In my previous essay, I tried to illustrate the differences between what I call anti-evolutionism and creationism.  While an anti-evolutionist is concerned with refuting evolution, a creationist is interested in understanding scientific evidence from a creationist perspective.  As I noted, this is not a hard and fast distinction.  Lots of people have both tendencies.  Plenty of creationists like to use their theories to refute evolutionary explanations, but when creationists try to develop new theories, anti-evolution is not always a helpful strategy.  Take the origin of species, for instance.

In my previous essay, I tried to illustrate the differences between what I call anti-evolutionism and creationism.  While an anti-evolutionist is concerned with refuting evolution, a creationist is interested in understanding scientific evidence from a creationist perspective.  As I noted, this is not a hard and fast distinction.  Lots of people have both tendencies.  Plenty of creationists like to use their theories to refute evolutionary explanations, but when creationists try to develop new theories, anti-evolution is not always a helpful strategy.  Take the origin of species, for instance.

Early on in the debate over Darwin’s theory of evolution, anti-evolutionists were inclined to defend the view that species were fixed and could not evolve into other species.  This was the most natural response, since Darwin himself conceived of “independent creation” as an explanation for the origin of species.  By the early twentieth century, however, some creationists were beginning to suspect that species weren’t so stable after all.  In his 1924 book Phantom of Organic Evolution, George McCready Price wrote, “We seem to have in nature certain great groups of living creatures, call them what we will, genera, families, or tribes, but usually larger than 'species,' all the members of each of which have probably descended from common ancestors.”  It would be easy to see that claim as a sort of concession to evolution, but when we examine Genesis, we find no indication that the species that we know today were the same species that God created in the beginning.

One could also argue that since Price was no scientist, what would he know about species?  That might be a reasonable point if Price was alone in his conjecture, but the reality is that most twentieth-century creationists trained in biology agree with Price.  Frank Lewis Marsh (Ph.D. in botany) wrote an entire book arguing for speciation within “Genesis kinds.”  Today, I and many of my creationist colleagues engage in research to better understand these Genesis kinds, or baramins as Marsh called them.

Do we owe it all to Darwin?  Not entirely.  Few people know that scientists prior to Darwin also suggested that species had developed within limited, created groups.  For example, after famously advocating the creation of species, Linnaeus later changed his mind and suggested that species had developed naturally within the limits of a genus.  Likewise, Amaryllis breeder William Herbert also suggested that species developed within genera “If the Almighty created the original types capable of permanent variations under different circumstances” (Amaryllidaceae, 1837).  I suspect that without Darwin’s influence, creationist biology would have eventually come to recognize that species are not fixed but originate from other species.  Darwin sort of kickstarted the rejection of species fixity, but he did it in such a way as to alienate creationists and inspire anti-evolutionists.  So we creationists don’t really owe much to Darwin.  If anything, he slowed us down.

Dr. Todd Wood is the Executive Director of CORE at Bryan College.