Evolution and Creationism in the Term Paper

Countless fossils and remnants of ancient limbs (such as the legs found on a dolphin recently) continue to back up the theory of how animals evolved from other forms of life and other kinds of bodies. For instance, whales and dolphins (proven by DNA to be related) have the vestiges of legs within their sleek bodies and their front "fins" have bones that correspond to human hands, rather than fish fins. They have been traced from an ungulate that evolved on land, then returned to the sea and adapted to that environment. Of course this took millions of years, but the bones and fossils of ancient whales back up this long history (Whitehead, 2003).

Creationism is the view that rejects scientific theories that contradict the stories of those events that are expressed in the Bible. Bishop Samuel Wilberforce of Oxford, in the 1880's, found the idea of human beings being "ascended from lesser creatures" as blasphemous and insulting and kept Darwin from being conferred as a knight by complaining about such to Queen Victoria. Creationists also reject the scientific theories regarding the origin of life (as coming from the "warm stew" of the sea, where cells got together and formed life forms in water), the origin of the human species (as evolving from primitive "cave men" who began to stand upright and whose brains developed gray matter to begin to develop society and modern humans), the geologic history of the earth (that it formed from being completely covered by water, from which land arose and then split up over eons of time to become the continents -- which are still drifting about, creating earthquakes and falling into the ocean), the formation of the solar system (that the sun is a small star which probably split off from other stars in other galaxies, and that pieces of the sun or other planets formed earth), and finally the origin of the universe - that God didn't create earth in seven days, but that the earth was formed over millions of years of time.

A second kind of creationism is "Creational Spirituality," expressed by Matthew Fox. Fox "reminds his followers that awe is the appropriate response to the unfathomable wonder that is creation - from the magnificence of galaxies, to the complex and brilliant process of cell-differentiation, and the miracle of the human hand (product of 14 billion years of evolution)." (Fox, 2006, back cover)

The third kind of creationism is called Neo-Creationism. These creationists deliberately distance themselves from the other two forms. They want to put religion back into the science studies in public schools, to allow the Bible theory to be one of the choices of theories that are given to school children as to how the earth was formed and mankind came into being. They want science to not be atheistic (without God), but for God to be considered as taking part in the whole creation process.

References

Darwinism," (2004). Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford, CA. Stanford University Press.

Darwin, C. (1962). The Origin of the Species, New York: Modern Library,

Futuyma, D.J. (1982). Science on Trial: The Case for Evolution, New York: Pantheon Books.

Fox, M. (2006). The A.W.E. Project: Reinventing Education, Reinventing the Human. New York: Copperhouse Publishing.

Harrold, F.B., and R.A. (1987.) Eve Cult Archeology and Creationism: Understanding Pseudoscientific Beliefs about the Past, 1st ed., Iowa City, Iowa: University of Iowa Press.

Whitehead, H. (2003). Sperm Whales: Social Evolution….....