Darwin, God, and Creation

Abstract

Charles Darwin drove a stake into the heart of religious belief in 1859 when he published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. Darwin proved that the biblical account of creation is a fairy tale of epic proportions. The biblical narrative tells the story of the miraculous creation in six days of the heavens and the earth and all that they contain. God speaks the world into existence one day, then shapes and populates it over the next few days. Finally, God breathes into the dust of the earth and creates the first man, Adam, and from Adam he extracts a rib and fashions the first woman, Eve. Prior to the fall of Adam, there was no suffering and no death. Finally, the Bible offered a means by which the days of the earth could be numbered: by tracing back the chronology of events recorded therein, the seventeenth-century Irish Bishop James Ussher calculated that the earth’s birthday was October 23, 4004 bc.¹