The evolution-creationism debate deals with attempts to explain the ultimate causes of order in the living world. Some people think that order arose from natural evolutionary causes. Others think it arose from divine creative intelligence. A third group thinks it arose from divine intelligence working through natural causes.

Nature of the Debate

This debate can be traced back as far as ancient Greece, where it appears in Plato's philosophical dialogues. More recently the debate has been between followers of the Bible and followers of the scientist Charles Darwin (1809–1882). The opening chapters of the Bible relate how God created the world in six days and created human beings in his image. In The Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871) Darwin discusses how all the forms of life could have evolved by natural law, in which the heritable traits that enhanced reproductive...