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Creation : God Vs. Nature

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Creation: God vs. Nature
Ideas and beliefs regarding human origin have plagued the minds of scholars and laymen alike since the beginning of humanity. How, then, did humans come to be? The Divine Creation Myth, as written in the Bible, was commonly accepted by Europeans as the real work of God. Thus, the creation of humanity in the Garden of Eden and the creation of all the animals was an instantaneous event of God 's creation rather than a gradual process. But it seems inevitable that eventually someone would question the explanation of "God" for why humans, plants, and animals exist the way they do. The work of Darwin and Wallace introduced the idea of the evolutionary theory, which changed the boundaries between humans and nature by …show more content…

Darwin’s theory of evolution disputes this single creation event in that his theory proposes that “the descent of all organisms [is] from common ancestors”—marked by his branching evolutionary model, the Tree of Life (Mayr, 1). Wallace, on the other hand, takes no outright stance on the idea of common descent—although it is theorized that he would agree with Darwin’s notion of the matter (Mayr, What Evolution Is; Costa, Popich). For Darwin, the key factor differentiating humans from their animal ancestors is their moral and intellectual faculties; unlike other animals, over time, humans undergo natural selection for not only physical traits but also for features that facilitate ethical and intellectual capacities (Mayr, What Evolution Is; Darwin, On Evolution). The ideals held by Darwin and Wallace clearly demonstrate the dissipation of the line previously drawn, by the creation myth, between human and animal origin—as it is replaced by their notion of common descent.
In his theories, Darwin relates the phenomena of natural selection in the wild and domestication of plants and animals by humans as parallel occurrences, only differing in the role humans play. Darwin advocates the stance that since humans are simply another force of nature, they act as a nature-like force in shaping desirable characteristics to become the highest

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