Encyclopedia of Evolution.pdf - Online Reading Center

creationism
explained these observations by appealing to epicycles, which
are smaller revolutions within the larger revolution of the
planets around the Earth. Copernicus realized that the calculations
were much simpler if one assumed that the planets were
circling the Sun, not the Earth. (Interestingly, Copernicus also
had to appeal to epicycles, since he assumed planetary motions
were circular. Physicist and astronomer Sir Isaac Newton was
later to demonstrate that planetary orbits were elliptical.)
Copernicus feared that such a view might be considered
heretical. When he published his views in 1514, it was
in a handwritten treatise (Little Commentary) circulated only
among his friends. He stated basic axioms which became the
basis of his major book, De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium
(On the revolutions of the heavenly orbs), which he
began writing the following year. Among the axioms were
that the Earth is not the center of the universe; the distance
from the Earth to the Sun is miniscule compared with its distance
to the stars; the rotation of the Earth accounts for the
apparent movement of stars across the sky each night; the revolution
of the Earth accounts for the apparent movements of
the Sun and stars over the course of a year; and the apparent
backward motion of the planets was caused by the movement
of the observer, on the Earth. All of these things are understood
by educated people today, but in Copernicus’s time the
very concept that “the Earth moves” was revolutionary.
Copernicus’s progress on his book was slow, partly
because he hesitated to announce his theories, and partly
because he spent a lot of time as a government administrator,
attempting to prevent war between Poland and the Germans
and then dealing with the consequences of war. The book was
not published until immediately before his death. Copernicus
left his manuscript with a Lutheran theologian, who without
the author’s knowledge removed the preface and substituted his
own, in which he claimed the work was not intended as literal
truth but just as a simpler way of doing astronomical calculations.
Although many scholars were and are appalled at this
substitution, it may have prevented Copernicus’s work from
being condemned outright. Had Copernicus lived to see what
happened to other astronomers such as Galileo Galilei, who
defended the view that the Earth moved around the Sun, he
might have been even more hesitant about publishing his work.
Copernicus’s revelation that the Earth revolved around
the Sun is considered by many historians to be the decisive
work that broke the unscientific medieval view of the world
and opened the way for scientific research. Copernicus’s
dedication to observation over theology made all subsequent
scientific work, including the development of evolutionary
science, possible. He died on May 24, 1543.
Further Reading
Copernicus, Nicolaus. On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres.
Trans. by Charles Glenn Wallis. Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus, 1995.
Gingerich, Owen. The Book Nobody Read: Chasing the Revolutions
of Nicolaus Copernicus. New York: Walker and Company, 2004.
O’Connor, J. J., and E. F. Robertson. “Nicolaus Copernicus.” Available
online. URL: http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/
Mathematicians/Copernicus.html. Accessed March 23, 2005.
creationism Creationism is the belief that evolutionary science
is wrong and that the history of the Earth and life can
be explained only by numerous miracles. There is a range of
beliefs ranging from the most extreme forms of creationism
to evolutionary science:
• Young-Earth creationists insist that the universe and all its
components were created recently by God and the entire
fossil record was produced by a single flood, the Deluge of
Noah.
• Old-Earth creationists believe that the Earth is old but that
life-forms were created miraculously throughout the history
of the Earth.
• Theistic evolutionists accept the general outline of the
evolutionary history of life on Earth but believe that God
intervened miraculously, perhaps subtly, in the evolutionary
process.
• Deists believe that God set the natural laws in motion at
the beginning and has not physically acted upon the universe
since that time. Deism, in terms of scientific evidence,
cannot be distinguished from evolutionary science, except
perhaps in cosmology (see universe, origin of).
In the review that follows, the young-Earth definition is
used. Creationism consists of a creationist theology, in which
the Christian Bible is interpreted literalistically, and “creation
science,” in which scientific information is presented to support
those literalistic Bible interpretations.
Although many evolutionary scientists believe in God
(see essay, “Can an Evolutionary Scientist Be Religious?”),
evolutionary science operates under the assumption that God,
if God exists, has not influenced the processes that are being
studied.
The fundamental assumption of creationists is that creationism
is the only alternative to a completely nontheistic
evolutionary philosophy; most consider creationism to be
the only alternative to atheism. For this reason, creationists
spend a great deal of time attacking aspects, sometimes
even details, of evolutionary science. They imply, but seldom
directly state, that if evolutionary science has even one flaw,
then any reasonable person must accept all of the tenets of
biblical literalism, from the six days of Genesis to the Flood
of Noah. Most religious people, not only in mainstream but
also in conservative Christian churches, accept at least some
aspects of evolutionary science and have done so for more
than a century (see “American Scientific Affiliation” and the
book by Matsumura in Further Reading). Many prominent
evolutionists have been religious (see Gray, Asa; Teilhard
de Chardin, Pierre; Dobzhansky, Theodosius). Despite
this, creationists attempt to increase their support base by
presenting themselves as the only alternative to atheism.
There is a limited amount of diversity in creationist
beliefs. For example, many creationists do not believe that
God created each species, as defined by modern science, separately;
they believe instead that God created separate “kinds,”
an undefined category that may refer to species, genus, family,
or other level of taxonomic classification (see Linnaean
system). Creationists have even invented a new taxonomic