The opening chapters of Genesis give a historical account of the origin of the world. They do not amount to a scientific theory (though they contain the kernel of one), and whether they should be classed as myth or not will depend on whether they are true. That question has become increasingly complicated over the last two hundred years. Today the dominant world-view is Darwinian evolutionism, a science-based account which has supplanted the Genesis narrative and it has all the authority of an explanation that man has worked out for himself. Historical tradition plays no role. In reaction against this revolution, biblical creationism attempts to give a scientific account that upholds the Genesis narrative.

‘Evolutionism’ is the doctrine that the history of the universe was determined solely by natural causes; that these causes eventually gave rise to the earliest form of life; and that from this simplest form all subsequent organisms descended. The beginning of all things is dated to about 13 billion years ago and the origin of the Earth to about 4.5 billion years ago. From their different perspec- tives, modern cosmology, biology and geology have all contributed to this story. The term ‘Darwinian’ refers to the fact that some of the biological foundations for modern evolutionism were laid down by Charles Darwin.

The ‘ism’ at the end of the word denotes a belief system. Evolutionism is therefore not the mere acceptance of the observational fact that organisms have changed over time and new species arisen from old. Rather, it interprets the fact that species have diversified as evidence that all forms of life came into existence through a process of diversification and upgrading their own biological programs. The theory of evolution (i) rests on the observational fact that species must have multiplied, (ii) proposes a mechanism for the fact (the natural selection of chance variation), and then (iii) links all organism, from the simplest to the most complex, into a genealogical continuum of ‘numerous, successive, slight modifications’.

‘Creationism’ is the doctrine that the universe came into being through the will of a supreme being who was, and is, outside time and space, that he made land and sea and everything in them in six days, and that he subsequently destroyed them in a global flood. The beginning of the universe is dated to less than 10,000 years ago, maybe even 6,000 years ago. The term ‘biblical’ refers to the fact that believers take the book of Genesis as their starting point rather than Darwin’s Origin of Species (or the assumptions underlying the book), and they base their date of less than 10,000 years on the Genesis genealogies, assumed to record the number of years between Adam and Abraham without abridgement. As an apologetic movement, creationism goes back to the ‘Scriptural geologists’ of the 19th century, but it was only following the publication of The Genesis Flood by John Whitcomb and Henry Morris in 1961 that it made an appreciable impact.

Creationism is also a belief system, and therefore not to be confused with acceptance of the observational fact that organisms show design. One can draw the conclusion that organisms were created without believing that they were created in their present form or that the universe came into existence only 6-10,000 years ago, looking much as it does now.

Evolutionism and creationism are em- broiled in a propaganda war. Champions of Darwinism claim that ‘evolution is a fact’ and dismiss creationism as religion masquerading as science. Champions of creationism, conversely, claim that Darwinism is a pseudo-religion: if one interprets the facts in accordance with the Bible, it becomes clear that God made the world and Noah’s Flood produced its fossils. In their sense of conviction and unwillingness to look for common ground, both sides are similar to each other. It is not only creationists who start from a fixed position and then look for facts to support it.

What, then, makes a theory scientific? Perhaps it is the reliance on data gathered by scientific methods? Perhaps it is the investigation and explanation of physical processes in terms of cause and effect. We don’t have to come up with a definitive answer, but one characteristic a scientific theory must have is the capability of being falsified. The crux of the matter is not whether there is evidence which the theory satisfies – other theories may be able to do the same – but whether evidence exists which contradicts the theory.

In this sense, because they are falsifiable, Darwinian evolutionism and biblical creationism both have the characteristics of a scientific theory.

And both have been falsified, notwithstanding that they continue to be advocated as vigorously as ever. Adherents believe in them and promote them for all they are worth despite their having failed as scientific theories. Both beliefs – as each party indeed says of the other – function as myth, satisfying the basic questions about where life came from and where it is going, and determining how reality is perceived. They provide the rules which govern the interpretation of everything else. As they go to the core of one’s being, they are immune from investigation and generate only taboos.

If the two doctrines are both wrong, there must be a third possibility, as succeeding parts of this website argue. The following summaries are restricted to showing just how comprehensively current theories have been falsified.