The Theory of Evolution versus the Biblical Creation Story*
Up until mid-twentieth century, all we had was a succession of genus and species of ever-increasing complexity with unusually specific adaptations as continental drift separated species onto environments that were uniquely transformed over long stretches of time. No one could pinpoint the fine gradations of genetic alterations that would reveal precise processes of transformation. However, in the last decade, experimental biologists have generated such transformational processes of physical characteristics in fish and mammals and plotted their corresponding genetic alterations. In a parallel vein, around 1950, a woman scientist, Barbara McClintock presented her research studies in genetics and botany on the processes of spontaneous genetic mutations, or changes, in corn for which she later won the 1983 Nobel Prize in physiology and medicine. Since then, the study of natural mutations in plants and animals by ultraviolet radiation and Ionizing radiation, such as X-rays and gamma rays, have become so sophisticated that PhDs in biology regularly specialize in the laboratory study of micro processes of induced mutations in plants and animals as well as naturally occurring genetic alterations, their causes and rates of occurrence in nature, and their adaptation results.
The last half of the twentieth century there has been a worldwide proliferation of macro studies of the processes of evolution and the descent of species. Macro studies of the origin and age of the universe and its galaxies, nebulae, stars, planets and the like have made enormous strides. Similarly, micro studies of the origin of life have made great progress. Scientific studies on genetics, mutations, and the processes of the evolution of the species have progressed to the point that they have resulted in applications to commercially successful genetic modifications in plants, insects, animals, and the like. These scientific fields and their theories and hypotheses are now so well researched and so compelling that a person would have a very hard time discounting them in favor of the naïve Sunday School teacher’s lesson on Genesis and the Creation story.
In my personal experience as a teenager, seeing the cores brought up, while drilling for oil, from like five, ten, twenty thousand feet and even deeper below the surface of the earth was fantastic. These cores contained bits of fossils of plants, seashells, fish skeletons, and animal skeletons that had to be millions, even billions of years old. Also, once, when I was about fourteen years old, I found a fossil of an
intact, very large, Jurassic Ammonite, circa 190 million years ago, , about a foot in diameter, on a hill in Fort Worth where my Great Aunt lived. The Jurassic Period was about the time that Texas was under water and as the sea gradually receded it left behind, on Texas Mountains and prairies, these vestiges from the ocean's floor. This, and the cores from my father’s oil wells, generated in me an intense interest in paleontology and evolution.
On the one hand, a well-educated, well-informed person knows that there is an enormous wealth of research studies into the descent of species and the processes of evolution carried on in major universities around the world. On the other hand, if sitting in Sunday school and hearing about the Creation story, without any background in Old Testament studies, a young student is most likely to interpret what they hear as an actual description of the origin and age of the earth and of the universe. if the student were to accept this literal, 'Sunday School lesson', interpretation and later have to compare it with contemporary research in Astronomy, Paleontology, Biology, and all of the vast numbers of related sciences that clearly conflict with such a literal, biblical, interpretation of Creation, surely anxious dissonance would result.
There are almost no theological seminaries that take Genesis as a literal Creation theory. If a theology professor specializing in Old Testament studies were to come into a Sunday School class, such as the described above, and instruct the class about the proper way to interpret Genesis, this dissonance would dissipate or not arise in the first place.
*Tree of Evolution: http://www.google.com/search?q=tree+of+evolution&hl=en&sourceid=gd&rlz=1D2GGLD_enUS362US362