Creationist Objections To Evolution - History

History

Further information: History of evolutionary thought, History of creationism, and Creation-evolution controversy

Various evolutionary ideas came to prominence around the start of the nineteenth century, in particular the transmutation of species theory put forward by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. These were opposed on scientific grounds, most notably by Georges Cuvier, as well as meeting political and religious objections. These ideas that natural laws controlled the development of nature and society gained vast popular audiences with George Combe's The Constitution of Man of 1828 and the anonymous Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation of 1844. When Charles Darwin published his 1859 book On the Origin of Species, he convinced most of the scientific community that new species arose through descent through modification in a branching pattern of divergence from common ancestors within fifteen to twenty years, but while most accepted that natural selection was a valid and empirically testable hypothesis, his view that it was the primary mechanism of evolution was generally rejected.

The earliest objections to Darwinian evolution were both scientific and religious. Darwin's contemporaries eventually came to accept the transmutation of species based upon fossil evidence; forming the X Club to defend it against the church and wealthy amateurs, although the specific evolutionary mechanism which Darwin provided – natural selection – was actively disputed by alternative theories such as Lamarckism and orthogenesis. Darwin's gradualistic account was also opposed by saltationism and catastrophism. Lord Kelvin led scientific opposition to gradualism on the basis of his thermodynamic calculations that the Age of the Earth was between 24 and 400 million years old, an estimate strongly disputed by geologists. These figures were corrected in 1907 when radioactive dating of rocks showed that the Earth was billions of years old. Kelvin's own views favoured a version of theistic evolution accelerated by divine guidance. The specific hereditary mechanism Darwin provided, pangenesis, lacked any supporting evidence. In the early 20th century, pangenesis was replaced by Mendelian inheritance, leading to the rise of the modern evolutionary synthesis. The modern synthesis rose to universal acceptance among biologists with the help of new evidence, such as genetics, which confirmed Darwin's predictions and refuted the competing theories.

Protestantism, especially in America, broke out in "acrid polemics" and argument about evolution from 1860 to the 1870s – with the turning point possibly marked with the death of Louis Agassiz in 1873 – and by 1880 a form of "Christian evolution" was becoming the consensus. In Britain while publication of The Descent of Man by Darwin in 1871 reinvigorated debate from the previous decade, Sir Henry Chadwick notes a steady acceptance of evolution "among more educated Christians" between 1860 and 1885. This led evolutionary theory to be "both permissible and respectable" by 1876. Frederick Temple's lectures on Relations between Religion and Science (1884) speaking on how evolution was not "antagonistic" to religion highlighted this trend. Temple's appointment to Archbishop of Canterbury in 1896 showed the broad acceptance of evolution within the church hierarchy.

For decades Catholicism avoided official refutation of evolution. However, it would rein in Catholics who proposed that evolution could be reconciled with the Bible, as this conflicted with First Vatican Council's (1869–70) finding that everything was created out of nothing by God, and to question that could lead to excommunication. In 1950, the encyclical Humani Generis of Pope Pius XII first mentioned evolution directly and officially. It allowed for inquiry into humans coming from pre-existing living matter, but to not question Adam and Eve or the creation of the soul. In 1996, Pope John Paul II stated evolution was "more than a hypothesis" and acknowledged the large body of work accumulated in its support, but reiterated that any attempt to give a material explanation of the human soul was "incompatible with the truth about man."

Muslim reaction covered the gamut with those believing in literal creation from the Qur'an while many educated Muslims subscribed to a version of theistic or guided evolution where the Qur'an reinforced rather than contradicted mainstream science. This occurred relatively quickly as medieval Madrasahs taught ideas of Al-Jahiz, a Muslim scholar from the 9th century, who proposed concepts similar to natural selection. However, acceptance of evolution remains low in the Muslim world as prominent figures reject evolution's underpinning philosophy of materialism as unsound to human origins and a denial of Allah. Further objections by Muslim scholars and writers largely reflect those put forward in the Western world.

Regardless of acceptance from major religious hierarchies, early religious objections to Darwin's theory are still used in opposition to evolution. The ideas that species change over time through natural processes and that different species share common ancestors seemed to contradict the Genesis account of Creation. Believers in Biblical infallibility attacked Darwinism as heretical. The natural theology of the early 19th century was typified by Paley's watchmaker analogy, an argument from design still used by the creationist movement. Natural theology included a range of ideas and arguments from the outset, and when Darwin's theory was published, ideas of theistic evolution were presented in which evolution is accepted as a secondary cause open to scientific investigation, while still holding belief in God as a first cause with a non-specified role in guiding evolution and creating humans. This position has been adopted by denominations of Christianity and Judaism in line with modernist theology which views the Bible and Torah as allegorical thus removing the conflict between evolution and religion.

However, in the 1920s Christian fundamentalists in the United States developed their literalist arguments against Modernist theology into opposition to the teaching of evolution due to fears that Darwinism had led to German militarism and was a threat to religion and morality. This opposition developed into the creation-evolution controversy involving Christian literalists in the United States objecting to the teaching of evolution in public schools. Although early objections dismissed evolution for contradicting their interpretation of the Bible, this argument was invalidated when the Supreme Court ruled in Epperson v. Arkansas that forbidding the teaching of evolution on religious grounds violated the Establishment Clause.

Since then creationists have developed more nuanced objections to evolution, alleging variously that it is unscientific, infringes on creationists' religious freedoms or that the acceptance of evolution is a religious stance. Creationists have appealed to democratic principles of fairness, arguing that evolution is controversial, and that science classrooms should therefore "Teach the Controversy". These objections to evolution culminated in the intelligent design movement in the early 2000s that unsuccessfully attempted to present itself as a scientific alternative to evolution.