Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Creationist cosmologies (2nd nomination)


 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review).  No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was delete and redirect to Creation science. Eddie891 Talk Work 00:52, 25 October 2021 (UTC)

Creationist cosmologies
AfDs for this article:


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I last nominated this article for deletion in 2014. Since then, the article has gotten worse and the consensus on Wikipedia clearer for what fringe content deserves preserving and which needs trashing. In the case of this article, the vast majority of the content is sourced entirely to creationists. Because of the WP:FRINGE nature of the topic, we really need to find some independent evaluation of these ideas for them to be properly discussed at Wikipedia... but such sources are lacking. There are a few topics which have been mentioned by independent sources, but these can be safely discussed at creation science or Young Earth creationism. The detailed exploration of the minutiae of how various evangelical Christians try to square the circle of their religious faith with scientific facts cannot properly be handled by Wikipedia as we service only to repeat what has been identified as the verifiable and reliable ideas that have been noticed enough to be properly contextualized. This article cannot do that because most of the ideas are so marginalized as to be ignored. Thus, the article is essentially a WP:POVFORK of physical cosmology and also something of a synthetic amalgamation of ideas various creationists have about cosmology (you won't find any other reference on the planet which puts together all the different cosmologies creationists believe in as one coherent topic like this). All around, this is a pretty bad article and I don't see how it can ever get to the point of being salvageable. jps (talk) 01:46, 14 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Bible-related deletion discussions. jps (talk) 01:46, 14 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Christianity-related deletion discussions. jps (talk) 01:46, 14 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Science-related deletion discussions. jps (talk) 01:46, 14 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Astronomy-related deletion discussions. jps (talk) 01:46, 14 October 2021 (UTC)


