BIOLOGY AND CREATIONISM FACE TO FACE

Creationism is the religious belief that God created the Universe and everything that is contained in it. Although creationism has different approaches to explain the details of the creation of the Universe and all forms of life, in most cases it interprets the Genesis quite literally, which is not compatible with the idea of evolution. As the theory of the evolution of species began to take shape in the XVIII century and was finally proposed in detail in the middle of the XIX century by Charles Darwin, a debate began between the advocates of each view. This debate has included court cases, such as Epperson vs. Arkansas in 1968, when it was ruled that state regulations that prohibited the teaching of biological evolution, violated the United States Constitution, which does not allow state support for religion. Nowadays, a widely accepted position is that science and religion are two non-overlapping ways of thinking, and that creationism and the evolution of species are not necessarily contradictory, they simply address different aspects of the world. However, creationism and biology have clashed in various ways in recent history, and in this paper, this confrontation will be examined, and how the teaching of biology might have been conditioned will be analyzed.