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Creation Versus Evolution

Creation Versus Evolution©



Creation Versus Evolution:   Part I

A Balanced Perspective

 

            "Creation Versus Evolution."   What's wrong with this title?   Read it to yourself a few times, and then answer that question.

            We've all heard of the argument.   Creationism, the idea that God created all the species as they appear today, versus Evolutionism, the idea that all life evolved from simple bacteria to all the species that appear today, is a familiar controversy.   Ever since Darwin first published the Theory of Evolution in his controversial 1859 book The Origin of Species, the debate has raged between religion and science.

            But this debate is something that has always puzzled me.   From the time I first understood what the Theory of Evolution was really saying, I found it difficult to reject.   Scientifically, every shred of evidence in biology and genetics I have ever seen points to it, directly or indirectly.   And religiously – Evolutionism does not contradict Creationism.

            Evolution is based on two underlying principles that themselves are not at all controversial:   heredity and natural selection.   Heredity is the principle that organisms pass on different combinations of their traits to their offspring.   If an organism has strong traits that help it to survive, then its offspring are likely to possess some of those same strong traits and themselves be more likely to survive.   The second principle is natural selection, better known as "survival of the fittest."   According to natural selection, the organisms with strong, "fit" traits are more likely to survive long enough to reproduce than are the organisms with weak, "unfit" traits; thus over time, the strong organisms (as a species, or subspecies) will survive and the weak ones will die out.   In this way, only the strong traits that help organisms to survive will be preserved over long periods of time.   For instance, all the long-necked giraffes...