Darwininsm is the particular view of how evolution had occurred propounded by Charles Darwin in his On the Origin of Species first published in 1859. The two pillars of darwinism is 1) universal common ancestry (i.e., all forms of life have ultimately descended from a single common ancestor somewhere in the past, and 2) natural selection (a naturally occurring creative process that acted on random variations to 'select' those best fitted to survive). Central also to darwinism is that evolution had occurred gradually; the idea of saltation, i.e., evolution may have occurred by spurts is anathema to darwinism.
Though Darwin offered a very elegant explanation of evolution by natural selection, many branches of the scienced needed to provide with an emperical evidential base, such as genetics (how the traits from one generation are passed on to the next), paleontology (the study of fossils), geology (the story of rocks and the question whether there was enough time for the process of evolution to occur gradually as Darwin's theory requires), were still in their infancy. In particular, the pronouncement by Lord Kelvin a few years later that calculations based on the rate of the Earth's cooling showed that the Earth was a mere 100 million years old—far insufficient for Darwin's theory to work—dealt darwinism a serious blow (though Lord Kelvin's calculations were later to be proved wrong). Though, after a period of rigorous debate, the idea of evolution itself became wide-spread, darwinism as such went into decline. It was not until the 1920s when the (re-)discoveries of Gregor Mendel's work on the inheritance of traits in pea plants re-energized the study of genetics, and new findings in the following decade enabled a new synthesis, especially by scientists like T. H. Morgan, Ronald Fisher, J. B. S. Haldane, Theodosius Dobzansky, and Julian Huxley, of Darwin's theory. This new synthesis became known as neo-darwinism. Today the terms darwinism and neo-darwinism are usually understood as synonymous.
A question many Christians would ask is whether darwinism is antithethecal to the Christian faith. The answer despends. Almost always, modern darwinists also assume that the process of evolution by natural selection is a random, chance event; i.e., it is undirected. This is the position insisted upon by 'darwinian fundamentalists such as Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, two of what Alvin Plantiga calls the Four Horsemen of the New Atheism. If darwinism is thus defined then, of course, it is antithetical to any theistic beliefs. Theistic evolutionists, however, do not believe the process of evolution, even by natural selection, is unguided. There is in fact, they argue, no evidence that evolution is undirected; God, they claim, used the process of evolution and is its director and lord. Seen from this perspective, of course, darwinin evolution need not be antithethecal to the Christian faith.
Further Reading & Resources:
☰ John D. Hannah, "Bibliotheca Sacra and Darwinism: an analysis of the ninetheenth-century conflict between science and theology," Grace Theological Journal 4.1 (1983): 37-58.
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