Creationism vs. Evolution: How did we get here?

Darwin's finches

I was in the library this week studying for finals and finishing up the rest of the work in my classes when I came across this book called Is God a Creationist, which contained many valid arguments for both scientific theory as well as theological explanations as to how life on this planet began. The age-old question of our existence has long been debated by both scientists and theologians.

Since Charles Darwin published his findings on the Galapagos finches and his theory about evolution, there has been an intense debate between scientists and theologians. Scientific evidence, such as carbon dating, dates the earth at about 4.54 billion years old, long before the existence of mankind. Theologians argue the biblical implications of the origins of the world saying that Earth was created by God and all living things were created by God. Literal interpretations of the Bible are difficult to comprehend for many reasons including the fact that the Bible was written 3,000 years ago so the interpretation and meaning of words could have been different than what they mean today and the fact that the Bible was not written as or intended to be a historical accurate account of the world because it is a book filled with symbolism.

The Bible contains two creation accounts in the book of Genesis. The first creation account can be found in Genesis 1-11. According to Michael D. Coogan, the first account of Genesis describes the “formation of the cosmos, an ordered universe, out of preexisting but chaotic matter—an unformed earth and unruly sea over which a wind from God swoops like a large bird” (Coogan 28)

The majority of evolutionary theorists believe that there was preexisting matter from which our universe has evolved. Besides the concepts of evolution, scientists are also known for having developed the “Big Bang Theory” to explain the origins of matter in a naturalistic framework, from which our universe was theoretically created. The Big Bang Theory is described as a moment 15 billion years ago when the total amount of matter in the universe exploded from a point and moved out to form the expanding universe today. The scientific perspective on the origins of the world can be described by: “the world had a beginning under conditions in which the known laws of physics are not valid, and as a product of forces or circumstances we cannot discover…the scientist’s pursuit of the past ends in the moment of creation” (Is God a Creationist 35)

Evolution and natural selection cannot be ignored even by theologians because there is significant scientific evidence that states that both do and have existed. At the very least, it is evident that at least artificial selection exists because of the domestication of animals such as horses, dogs, and cats. Humans were able to domesticate or breed certain characteristics of an animal, for example wolves that were friendlier to man than those that tried to attack, and cultivated these characteristics over thousands of years to produce the species we know as our four-legged friends, dogs.

Do chimps think and act like us because they are one of our closest ancestors?

Through molecular genetics, it is possible to find evolutionary pathways through the similarities in homology of DNA between different living species. Also, extracted DNA from fossilization records are the scientific equivalent of “paternity tests” of our earliest ancestors, determining how closely related we are genetically to other species, namely apes. Molecular geneticists as well as evolutionary theorists believe that chimpanzees and humans emerged from a common ancestor 6 million years ago, dating long before the creation of Adam and Eve (according to the Biblical timeline). The genetic evidence for humans being potential “cousins” of chimps is astounding in that approximately 99% of our DNA is identical to that of chimpanzees. The one percent variance between our DNA and that of chimpanzee DNA is what distinguishes us from apes, but in the genetic world one percent could potentially mean that all of the DNA in that one percent is what makes us distinctly different from say starfish. Although theologians refuse to believe that humans evolved from apes, how do we account for species such as the Geico Neanderthals or other upright-walking mammals that shared more behaviors with humans than chimpanzees do. Neanderthals looked more like humans today than modern apes do, so how does religion account for these differences?

An interesting view on the culmination of both the scientific and religious aspects concerning our existence can best be described by John MacArthur: “For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”