Creation and Evolution

Christian responses to the theory of evolution range across a spectrum this atlas records as documented positions rather than a single settled Christian view. Young Earth Creationism holds that Genesis describes a recent, literal six day creation and rejects the standard scientific chronology of the earth and universe. Old Earth Creationism accepts the ages given by modern geology and astronomy while still rejecting common descent, the claim that species share ancestry through evolutionary processes. Theistic Evolution, also called evolutionary creation, accepts the scientific account of evolution as the means through which a divinely governed creation unfolded, a position the Catholic Church has moved toward with increasing openness since permitting study of the evolutionary origin of the human body in the 1950 encyclical Humani Generis, while continuing to teach that the human soul is directly and specially created by God.

Intelligent Design argues that specific features of biological life show evidence of design detectable by scientific method, without necessarily specifying a young earth, a position that has not been adopted as doctrine by any major religious body. Biblical Inerrancy as a controlling premise treats a particular reading of scriptural authority as the starting point from which a position on origins follows, while non-concordist and literary readings treat Genesis as making theological rather than scientific claims and read its creation narrative accordingly.

The six documented positions do not disagree along a single axis, and treating the debate as one simple line between religion and science obscures more than it clarifies. The age of the universe and earth separates Young Earth Creationism from every other position listed, since Old Earth Creationism already accepts the standard scientific chronology while still rejecting common descent, showing that accepting geological and cosmological age does not by itself settle the separate question of evolutionary common ancestry. Whether the human soul specifically requires distinct, non-evolutionary divine creation is a further, separate question on which Theistic Evolution as taught within Catholicism takes an explicit position, accepting bodily evolution while requiring the soul's direct creation, a combination not available to positions that either reject evolution outright or that reject any specially created element within the human person at all.

The most basic disagreement running underneath all six positions concerns biblical interpretive method, whether Genesis is read as making claims of the same kind natural science makes, which non-concordist and literary readings deny, or as making claims that must be reconciled with or checked against scientific findings on shared ground, which the other positions in different ways affirm. This atlas records each position as its proponents state it, without adjudicating which reading of Genesis or which account of human origins is correct.