 * Delete I'm not sure whether to call it a POVFORK of physical cosmology, a worse version of creationism, or what exactly, but it's not adding value to the encyclopedia. Strip out the "references" to Answers in Genesis and the like, and there's just not much left at all. This page would need a complete overhaul to bring it up to a bare minimum of respectability, and even then it would be redundant with better articles that we already have. XOR&#39;easter (talk) 04:37, 14 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Delete or Redirect to Creationism: while creationism is notable, an article already exists, making this article redundant. Per my other comment below, the various forms of Biblical creationism are already well covered in other subarticles and linked in a template.  There also are other articles on cosmology.  Moreover, this article that would be expected to be a WP:SPINOFF of a too-large section from the main article, is not that...  Moreover, it's clear from the epoch of the first AfD, that thre was an effort to portray creationism as "branches of science", i.e. see creation geophysics that is now a redirect.  — Paleo  Neonate  – 10:32, 14 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Comment: I'm unclear, what's the specific WP:DEL-REASON for nominating this article? We have other pseudo-science articles on Wikipedia. Praemonitus (talk) 04:52, 14 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Reasons 5, 6, and 8 all apply at the very least, with WP:NFRINGE being the relevant notability guideline. XOR&#39;easter (talk) 08:40, 14 October 2021 (UTC)
 * I'll accept reason 5 perhaps, but for number 6, people's stated beliefs can surely be reliably sourced. I'm skeptical about #8 because it appears well cited. WP:NFRINGE already states that the topic of Creationism is sufficiently notable. (I'm not propounding a belief in the same, just looking at it from a WP notability perspective.) Praemonitus (talk) 19:42, 14 October 2021 (UTC)
 * It isn't well cited at all. "References" from places like AIG violate WP:SECONDARY and WP:PROFRINGE. The topic of creationism is notable, which is why we have the article Creationism, but this artificial subdivision of the topic isn't. XOR&#39;easter (talk) 14:58, 15 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Comment: I'll look at it again tomorrow, but a problem I can see is that the article is really about biblical cosmology interpretations, when another article already exists as well, Biblical cosmology, that can include major interpretations... Yet another related article is Religious cosmology.  And of course we already have Old Earth creationism, Day-age creationism, Young Earth creationism, Gap creationism, Progressive creationism and the Creationism sidebar template linking them.  Perhaps if not deleted, this article could be a small disambiguation page to those as well?  — Paleo  Neonate  – 08:22, 14 October 2021 (UTC)
 * It seems to me that that would be redundant with the Creationism article. Since creationists have to reject, well, most of science, their complaints about geology, physics, biology, cosmology, etc., all blend together. So, it's not really a good representation of the subject to split off the part where they complain about physical cosmology specifically. XOR&#39;easter (talk) 09:00, 14 October 2021 (UTC)
 * So obvious that I missed it... That makes sense, now when I check the creationism article, it links to this very article in YEC, specifically, claiming that this is about Usher's.  This may explain some of the debates I saw on the talk page, pressure to change the article's scope.  The original version was an unsourced collection-table.  — Paleo  Neonate  – 10:32, 14 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Delete or Redirect to Religious cosmology. Fringe arguments aside, if it's already covered in Religious cosmology, there is no point to this article, as far as I can see. Pyrrho the Skeptic (talk) 19:46, 14 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Strong keep (or merge somewhere) -- I am not a young earth creationist, and reject many of their views, but it is not appropriate to delete it just because is is a fringe view. This is a widely held viewpoint among a certain kind of evangelical Christian.  IDONOTLIKEIT is not a ground for deletion.  This is a properly written article, with a load of citations.  A redirect to religious cosmology would not do, because each religion has its own ideas on the subject.  Peterkingiron (talk) 16:37, 15 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Are you saying you object to WP:NFRINGE? jps (talk) 21:21, 15 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Comment. A problem with separate articles on creationist cosmology, biology, geology etc is that schools that differ on one of these subjects might also differ on the others, so that the real taxonomy is of schools of creationism and not at any finer level. To "organize" creationism by scientific subtopics obscures that as well as being in itself a level of synthesis that creationism itself has not developed.  For some of these topics the whole notion of "creationist X" is that sort of volunteered synthesis.  So I think only an account of flavors of  creationism (detailing for each one any noteworthy views on particular questions of cosmology, biology, history, etc) is suitable. Sesquivalent (talk) 02:45, 16 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Delete and do not redirect - I would expect an article called "Creationist cosmologies" to deal with various historical cosmological theories that were formulated from a creationist perspective. This is much broader than both Biblical cosmology and religious cosmology: see, e.g., Kaiser 1997, or Sedley 2007. While the literature on that is not enormous, it would be more than enough to base a separate article on. Since thus conceived, Creationist cosmologies is a notable subject that really deserves its own article, it should probably not redirect elsewhere based on a different, non-notable conception of it. Such a non-notable conception lies at the basis of the current article, which takes it to refer to contemporary creationist 'cosmologies' (in the contemporary context, this should really be 'pseudo-cosmologies'). Now in fact almost all of the text is taken up with an originally researched and largely conceptual refutation of creationist pseudo-cosmology, rather than with the descriptive presentation of actual pseudo-cosmological theories. This is likely due to the fact that creationist pseudo-cosmology itself is such a marginal phenomenon that independent secondary sources on it are all but non-existent. While sources like Numbers 1992, Numbers 2006 or Rosenhouse 2012 may contain some relevant info, this would at best perhaps be enough to expand the Creation science section a little. The fact of the matter is that there is just not enough scholarly interest in creationist pseudo-cosmology for independent reliable sources to produce significant coverage of it. ☿ Apaugasma  ( talk  ☉) 18:04, 16 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Delete and do not redirect - obscure sub-set of religious cosmologies, to the extent that there even are such things as creationist cosmologies separate from the regular cosmologies of the sects they come from (and I'm not convinced by reading this article that there are such things). -- Orange Mike &#124;  Talk  03:29, 18 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Redirect to Creation science per WP:TNT; the useful material is largely on other topics addressed at Young Earth creationism, Old Earth creationism, and Answers in Genesis. Quite a bit of this also feels like WP:SYNTH.  The one paragraph on the actual topic at Creation science is probably sufficient. User:力 (power~enwiki,  π,  ν ) 22:29, 21 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Redirect to Creation_science per above. Delete as an acceptable second choice. Ajpolino (talk) 17:44, 24 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Redirect to Creation_science.4meter4 (talk) 18:29, 24 October 2021 (UTC)


 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.