History of creationism: Encyclopedia II - History of creationism - Darwin

History of creationism - Darwin

In the 1860s, the concept of variation through natural selection first came to be widely understood. Charles Darwin (1809 - 1882) published The Origin of Species in 1859 suggesting that species had evolved by the process of natural selection. The theory of evolution would later develop through the 20th century; see history of evolutionary thought.

Darwin's book ignited a furious controversy in Victorian Britain, as it posed fundamental questions about the relationship between religion and science. Though Origin did not explicitly deal with human evolution, the jump was one both supporters and opponents of the theory immediately made, and the idea that man was simply an animal (common descent) who had evolved a particular set of characteristics — rather than a spiritual being created by God — proved to be one of the most divisive notions of the 19th century. One of the most famous disputes was the Oxford Debate of 1860, in which T.H. Huxley (1825 - 1895), Darwin's self-appointed "bulldog", debated evolution with "Soapy Sam" Wilberforce (1805 - 1873), the Bishop of Oxford. Both sides claimed victory.

Others in the scientific élite of the day were not as quick as Huxley to accept naturalistic evolution. Alfred Russel Wallace (1823 - 1913; with whom Darwin had first published on natural selection in 1858), and the American Asa Gray (1810 - 1888; with whom Darwin had corresponded before and after publication of The Origin) later both argued for special roles for a creator when applying the theory to humans.

In 1862, the Glaswegian physicist William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin) (1824 - 1907) published calculations, based on his presumption of uniformitarianism, that fixed the age of the Earth and the solar system at between 20 million and 400 million years, i.e. between ~3,000 and ~70,000 times Ussher's value. This came as a blow to Darwin's anticipated timescale, though the idea of an ancient Earth was generally accepted without much controversy. Darwin and Huxley, while not accepting the timing, said it merely implied faster evolution. It would take further advances in geology and the discovery of radioactivity to recalculate it to the present estimated 4 billion years, or ~700,000 times Ussher's value. A way to measure the age of the universe would be discovered by Edwin Hubble in the 1930s, but due to observational constraints, an accurate measurement of the Hubble constant would not be forthcoming until the late 1990s, giving an age of the universe of approximately 14 billion years or some ~2,000,000 times Ussher's value.

The Swiss-American palaeontologist Louis Agassiz (1807 - 1873) opposed evolution. He believed that there had been a series of catastrophes with divine re-creations, evidence of which could be seen in rock fossils. Catastrophism would remain a major paradigm in geology until it was replaced by new models which allowed for both cataclysms (such as meteor strikes) and gradualist patterns (such as ice ages) to explain observed geologic phenomena.

In 1878, American Presbyterians concerned about the implications of evolution for the accuracy of the Bible held the first annual Niagara Bible Conference, and thus founding the Christian fundamentalist movement.

Darwin died in 1882, and immediately there were rumours that he had repented and accepted God on his deathbed, spread by Lady Elizabeth Hope (1842 - 1922). The Lady Hope story is almost certainly false, and it is unlikely that she visited Darwin as she claimed.

It was during the debates of the 1870s and 1880s that the term "creationism" and "creationist" began to be used for the first time to refer to those who believed that God had some direct role in the creation of the different species of the Earth (the term had been used previously for the belief that God had created each person with a soul).

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Darwin", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki