Progressive Creationism - Historical Development

Historical Development

At the end of the 18th century the French anatomist Georges Cuvier proposed that there had been a series of successive creations due to catastrophism, Curvier believed that God regionally destroyed previously created forms through regional catastrophes such as floods and afterwards repopulated the region with new forms. The French naturalist Alcide d'Orbigny held similar ideas; he linked different stages in the Geologic time scale to separate creation events. At the time these ideas were not popular with strict Christians. In defense of the theory of successive creations, Marcel de Serres (1783–1862) a French geologist suggested that new creations grow more and more perfect as the time goes on.

The idea that there had been a series of episodes of divine creation of new species with many thousands of years in between them, serving to prepare the world for the eventual arrival of humanity, was popular with Anglican geologists like William Buckland in the early 19th century; they proposed it as an explanation for the patterns of faunal succession in the fossil record that showed that the types of organisms that lived on the earth had changed over time. Buckland explained the idea in detail in his book Geology and Mineralogy considered with reference to Natural Theology (1836), which was one of the eight Bridgewater Treatises. Buckland presented this idea in part to counter pre-Darwin theories on the transmutation of species. The Scottish geologist snd evangelical Christian Hugh Miller also argued for many separate creation events brought about by divine interventions, and explained his ideas in his book The testimony of the rocks; or, Geology in its bearings on the two theologies, natural and revealed in 1857.

Louis Agassiz, a Swiss-American naturalist, argued for separate divine creations. In his work he noted similarities of distribution of like species in different geological era; a phenomenon clearly not the result of migration. Agassiz questioned how fish of the same species live in lakes well separated with no joining waterway, Agassiz concluded they were created at both locations. According to Agassiz the intelligent adaptation of creatures to their environments testified to an intelligent plan. The conclusions of his studies lead him to believe that whichever region each animal was found in, it was created there “animals are naturally autochthones wherever they are found”. After further research he later extended this idea to humans, he wrote that different races had been created separately, this became known as his theory of polygenism.