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Creation or creationism

John Cornwell

Published 08 January 2009

Observations on science

Museum assistant and skeleton at the Darwin exhibition in London

Creation or creationism

The other day I went along to see the Darwin exhibition at the Natural History Museum in London.

There's a mock-up of the HMS Beagle, in which Darwin made his famous voyage, and collections of items he brought back to England. There are fossils, and stuffed finches, and samples of his notebooks; there are even amplified sounds of birds, bringing the South American jungles to South Kensington.

In place of honour there's a pair of mockingbirds that Darwin found on the Galapagos Islands. He realised that these birds were different from others of the same species he had noted on the mainland of South America: larger, with longer bills and darker feathering. So it dawned on him that species were not fixed and permanent. Every kind of life form has the capacity to change, to mutate through blind natural selection.

This seems to fly in the face of Genesis, the Bible story that explains how the world and all its creatures, including our first parents, were created by God in six days; and tells how all species, including our first parents, were created fixed and immutable from the very beginning. Taking the word of the Bible literally, some scholars have worked out that this occurred about 5,000 years ago. This literalist version of the creation story is widely known as creationism.

The organisers of the Darwin exhibition have displayed some historical facts and quotations illustrating the clash between Darwin's theory of evolution and religious belief in the Bible story, a conflict that has been going on ever since Darwin published his Origin of Species in 1859. But there's a quotation on display, by Pope John Paul II, which tells a different story. John Paul insisted that the Catholic Church sees no essential contradiction between evolutionary science and Christianity. He was saying, in effect, that the Book of Genesis is not a scientific textbook. Genesis, he was saying, is about symbolic truth rather than scientific facts. The symbolic truth of Genesis is about creation: that God is the creator and origin of all things.

The difference between believing in God's creation and believing in creationism, then, comes down to how we read. It is possible, by reading Genesis with an eye to its poetic values, to believe in creation and in Darwin's theory as the providential process whereby creation occurred. So, in 2009, a year in which we celebrate the bicentenary of Darwin's birth, there's no reason why those people who believe in the God of the Bible shouldn't celebrate Darwin's remarkable theory, and at the same time rejoice in the truth and mystery of God's creation.

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3 comments from readers

Carl Jones
08 January 2009 at 22:09

John, I think its somewhere in between. I don`t believe either account.

I know it seems low brow, but one day I was listening to BBC Radio 5 Live, with Victoria Jackboot Derbyshire and they were doing a phone-in about Darwin and the rest of it. One guy phoned in, just an ordinary guy (as far as I could tell) and he demolished Darwin`s theory. Of course, Victoria was lost, as she hadn`t been briefed by the SIS. Now, I`m not the brightest spark on the planet, but this guy blew me away, in fact, a woman phoned and said she wanted to hear more.

Darwin`s theory is racist, it implies that I am white and that I should have no respect for other races, to hell with the black man, kill the Chinese....where does it stop?

Darwin covers only a tiny portion of our natural world and even then, none of it can be proved. I find it AMAZING that our Moon is so ingnored. I remember reading a BBC article by some well known astronomer. This article claim the Moon was formed by Mars and Earth colliding....LOL....I sent her an email, I never received a reply, not supprising when I pointed out the error of her ways.

The Moon is older than all the known planets in our solar system, but is younger than our Sun. So, somehow, our Moon managed to wander into our solar system, avoiding all the larger outer planets with their equally large gravitational fields, only to park itself in the most purfect orbit around Earth (how did little Earth do this?)....the great story about "life on Earth", isn`t the great question...no, the GREAT QUESTION, is the construction of our solar system. The size and PRECISE position of the Moon, is by far, a much more important question, than life on Earth.

The US has photographed the dark side (dark to humans) of the Moon in great detail, but the US government decided that 36,000 pictures needed to be CLASSIFIED....I wonder why?LOL

Contin.

Carl Jones
08 January 2009 at 22:27

Darwin and the Bible is a convenient public blindfold. Gary McKinnon has done more than anyone to shed light on what it going on. Even the "big bang" theory is a load of tosh...perpetuated to maintian funding. THEY claim the universe is 14 billion years old and that we can see things as they were over 13 billion years ago, sorry, but its poppycock and Darwin is a cornerstone in the house of cards, much like Rubin in the current designed financial crisis.

My own thoughts, which aren`t relient on funding, is that there was some form of intelligent design, but not a God. This might explain why a UFO hit a wind turbine.LOL :)

sweety
13 January 2009 at 04:41

Ok. we perhaps should follow your suggestion, but priests, curates, monsiegners and the like were at the cutting edge of scientifc discovery. Find me an Inman who is interested in Mockingbirds, or even social cooperation in babblers in the Negev?

Even David Attenborough has been hijacked for political rhetorical purposes , a fate that befelled Darwin's, brilliant contemporary, Wallace who gave his mind over to seances and the ilk.