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History of Evolution
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A BRIEF INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF EVOLUTION
by Gerardus D. Bouw, Ph.D.
It will come as a surprise to many to learn that evolution is not a modern idea, spawned by the pressure of scientific evidence. Evolution’s roots go back several millennia; back to ancient Babylon and Sumer.
The word “evolution” means “unfolding.” When applied to the creation of the universe it tacitly supposes that God, at best, had a more-or-less passive role in the history of the creation. By “God” I mean, of course, the God of the Bible.
The ancients had other gods which they held accountable for the creation. The earliest surviving extra-Biblical account of the creation came to us from the ancient Babylonians. The Babylonian creation accounts are typified by that found in the Epic of Gilgamesh. From said epic we learn that the Babylonians believed the universe to have had a chaotic beginning.
Some centuries later, under Alexander the Great, the Greeks inherited the Babylonian culture, complete with its mythology. In the Greek writings we find a strong reinforcement of the superstition of evolution: that the world as we now know it was not created in its present form and that the life it bears evolved into its present forms through tens of millennia. To the Greeks the creator of the universe was the god, Chaos. The most prominent Greek advocates of evolution were Thales, Anaximenes, Aristotle and Lucretius.
Although the Greek myths of the creation were interpolated from the Babylonian before 200 B.C., we can still find the same myth in modern “science.” Today, “scientists” no longer share quite the same animistic theological bent as held by the ancient Greeks and so it is that modern “science” does not claim that the god, Chaos, created the universe. So as not to smack of the supernatural, “science” instead drops the title “god” and writes the “god’s” name with a lower-case letter. Hence modern “science” claims that the cosmos came into being, by chance (or chaos) and that it had a chaotic beginning (that is, it exploded into existence). Though other terminology may be used today, the idea is still basically the same as that held by the ancient Greeks; the only difference being that the modern version of cosmogony avoids using the words “god” and “creator”.
The speculation that the universe had a chaotic origin is not the only place where modern “science” partakes of the fables of the ancients. Circa A.D. 50 Hinduism was born with its belief in the life cycles of reincarnation. The Hindus extrapolated the reincarnation theme to the very universe itself. To them the universe was reborn only to die, only to be reborn, only to die, and so on and so on. Today we find the same whim alive and well in modern “science” here some variations of the “Big-Bang” have the universe exploding into existence and then collapsing back onto itself only to blaze forth again in another “Big-Bang” only to die again only to be reborn and so on and so on. Lest the reader think it merely a coincidence, we submit that the original model for the “oscillating Big-Bang” (also called the “gnaB-giB”) had a “reincarnation” life-cycle of about 50 billion years. This “happens” to be the same cycle time held by the Hindus. Furthermore, at the time that the “gnaB-giB” model was proposed, the universe was held to be about 7 billion years old -- the same age the Hindus hold for this present reincarnation. (Actually, the Hindus claim to know that age to the exact year.)
But the Hindu model of the universe was not the first reincarnation model. Before them a hierarchical cult, called the “Cabalists” for their reverence of a mystical book called the Cabala, had advocated that the universe would undergo seven “reincarnation” cycles of seven thousand years each. Each seven-thousand year cycle would have its seventh millennium as that of the Lord’s rest. It is from the Caballists that we have received the “Gap theory” of creation -- the belief that a pre-existent world is referred to in Genesis 1:1 and that said world was destroyed and that the creation account starting at Genesis 1:2 is actually a re-creation and does not at all describe the creation.
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