The question of origins has always fascinated the human mind. From the earliest times, the existence of life has mostly been attributed to supernatural intervention. However, naturalistic models of origins based on logic and philosophy can be traced to about the fifth century BC in Greece. Plato (428-348 BC) and Aristotle (384-322 BC) were the philosophers that probably had the greatest impact on western thought. Their idealistic view of striving for perfection laid the foundations for a naturalistic view of origins.

Plato's idealistic views had a profound effect on biology. To him, the structure and forms of organisms could be understood from their function which in turn was designed to achieve ultimate goodness and harmony imposed by an external creator.

Aristotle, the father of biology, expanded this idea to include the development of organisms and the origins of groups of organisms. To Aristotle, the adult form represented the final goal or telos, and the changes occurring during embryological development represented a striving towards the telos and is dictated by the telos.

Aristotle used this idea to develop a "scale of nature," in which he arranged the natural world on a ladder commencing with inanimate matter to plants, invertebrates, and vertebrates. Among the vertebrates, he placed the fish at the lowest rung of the ladder and humans on the highest rung. This "scale of nature"  represents a progression from the most imperfect to the most perfect. The concepts developed by the Greek philosophers retained their influence well into the 18th century and were nurtured by prominent thinkers such as Goethe (1749-1832), who believed that the origin of each level of organism was based on a fundamental primitive plan—an archetype—from which the more complex features and organisms developed.

Although these naturalistic models of origins have existed for many centuries, only since the work of Charles Darwin (1809-1882) has biological evolution become socially accepted. The ideas propagated by Darwin were totally in conflict with the Christian worldview of his time. The biblical account of Genesis was considered by church authorities to be the only correct version of origins and the age of the earth was measured by the number of generations since Adam. In contrast, the Darwinian concept of evolution required millions of years for the gradual change of form and structure required for the transition of one species into another.

The conflict between Christianity and Darwin centered largely on time and fixity of species. Ironically, Aristotle believed in the fixity of species, and Augustine (AD 345-430) had incorporated this concept into Christian thought. The European worldview in Darwin's time was thus that God had created immutable, unchangeable fixed species in the not-too-distant past.

Uniformitarianism vs. Catastrophism

The concept that the present is the key to the past is called Uniformitarianism. The term means that the processes in the world today existed in the past, and a study of present events can be used to create models of past events. Uniformitarianism has become basic to scientific thinking. In the science of geology in particular, it forms the cornerstone for modern concepts in geochronology.

Before 1780, Uniformitarianism was not readily accepted. The dominant doctrine was Catastrophism. According to this view, the earth's features and the fossil record were the consequence of a series of global catastrophes, each of which had wrought extensive changes, both in the physical features of the earth and in all living things.

James Hutton (1726-1797) first championed the idea of slow gradual change to account for changes in the earth's topography, but it was not until about 1830 that Charles Lyell (1797-1875), an Englishman sympathetic to the views of Hutton, documented Uniformitarianism in his interpretation of the origin of the rocks and landforms of western Europe. Lyell argued that the earth must be very old for its many geological changes to have taken place by such gradual processes.

On these islands, he found the most unusual collection of organisms—giant tortoises and iguanas, many unusual plants, insects, and reptiles and many varieties of finches. The finches in particular interested him, as these normally seed-eating birds adapted the insect-eating habits of other bird species, such as warblers, that did not exist in the Galapagos islands. The subtle changes in form, structure, and habit of the finches stirred the evolutionary thought in Darwin, leading him to begin his first notebook on the Transmutation of Species in 1837.

It seemed reasonable to Darwin that the organisms on the islands had been transformed over time and that the new structures and habits had developed over time. However, the mechanism for the transformation of species was not nearly as easy to explain as the assumption that such transformation had indeed occurred. It must be noted that the world at that time had no knowledge of the science of genetics. Gregor Mendel (1822-1884), the father of genetics, was a contemporary of Darwin, but his work was unknown to the world at large and unavailable to Darwin.

Lamarckism vs. Natural Selection

Lamarck was the first biologist to propose a mechanism for evolution. He proposed that organisms acquired features as they needed them. A giraffe would require a long neck because it strove to eat leaves high up in the trees, and birds that did not like swimming, but collected food in shallow water would develop long legs and become waders. Lamarck, at times, ascribed the process of evolution to some inner mystical vitalistic property of life (an ethereal fire).

Darwin, on the other hand, proposed the mechanism of natural selection as an evolutionary mechanism more acceptable to biologists. He defined the principle as follows:

As many more individuals of each species are born than can possibly survive, and as, consequently, there is a frequently recurring struggle for existence, it follows that any being, if it vary, however slightly, in any manner profitable to itself under the complex and sometimes varying conditions of life, will have a better chance of surviving and thus be naturally selected. From the strong principle of inheritance, any selected variety will tend to propagate its new and modified form.ⁱ

This theory provided a mechanism for change over time, but it was not until the science of genetics had developed and the concept of mutations was understood that the concept could be developed into its present-day form, in which mutations provide the material for variation and variation becomes the substance upon which natural selection could feed.

The basic difference between Lamarckism and Darwinism is thus that Lamarck proposed that adaptations were acquired because organisms needed them, whereas Darwinism states that the adaptations developed by chance through mutations and selection takes place by natural selection. In a sense, natural selection becomes the driving force for change. The basic Darwinistic view of origin by natural selection is upheld by most biologists today. They might vary on the mechanism of change, but the basic principles of Darwinism are deeply entrenched in current scientific thinking. Science today leaves little room for a literal interpretation of the Genesis account, let alone the short chronology associated with it. At best, scientists might ascribe to some form of theistic evolution where God is seen as the originator of life and the mechanisms of evolution as the "creator" of the varied life forms in existence today. This theory proposes that God used evolution to create people and all the other living organisms on Earth. A basic problem with this theory, however, is that the Bible declares that death is a consequence of sin, whereas natural selection sees death as an underlying principle for change. In essence, the two world views of origin by evolution or special creation seem mutually exclusive. 

In light of these differences, it is evident that it would take quite a degree of distortion to reconcile the two concepts. Indeed, the modern concept of scientific Creationism is largely frowned upon by the scientific community, and even subjected to open ridicule. Nevertheless, some new evidence strongly supports at least some of the arguments put forward by propagators of the Creation model, and there have been some major modifications in the thinking of even the Uniformitarianists. Even many geologists have come full circle in the past few years, accepting the possibility that some of the catastrophic events in our geological past may have had more than local significance.

Since scientist Luis W. Alvarez proposed in 1980 that an asteroid had collided with the earth and caused widespread destruction and extinction of species, there has been a greater acceptance of catastrophism as a causative agent in the shaping of geological features. Although the concept of a worldwide flood on the scale described in Genesis is still taboo, post-catastrophic floods are being regarded more and more as shapers of geological features that were previously considered to have developed as a consequence of Uniformitarian principles over thousands or millions of years. One example of such a change of position is the story of the Columbia River Dry Falls which are now considered to have been shaped by catastrophic floods at the end of the last ice age.

 i Monroe W. Strickberger, Evolution, 2nd edition, (London, Jones & Bartlett Publishers): 1996.