Evolution and creationism: comparative perspectives

Evolution and Creationism

In the early 1920's the older Victorians, called Traditionalists, became alarmed at the social chaos they found in society, with Intellectualism, women beginning to feel less restricted, with jazz, dancing the Charleston, smoking, drinking, flaunting prohibition, abstract art, Freudian psychology and no one asking permission to do anything. The Traditionalists felt that everything valuable was slipping away. A wave of Revivalism swept the South to counteract Modernism and Intellectualism. There was conflict between the liberals and the conservatives in society, between the Evolutionists and the Fundamentalists. Things came to a head in the small town of Dayton, Tennessee, when John Scopes, a high school biology teacher, was tried for teaching the theory of evolution. The trial was widely covered by the most famous broadcasters in the nation. In the trial, also called the "Scopes Monkey Trial," it was decided that it would be legal to teach evolution in the public schools. (Futuyma, 1982)

More recently, "Creationists" have brought up the issue again, trying to get a religious theory accepted back into the public school curriculum. The Fundamentalists want "Intelligent Design" taught in the classrooms, rather than "Darwinism," a term meaning "Evolution," which is now the dominating theory espoused by science teachers and biologists. (Darwin 1962) Today, the social scene is similar to the 1920's, in that Fundamentalists are alarmed at the apparent licentiousness in society today. Young people seem to be out of control, the nation seems to be moving away from its roots, the core American family is hard to find and religion is on the wane as fewer and fewer people go to church. The Neo-Creationists, however, are not like their forbearers in that they do not believe in a young earth (only a few thousand years old) or in a literal interpretation of the Bible. These Fundamentalists simply reject naturalism, as opposed to supernaturalism in the beginning of life, and oppose an atheistic "scientific method" as the means of natural selection and other scientific phenomena. They want religion to be an alternative choice for young people who study the universe.

Darwin is described by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy as:

distinctive form of evolutionary explanation for the history and diversity of life on earth. Its original formulation is provided in the first edition of On the Origin of Species in 1859. This entry first formulates 'Darwin's Darwinism' in terms of five philosophically distinctive themes: (i) probability and chance, (ii) the nature, power and scope of selection, (iii) adaptation and teleology, (iv) nominalism vs. essentialism about species and (v) the tempo and mode of evolutionary change. (Darwinism, 2004)

Darwin was a man who travelled the world observing biolog in plants and animals. As he travelled and observed, he found he was dealing with a mechanism of natural selection, as some species were able to survive in certain environments while others died out, but were those that died out were still able to in kinder environments. This observation grew into his theory of Natural Selection, in which evolution became a matter of "Survival of the Fittest." In his day, there was no rigid definition of "Darwinism" and the ideas spread throughout the world, becoming rather popular. It was so popular that lecturers toured the country expressing this new idea to great crowds of people.

Today, Darwinism, or Evolutionism is the accepted view of biologists, who teach natural selection as a matter of fact and evolution, including various theories of how the world began and how plants and animals evolved over eons of time. Countless fossils and remnants of ancient limbs (such as the legs found on a dolphin recently) continue to back up the theory of how animals evolved from other forms of life and other kinds of bodies. For instance, whales and dolphins (proven by DNA to be related) have the vestiges of legs within their sleek bodies and their front "fins" have bones that correspond to human hands, rather than fish fins. They have been traced from an ungulate that evolved on land, then returned to the sea and adapted to that environment. Of course this took millions of years, but the bones and fossils of ancient whales back up this long history (Whitehead, 2003).

Creationism is the view that rejects scientific theories that contradict the stories of those events that are expressed in the Bible. Bishop Samuel Wilberforce of Oxford, in the 1880's, found the idea of human beings being "ascended from lesser creatures" as blasphemous and insulting and kept Darwin from being conferred as a knight by complaining about such to Queen Victoria. Creationists also reject the scientific theories regarding the origin of life (as coming from the "warm stew" of the sea, where cells got together and formed life forms in water), the origin of the human species (as evolving from primitive "cave men" who began to stand upright and whose brains developed gray matter to begin to develop society and modern humans), the geologic history of the earth (that it formed from being completely covered by water, from which land arose and then split up over eons of time to become the continents -- which are still drifting about, creating earthquakes and falling into the ocean), the formation of the solar system (that the sun is a small star which probably split off from other stars in other galaxies, and that pieces of the sun or other planets formed earth), and finally the origin of the universe - that God didn't create earth in seven days, but that the earth was formed over millions of years of time.