ether or not the two views can coexist.
The position that is taken by most of the modern scientific evolutionists is based almost exclusively on Darwin's Origin of Species and the work that naturally followed it. The impact of this work cannot be overemphasized. Less than two years after its publication, one reviewer had this to say about it.
Perhaps no scientific work has ever been at once so extensively read, not only by the scientific few, but by the reading masses generally; and certainly no one has ever produced such commotion.3
Throughout a lifetime of study and gathering of information, including his famous voyage on the H.M.S. Beagle to the Galapagos Islands off South America, Darwin developed his theories.4 Throughout his travels he noticed that there were numerous, slight differences among individuals in a species which would be passed on to offspring. Proceeding on the assumption that the process of adaption was central to any discussion of natural history, Darwin reasoned that in an environment characterized by constant change, some variants on biological traits would be better adapted than the original trait itself. He then continued this to reason that in a struggle for limited resources, those individuals best adapted to their circumstances would survive to leave the greatest number of progeny.5 In this fashion, he maintained that due to genetic mutations at each generation, new and more adaptable traits in individuals develop over long periods of time. In hypothesizing his theory he rejected the fixation of the number of species and the doctrine of special creation where a divine being interjects into nature to create or change it.6 It was this rejection of special creation that angered fundamentalists. Darwin, by rejecting this doctrine, was challenging a vision of natural history that had become fundamental to the way most religious thinkers conceived of the relationship between the Creator and the ...