The Validity of Creationism and Evolution Essay -- Science Creationism

The Validity of Creationism and Evolution Abstract: This paper discusses the validity of both creation and evolution and examines whether they can interact with each other. Besides doing my own research, I have chosen to interview four people extensively involved in either Christianity or biology. I specifically picked interviewees who strongly supported either evolution or creation to get both sides of the issue. Two of the people were from United Christian Fellowship (UCF): Andrew Larratt-Smith, leader of UCF, and Ricardo Dawkins, UCF small group member. I also interviewed two biologists: Paul Matsudaira, MIT Biology professor, and Bettina Bauer, a post-doctoral fellow in the HST department. Paul considers his religious beliefs in between agnosticism and Catholic. He was baptized in the Roman Catholic church but has not thought about God extensively. Bettina is neither religious nor anti-religious. She says that if God really exists, it would not change her life. From these interviews, I hoped to gain a better understandi ng of creation and evolution and examine whether they can co-exist. Creationism is based on the belief that God is the intelligent Designer who created our universe and the natural things in it. It is derived from the two stories of Genesis. The first of the stories (Genesis 1:1-2:3) states that God created the heavens and the earth, light, water, vegetation, animals, and then man in the image of him. In the second account (2:4-2:9), God made the heavens and the earth, water, man from the dust, and then vegeta-tion and animals. Clearly these two accounts differ from each other in terms of order. The response I received from creationists (Andrew) was that the Bible must not always be taken literall... ...onists want to put the hand of God behind various scientific processes, scientists cannot show that they are incorrect. His reasoning is that religion is dogmatic and not scientific in its nature. In conclusion, history has shown that religion and science can interact, and that reli gion has adjusted to the renewing knowledge of science. Therefore, the claim that science and religion are in separate spheres is not solid reasoning to avoid interrelating the two. However, religion as a whole does not need to obey scientific laws, nor can it be proved through repeatable experiments. It may never be disproved by science because its strength is gathered from the faith of its followers. Hence when scientific theories such as evolution extend itself to answer questions of why humans were created and what began life, it will ultimately fail in its attempts.