nd find themselves opposing the theory of evolution as articulated by Darwin's On the Origin of Species, first published in 1859.
The theological paradigm, indeed, faces seemingly insurmountable obstacles vis-à-vis the naturalistic paradigm. Darwinian theory accounted for the evolution of life in terms of nature, not in terms of faith. The theory, says Kuhn, "recognized no goal set either by God or nature" (171).
Instead, natural selection, operating in the given environment and with the actual organisms presently at hand, was responsible for the gradual but steady emergence of more elaborate, further articulated, and vastly more specialized organisms (Kuhn 172).
That approach to giving an account of the human position in the cosmos was surely enough to doom Darwin to literalist religious censure. The power of faith to exert an impact culture, particularly in America, persisted through the 19th century, through the 20th, and into the 21st, such that the theological paradigm still resonates with a vocal demographic segment. The trouble is, one need not be a Darwinian partisan to see that one of the most attractive features of Darwin's theory is its internal consistency. The theological paradigm obliges religious adherents who take everything literally to embrace two contradictory explanations of the same cosmic event--namely, the origin of life. Even religious adherents who are not literalists and who cite the use of deliberately nonliteral linguistic devices to make theological points are faced with dueling metaphors. That is why Vawter makes the point that all the fuss and bother about literalism is misdirected and that scientific attributions to Genesis are irrelevant since Genesis neither affirms nor denies the scientific explanation of the Creation (49).
Thus the problem remains: how to reconcile internally inconsistent, however metaphorical, linguistic choices of the Genesis text with what is undoubtedly a serious theo...