Does Evolution Theory Disprove God?

When the English scientist Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species was published in 1959, there was a great outcry and a historic clash of science and religion. Except, there was not.

Soon after Apple’s co-founder Steve Jobs introduced the first iteration of the iPhone on June 29 2007 iPhone shook the tech market. However, no one part of the mobile phone was never-done-before. However, history proves Apple has gathered already known technologies in a way not done before, and the company started a smartphone revolution.

For many consumers, iPhone was the first-ever owned smartphone. Needless to say, the technologies that iPhone was built on never-known-before to the public. Accordingly, in the eye of the public, Apple became the inventor of everything smartphone.

Charles Darwin editorial cartoon caricature (1871)

Second Half of the 19th Century

The English scientist Charles Darwin is known by many people as the man who discovered that humans came from monkeys. However, writers before Darwin had already made connections between humans and apes and monkeys because of the obvious physical similarities. Furthermore, his 1958 book “On the Origin of Species” focused on speciation, but perhaps intentionally, left out the evolution of humans. Yet, the journalists found it appropriate to summarise Darwin’s book with a caricature of him, half-monkey, half-human.

Most of the early readers of “On the Origin of Species” did not think that Darwin’s theory was controversial in that it was contradicting the Book of Genesis Charles in the bible. By the second half of the nineteenth century, common wisdom among scientists had become that the bible should not be read literally.

What is iPhone to smartphones is Darwin to evolutionary biology. If taken chapter by chapter Darwin’s theory was mostly built on ideas that were proposed before. However, no one before Darwin had brought those ideas together and explained so well why there were so many species in the world and what their origin was.

Darwin targeted the general public with the publication of his book. A good starting point for Darwin’s theory was the most familiar example of how animals and plants were known to change: domestication. With his book, Darwin reached the public where the ideas about evolutions had not reached before. For them, Darwin was the sole discoverer of everything evolution.

Does Evolution Theory Disprove God?

Although Darwin’s evolution theory is often conceived or promoted as an antitheistic preposition, it has never been out to get any deities or religions with his theory.

A scientific man ought to have no wishes, no affections, – a mere heart of stone.
— Charles Darwin

The evolution theory does not prove that there is no god, and it does not even intend to do so. Darwin’s evolution theory has been developed just like any other scientific theory – neither to prove nor disprove the existence of God. Besides, evolution theory does not even explain conclusively the emergence of life. The theory focuses on the origin of species, as the name of Darwin’s book suggests, and not the origin of life.

[Charles Darwin,] a celebrated author and divine has written to me that he has gradually learned to see that it is just as noble a conception of the Deity to believe that He created a few original forms capable of self-development into other and needful forms, as to believe that He required a fresh act of creation to supply the voids caused by the action of His laws’.
— Reverend Charles Kingsley, 1868

It should not come as a surprise that some of the Christian churches find evolution theory completable with their teachings, the Catholic Church is the biggest one of them. Hence, 55% of Catholics in the US accept evolution theory as truth.

In summary, evolution theory was and is meant to pursue the truth, but not to tell one to do with it. What one does with the truth is one’s own responsibility.