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Creation vs. Evolution?

There has always been a conflict between the religious world and the scientific world.  Whether it be when science first challenged that the earth was not the center of the universe as dictated by the Church, or when it was discovered that the earth was round rather than flat.  Both these “theories” today are widely accepted and the rest of society generally ridicules any persons that believe the earth is the center of the universe or that the world is flat.  However, at the time of their discovery, there was massive outcry by the religious community, as they believed it contradicted the “facts” in the bible.  The religious community has always been wary of new scientific discoveries as they feel that it threatens the power of their God.  In this paper, I will focus on one theory that has been in conflict with the church for the past hundred years.  The theory of evolution.  For the purpose of this paper, when referring to religions creationism, I mean the creationist beliefs held by Christians, Jews and Muslims.  The reason I have chosen to be isolated to those three religions is because they share a common history, and being three of the world’s largest religions encompasses the majority of world opinion.  The theory of evolution is simple; over millions of years, primitive life forms have changed to higher life forms and eventually to all the species that we see today.  Religious creationism, or orthodox creationism says that God created the world exactly the way it is today and more importantly, God created humans exactly the way they are today.  These two schools of thought are in conflict, but I hope to show that religious creationist ideas are inappropriately anti-evolutionary.  There are many connections that can be drawn between the two, and belief in the one does not negate the possibility of the other.  Rather both evolution and creation are both correct, but simply two sides of the same coin.  

        In 1992 New York Times took a poll in which about half of all Americans believe that God created humans pretty much the way they appear now.  At the same time, the vast majority of the scientific community supports the theory of evolution.  There are two reasons for this discrepancy.  Firstly, most of the general public is not fully aware of what evolution is.  And secondly, the religious ideals that have been ingrained in North American society dictates the one creator God, and therefore most people refuse to believe in evolution.  To emphasize this difference in opinion, I will explain some of the extreme beliefs on both the creationist side and the evolutionist side.  

Much of the religious world (Christians, Jews and Muslims) believe that the world was created pretty much the way it is today.  The reason they believe this is due to their literal understanding of the Bible.  Many believe that “…the story of Creation, written [in the bible] long before all others is completely accurate”(Cooper 45).  Furthermore, they believe that “[n]othing could be so exact and descriptive” (Cooper 45).  According to Genesis 1-3, God created the world in six days.  The first three days, He created the physical aspects of the world, i.e. light, darkness, land, water and sky.  Days 4 and 5, God created the plants and animals.  Finally, on Day 6, God created humans.  The most passionately held idea of creationism is the creation of humans.  As Genesis 1:27 says, God created man in His image.  It is easy for Christians to accept this idea, that God created man with divine purpose and design.  It gives Christians the idea that our species is somewhat set apart from all other in the world, at that we are the pinnacle of creation.

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        In comparison, extreme evolutionists completely refute the idea of a divine creator.  They believe that all life started as a chance event of amino acids coming together, and all subsequent evolutionary steps were chance mutations leading to natural selection and thus change in species.  In general, extreme evolutionists believe that the driving force for change is simply chance rather than some sort of divine being.

It is quite obvious that these two schools of thought are extremely different.  However, both theories carry some commonalities that will be explored later in this paper.  First, I would like to dismiss certain ideas ...

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