Melika, Youssef, Shenouda 1

Creationism V.S Darwinism:

The Great Debate on the Origin of Life and the Rise of Theistic Evolution

Ermia Melika, Mark Youssef, and Cyril Shenouda

Senior Division

Group Website

Student Composed Website Words: 1198

Media: 3 minutes 47 seconds

Process Paper Word Count: 496

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The topic of Creationism vs Darwinism was first brought up during a lesson by a monk,

in the monastery of Saint Anthony, who happens to be a relative of one of our teammates. We

then chose this topic for NHD after our friend pitched it to us; we were all interested in the idea.

Creationism vs Darwinism is a topic that has been argued for many years and is still a

controversial topic. We decided to make our project around this topic because many people are

unaware of the facts between both sides of the argument. We hope to inform those who are

curious about the matter.

Enable for us to get more information on this topic we had to understand the viewpoints

of both sides, so we did our online research, and ask those who are specialized in each topic. As

stated before we got the idea from a monk, so we asked him his views on the matter; he mostly

talked about creationism and why people believe in it over Darwinism. We then took this

information and compared it to those online, and we found many sources supporting creationism

and explaining the history of it. After gathering information on Creationism, we went on to do

our research on Darwinism.

To find someone to talk to we spent our free time in school going to our old biology

teachers and asking them what they know on Darwinism. We then compared our teachers’

explanation with that of the information of online. Afterward, we went online and searched for

the history of the conflict and read primary sources from the 1850’s to 1960’s. Overall our most

important sources included ​The Origin of Species, ​by Charles Darwin, which gave us an insight

of the theory of evolution, and the response to this theory called ​Early Catholic Responses to

Darwin’s Theory of Evolution​,​ ​by Samuel Klumpenhouwer, which denied Darwin’s theory by
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means of the Catholic church. Both these sources are primary and give us an insight of both the

thought process of Darwin and the Catholic church.

While, doing research on the topic we counted very few difficulties. One major difficulty

included sparing some time to do the research since we were all busy with other classes. Aside

from finding the time to the research another problem was understanding wording some primary

sources found, which also took us a great amount of time.

Finally, this topic fits into this year’s category of Conflict and resolve because it is a topic

that was argued for nearly a hundred years. Eventually, the creation of the Theistic Evolution

ends the conflict. Creationism and Darwinism caused conflict within the school, debating on

whether one should be taught over the other. This is also important because it causes problems

within the government since most citizens in the US were in fear that if Roman Catholic

president is elected, they’d have to begin to follow the pope over their own beliefs.