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History of the creation–evolution controversy

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Through Common Era, Christianity and Geology

Creation–evolution controversy in the age of Darwin

Although the history of evolutionary thought dates back to Empedocles and other Greek philosophers in Europe (5th century BCE), and Taoism in Asia, and the history of evolutionary thought in Christian theology dates back to Augustine of Hippo (4th century) and Thomas Aquinas (13th century), the current creation–evolution controversy originated in Europe and North America in the late 18th century. Discoveries in geology led to various theories of an ancient earth, and fossils showing past extinctions prompted early ideas of evolution, which were particularly controversial in England, where both the natural world and the hierarchical social order were thought to be fixed by God's will. As the terrors of the French Revolution developed into the Napoleonic Wars, followed by economic depression threatening revolution in Great Britain itself, such subversive ideas were rejected, associated only with radical agitators.

Conditions eased with economic recovery, and when Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation was anonymously published in 1844 its ideas of transmutation of species attracted wide public interest despite being attacked by the scientific establishment and many theologians who believed it to be in conflict with their interpretations of the biblical account of life's, especially humanity's, origin and development. However, radical Quakers, Unitarians and Baptists welcomed the book's ideas of "natural law" as supporting their struggle to overthrow the privileges of the Church of England.

Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation remained a best-seller, and paved the way for widespread interest in the theory of natural selection as introduced and published by English naturalist Charles Darwin in his 1859 book, On the Origin of Species. Darwin's book was praised by Unitarians as well as by liberal Anglican theologians whose Essays and Reviews (1860) sparked considerably more religious controversy in Britain than Darwin's publication, as its support of higher criticism questioned the historical accuracy of literal interpretations of the Bible and added declarations that miracles were irrational.

Darwin's book revolutionized the way naturalists viewed the world. The book and its promotion attracted attention and controversy, and many theologians reacted to Darwin's theories. For example, in his 1874 work What is Darwinism? the theologian Charles Hodge argued that Darwin's theories were tantamount to atheism. The controversy was fueled in part by one of Darwin's most vigorous promoters, Thomas Henry Huxley, who opined that Christianity is a "...compound of some of the best and some of the worst elements of Paganism and Judaism, moulded in practice by the innate character of certain people of the Western world..." Perhaps the most uncompromising of the evolutionary philosophers was Ernst Haeckel, who dogmatically affirmed that nothing spiritual exists.

A watershed in the Protestant objections to evolution occurred after about 1875. Previously, citing Louis Agassiz and other scientific luminaries, Protestant contributors to religious quarterlies dismissed Darwin's theories as unscientific. After 1875, it became clear that the majority of naturalists embraced evolution, and a sizable minority of these Protestant contributors rejected Darwin's theory because it called into question the veracity of Scriptures. Even so, virtually none of these dissenters insisted on a young Earth.

The greatest concern for creationists in the late 19th century was the issue of human ancestry. In the words of an 1896 religious tract:

I do not wish to meddle with any man's family matters, or quarrel with any one about his relatives. If a man prefers to look for his kindred in the zoological gardens, it is no concern of mine; if he wants to believe that the founder of his family was an ape, a gorilla, a mud-turtle, or a monar, he may do so; but when he insists that I shall trace my lineage in that direction, I say No sir!...I prefer that my genealogical table shall end as it now does, with 'Cainan, which was the son of Seth, which was the son of Adam, which was the son of God,' rather than invent one which reads, 'Which was the son of skeptic, which was the son of monkey, which was the son of oyster, which was the son of monar, which was the son of mud!'—a genealogical table which begins in the mud and ends in the gravel, which has a monar at the head, a monkey in the middle, and an infidel at the tail.

Creationists during this period were largely premillennialists, whose belief in Christ's return depended on a quasi-literal reading of the Bible. However, they were not as concerned about geology, freely granting scientists any time they needed before the Edenic creation to account for scientific observations, such as fossils and geological findings. In the immediate post-Darwinian era, few scientists or clerics rejected the antiquity of the earth, the progressive nature of the fossil record. Likewise, few attached geological significance to the Biblical flood, unlike subsequent creationists. Evolutionary skeptics, creationist leaders and skeptical scientists were usually either willing to adopt a figurative reading of the first chapter of Genesis, or allowed that the six days of creation were not necessarily 24-hour days.

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