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How did we get here? A brief history of the evolution vs. creationism debate

Gap theory, "old Earth creationism," and more.

The question for the evening.
Eric Bangeman

This week we saw Bill Nye the Science Guy and Ken Ham, President/CEO of Answers in Genesis and the Creation Museum, square off in a debate over whether Creationism remains a viable model of origins. As we noted in our story on the debate, there was a lot of talking past each other. A man whose beliefs are formed by a profound devotion to the scientific method exchanged ideas with a man whose beliefs are formed by a profound devotion to a literal reading of Genesis 1-2.

How did we get to this point? Why are Ken Ham and the Creation Museum wielding the Book of Genesis as a science text? We can begin to answer those questions with the text at hand.

The Book of Genesis

Therefore he brought up against them the king of the Chaldeans, who killed their youths with the sword in the house of their sanctuary... He took into exile in Babylon those who had escaped from the sword,
and they became servants to him and to his sons until the establishment of the kingdom of Persia. 

(2 Chronicles 36:17, 20)

There are a handful of different theories about the authorship and composition of Genesis, but most critical scholarship is in agreement that there was more than one source used and that the book wasn’t compiled into its present form until sometime around the middle of the first millennium BCE, perhaps as early as 700 BCE.

An Assyrian wall carving of prisoners being forced to play lyres. From the British Museum, dated between 790-592 BCE.

Even if you hold the view—as a handful conservative scholars do—that Genesis was written much earlier, it’s important to understand the audience for which the book was written. In this case, it was for a nation either about to go into exile or already living there (most of the residents of the ancient kingdoms of Israel and Judah were deported to Assyria and Babylon in the eighth and sixth centuries BCE, respectively). In this context, it can be argued that the creation accounts in Genesis 1-2 provide a corrective to the other creation accounts then prevalent in the Near East—critically, they purport to show how the Abrahamic God created the Universe.

An example of these other accounts: the Babylonian Enuma Elish creation myth says that the god Marduk created humankind from dust and the blood of a demon god. In contrast, the creation account in Genesis 2 says that God created humankind from the “dust of the ground” and “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life.”

It’s a stark contrast: on one hand, you have humankind resulting from an act of rebellion by a god. On the other, humankind comes from the generative, creative work of a loving god. It’s one of a number of examples of how Genesis 1-2 provided a contrasting origin account, and thereby an identity for a community in exile.

But even if you believe Genesis was written much earlier than the 7th century BCE by a single author, you still need to account for the original audience in your interpretation.

Early interpretation

In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day. (Genesis 1-1:5)

Regardless of whom you believe the intended audience of Genesis was, when it was written, and how it should be interpreted, you need to deal with the content of the first two chapters of the book at some point. Living in the 21st century as heirs to the Age of Enlightenment, the question we’re most prone to ask is “is it true?” Or as the Nye vs. Ham debate framed it, “Is creation a viable model of origins in today's modern scientific era?”

Strangely enough, some early Christians didn’t seem too concerned with that question. Origen, a third-century theologian in the Middle East, did not take the creation accounts in Genesis literally, writing in De Principis:

For who that has understanding will suppose that the first, and second, and third day, and the evening and the morning, existed without a Sun, and Moon, and stars? And that the first day was, as it were, also without a sky? And who is so foolish as to suppose that God, after the manner of a husbandman, planted a paradise in Eden, towards the east, and placed in it a tree of life, visible and palpable, so that one tasting of the fruit by the bodily teeth obtained life? ... I do not suppose that anyone doubts that these things figuratively indicate certain mysteries, the history having taken place in appearance, and not literally.

The earliest portrait of St. Augustine, in a sixth century Roman fresco.
St. Augustine, an important theologian of the late fourth and early fifth century and Bishop of Hippo (in what is now Algeria), argued that knowledge and reason trumped a literal interpretation of the Bible when conflict arose:

As I have noted repeatedly, if anyone, not understanding the mode of divine eloquence, should find something about these matters [about the physical universe] in our books, or hear of the same from those books, of such a kind that it seems to be at variance with the perceptions of his own rational faculties, let him believe that these other things are in no way necessary to the admonitions or accounts or predictions of the scriptures. In short, it must be said that our authors knew the truth about the nature of the skies, but it was not the intention of the Spirit of God, who spoke through them, to teach men anything that would not be of use to them for their salvation.

Given the nature of scientific inquiry in Christendom over the next millennium or so—or the lack thereof—the historicity of Genesis wasn’t much of a concern, so there was no reason to question the creation accounts in Genesis 1-2.

Reformation and rethinking

For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God—not the result of works, so that no one may boast. (Ephesians 2:8-9)

We see a significant movement toward a literalist interpretation of Genesis in the 16th century during the rise of Protestant Christianity. To understand why, it’s necessary to know what was taking place in the church at that time.

Even as intellectual life was reinvigorated during the Renaissance, the Roman Catholic Church was stuck in a period of spiritual decay. Want to get out of a few thousand years in Purgatory? The early-16th-century Catholic church would happily sell you indulgences to chip away at that long purgatorial sentence. That system, along with a number of other abuses, led to a reform movement that eventually split the church for the first time in over four centuries. Along with the reform movement came a renewed emphasis on the authority of the Bible as opposed to the authority of the institutional church and its traditions.

Martin Luther nails the Ninety-Five Theses to the door of the Wittenburg Church in an exhibit at the Creation Museum.
Eric Bangeman

First and foremost among the reformers was a German monk named Martin Luther. In 1517, he posted his Ninety-Five Theses on the door of the cathedral in Wittenburg, and the Protestant Reformation was off and running.

Luther and the other reformers emphasized the role of faith in salvation, teaching that faith alone was sufficient, rather than the combination of faith and works affirmed by the Catholic Church. Hand in hand with this doctrine of justification by faith was the doctrine of sola scriptura, that the Bible alone held all that was necessary for salvation and the leading of a holy life. Given his fierce devotion to the authority of Scripture, Luther read Genesis 1-2 far more literally than theologians of previous centuries.

“When Moses writes that God created heaven and earth and whatever is in them in six days, then let this period continue to have been six days... Since God is speaking, it is not fitting for you wantonly to turn His Word in the direction you wish to go,” wrote Luther in Kritische Gesamtausgabe.

Over in Geneva, Switzerland, reformer John Calvin didn’t mince words, either: “The duration of the world, now declining to its ultimate end, has not yet attained six thousand years,” he wrote in Institutes of the Christian Religion.

That was good enough for most Christians, at least for the next couple of centuries.

Here comes science

But blessed are your eyes, for they see, and your ears, for they hear. (Matthew 13:16)

As natural philosophers (and later scientists) gained the ability to engage in meaningful exploration of the natural world, the door opened to more questions about the Biblical creation accounts. James Hutton, who lived in the 1700s, revolutionized geology and used features of our planet to argue for the concept of deep time. And once Charles Darwin dropped On the Origin of Species on the world in 1859, the door was blown wide open.

Around the same time that Darwin was sailing on the HMS Beagle, German scholars were using archaeology and other historical records to reevaluate some of the claims made in the Bible. Emboldened by Rationalist and Enlightenment philosophy, they arrived at conclusions about Scripture that many Christians considered heretical.

Given the work of Darwin and Biblical critics, the events depicted in Genesis 1-2 (along with doctrines such as the virgin birth, deity of Christ, and infallibility of Scripture) came under unprecedented scrutiny, causing a crisis in the late 19th and early 20th century American church.

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