Leap of Science

One of the recent episodes in the debate between Creationists and Evolutionists has been the argument of the former that the infinite creativity of God better explains the complexity of nature than does Evolutionary Theory. Regardless of whether or not the claim is true, it does acknowledge that a fundamental criterion of the soundness of a theory is its explanatory power, and that the superiority of a theory with respect to another consists in its greater explanatory power. As the two sides continue to fight it out over developments that transpired at least millennia ago, a much more recent event presents a more accessible gauge of their relative strengths. Less than 40 years ago a terrestrial creature walked on the moon, certainly an unprecedented accomplishment in human history, if not unimaginable almost completely hitherto. Now, what do the prevailing theologies have to say about this? Apparently, not much: no mention in their scriptures, no accommodation in their doctrines, except for, possibly, the sublunary 'there is nothing new under the sun'. The conclusion to be drawn then is that according to the Religion side of these contemporary debates, the moon landing is as significant as a man twiddling his thumbs. In contrast, Evolutionary theory offers as a possible precedent the emergence eons ago of marine creatures onto land, which suggests that the extra-terrestrial activities of the past 50 years might be the beginning of the kind of protracted leap that it has at best only been able to represent imaginatively, "one giant leap for mankind", as Neil Armstrong himself put it. Only time will tell whether or not this is perhaps the most profound event in human history, but those who adhere to the position that human nature has been fixed from its outset have been conspicuously unilluminating on the matter.