantism itself there exists two main subgroups—Evangelicals and….non-Evangelicals—and that between them, 

Evangelicals predominate by a margin even larger than that between Protestants and Catholics.” See Lee, “Beleaguered Success,” p. 330 (note 124). 

 

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