People have long wondered about the origins of the Earth. Like any issue of this kind, Earth’s origin is rather controversial with the opinions being generally split into creationist and evolutionary ones. Each of these views lacks sufficient proofs, though people keeping to any of these viewpoints offer quite convincing evidence regarding the origin of the earth and its beings.
Two viewpoints, Creationist and Evolutionary, have absolutely different convictions regarding the origin of the Earth. Thus, creationism posits that the Earth and all its life-forms have been created by God or another supreme being. This being can be any kind of deity, depending on the interpretations. In any case, creationism is believed to be religiously motivated because it rejects natural biological processes.
Evolutionary viewpoint, in its turn, focuses on the naturalistic origin of Earth and its living creatures. These creatures are believed to have originated from the inorganic matter with their life being a product of random chance. The mechanism which makes this process possible has been explained by Charles Darwin who called it “natural selection”. Since that mechanism proved to be deficient, evolutionary biologists are now searching for a new one which would explain genetic mutation and the like processes.
The main contrast between these two approaches to Earth’s origin lies in their different findings regarding the age of Earth and dating of ancient artifacts. Creationists believe that Earth cannot be older than 10,000 years, while the scientists who keep to the evolutionary viewpoint state that it is about 4.55 billion years old with calculating error being no more than 1%. Dating of ancient artifacts is usually fulfilled by means of Carbon-14, an isotope of Carbon. This method has proven to be efficient and more accurate than tree ring method. It has been worked out by the evolutionary scientists this is why creationists often reject it.
Another conflict between Creationist and Evolutionary viewpoints consists in their different interpretations of fossil records. Creationists blame Evolutionary scientists in the absence of transitional fossils, which, according to them, does not allow representing transitional features correctly. One of the evidence which creationists present is the evolution of a whale which has long been puzzling the scientists who assume that it has somehow evolved from a land-dwelling animal. Besides, the evolutionary scientists are believed to have discovered only a small percentage of life-forms which have once inhabited the Earth. This gap in fossil records serves as another controversial issue between these two viewpoints.
Within the creationism, there is also a Scripturalist theory which opposes Evolutionary viewpoint. The supporters of this theory blame evolution theorists for incorrect interpretation of some sacred texts and keeping to contradictory principles in evolutionary biology. Apart from Creationism and Evolutionary viewpoints, there also exist such theories as Tidal (the Earth was formed from the Sun’s dust and debris), Planetesimal (the Earth was formed from other planets by means of gravitation), Dynamic Encounter theory (the Earth originated from the collision of Sun and another star), etc.
Though religious faith and acceptance of scientific records seem to be mutually exclusive, there still exist people who keep to both the viewpoints. Thus, for instance, it is possible to believe that evolution took place under the God’s control or that the collision of planets as a result of which the Earth was formed was initiated by God.