(Note: the blue horizontal menu bar directly above lists the subsections of "Evolution According to Contemporary Science." Beginning with "How Has Life Evolved?," be sure to read each of these subsections before moving on to the next primary section, "Evil, Ethics, and Human Values in an Evolving World.")

Evolution According to Contemporary Science: How a Darwinian Understands Nature
by Daryl P. Domning

Many devout Christians today believe that the story of creation found in the biblical book of Genesis must be taken literally (as indicating direct divine creation of the world in six 24-hour days only a few thousand years ago), or else the authority of scripture as a whole will be undermined. The fathers of the early church, however, understood the biblical "six-day" creation story metaphorically. Nonetheless, as the natural sciences developed in the West after the Middle Ages, and for lack of any obvious evidence to the contrary, the account of our origins given in Genesis 1-3 did come to be taken literally by natural scientists as well as by theologians. The events of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, including the Council of Trent in the sixteenth century and the condemnation of Galileo in the seventeenth, did nothing to encourage departures from this literalism, which remained the norm down to the nineteenth century.

At that time, discoveries in geology and biology by Hutton, Lyell, Wallace, Darwin, and others initiated a major upheaval in our views of human nature and prehistory. The idea of a six-day creation mere millennia in the past was shattered once and for all, giving way to a timescale for creation measured in billions of years.

Later, discoveries in nuclear physics made possible the development of radiometric dating and the actual measurement of when, during all those billions of years, specific natural events had occurred. Included among those events were radical rearrangements of the Earth's surface, with seas, mountains, climatic zones, and even entire continents shifting about as easily as stage scenery in an ever grander and lengthier play. Even the sequence of events recounted in Genesis 1-2 proved irreconcilable with the Earth's actual history as recorded by rocks and fossils.

Meanwhile, astronomy and astrophysics vastly expanded our understanding of space and time in the universe. We and our planet shrank to very small specks in a very big world, whose beginnings were very far removed in every way from our present state of affairs. The notion of the Earth and humanity being in any sense the center of this geometrically centerless universe came to look less and less tenable.

With these ever-expanding gulfs of time and space between the world's origin and ourselves, believers in a Creator began to think in terms of a creative process—natural laws acting over time—rather than direct divine fiat to describe Creation. The successful explication of these laws by Newton, Einstein, and the physical sciences in general drew around all of nature a firm line, within which God's direct tinkering was no longer required. If the Creator, in this view, had not necessarily lost interest in the material world, He or She had at least put its day-to-day operation on automatic pilot.

Words highlighted in green appear in the Glossary.