Progressive creationism
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Progressive creationism is the religious belief that God created new forms of life gradually, over a period of hundreds of millions of years. As a form of Old Earth creationism, it accepts mainstream geological and cosmological estimates for the age of the Earth, but posits that the new "kinds" of plants and animals that have appeared successively over the planet's history represent instances of God directly intervening to create those new types by means outside the realm of science. Progressive creationists generally reject macroevolution as biologically untenable and not supported by the fossil record, and they generally reject the concept of universal descendence from a last universal ancestor.
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[edit] Historical development
In the early 19th century many such theories were produced by scientists looking to explain developments in geology but opposed to what they saw as atheistic Lamarckian evolution, disreputably associated with the French Revolution and radical democratic agitators, although the term "creationism" would not be coined until the late 19th century. In the early 1830s the geologist Sir Charles Lyell set out a gradualist theory in which each species was sequentially produced in its "centre of creation" and was designed for the habitat, but would go extinct when the habitat changed. This view was supported by John Herschel and developed in the direction of Evolutionary creationism by Charles Babbage.
By 1836 the anatomist Richard Owen had theories influenced by Johannes Peter Müller that living matter had an "organising energy", a life-force that directed the growth of tissues and also determined the lifespan of the individual and of the species. In the 1850s Owen developed ideas of "archetypes" in the Divine mind producing a sequence of species in "ordained continuous becoming". Following publication of The Origin of Species Owen became a bitter critic of Darwin, arguing his own "axiom of the continuous operation of the ordained becoming of living things" in which new species appeared at birth, not through natural selection.
[edit] Modern progressive creationism
Although many Young Earth creationists equate progressive creationism with theistic evolution, it is distinct in that God is seen to regularly involve himself in the process of species development through special creative acts. Most notably, most progressive creationists would state that God specially created Adam directly as opposed to breathing life into a sub-human primate.
Therefore homo-sapiens (humans) would not have a soul/spirit until the time of Adam appearing in the Genesis account. This Adam possibly then was created not following the natural evolutionary processes.
Proponents of the Progressive creation theory include Millard Erickson, neo-evangelical theologian Bernard Ramm, and astronomer-turned-apologist Hugh Ross, whose organization, Reasons To Believe, accepts the scientifically determined age of the Earth but seeks to disprove Darwinian evolution. Answers in Creation is another organization, setup in 2003, which supports progressive creationism. The main focus of Answers In Creation is to provide rebuttals to the scientific claims of young earth creationism which are widely regarded as a pseudoscience.
[edit] Interpretation of Genesis
- See also: Creation according to Genesis
Most progressive creationists reject a strict literalist approach to Genesis chapter 1, and prefer interpretative options such as the day-age theory or the literary framework view. A range of views regarding the literal historicity of Genesis chapters 2-11 exists. The majority of progressive creationists would contend that Noah's flood was a regional rather than global event, although differences of opinion might exist concerning its precise geographical extent.
[edit] References
- Eugenie C. Scott (December 7, 2000). NCSE Resource. The Creation/Evolution Continuum. NCSE. Retrieved on 2007-11-19.
- Desmond, Adrian & Moore, James (1991), Darwin, London: Michael Joseph, Penguin Group, ISBN 0-7181-3430-3
