Ethics Finder

Creation / Evolution

According to traditional understandings of the Book of Genesis God created the world with human beings and other animals all in a short period of time. Even in the early middle ages this account began to be treated as allegorical, but for centuries it continued to be believed that the variety of living things, including humans, had been created in the form in which they existed thereafter. In the course of the 18th and 19th centuries this view came to be challenged by the discovery of fossils showing different but ancestral animal forms and by the development by Charles Darwin of the theory of speciation and evolution through variation and natural selection. His application of the theory to the origins of human beings in The Descent of Man (1871) proposed a natural account of human development though multitude of intermediary species. This posed two challenges for traditional believers. First, to the idea that human beings are radically different in nature from other animals; second, that the difference could only be explained by an act of special creation. The initial reply by Christians and others believers in the ‘uniqueness of man’ was to deny evolution. A later and more considered one was to suggest that the human body may be an evolutionary product, but that the human soul could not be accounted for naturally but was added by God. A third and now more common response is to reconcile evolution with creation by saying that the former is God’s chosen method of the latter. Finally, those who believe in creation point out that evolution requires and therefore cannot explain the phenomenon of reproduction and thereby shirt the ground of the debate for and against creation to the issue of the origin of life.

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