Compare Traditions on One Technology
Choose a technology and read the traditions' recorded stances side by side — each with its rationale in its own terms. The comparison is the section's method in one view: the differences are in the reasons.
Evolution by natural selection
The mechanism that reorganized biology: embraced, adapted, and fought over — usually inside traditions rather than between them, from Asa Gray’s theistic evolution to today’s divided evangelical house. The full register entry
Buddhist
Selectively adopted
Impermanence and dependent origination fit an evolving cosmos without strain, and the Dalai Lama accepts the biology; the points of friction are karma and rebirth, which Buddhist authorities treat as outside the laboratory’s remit rather than as contradicted by it.
- Donald S. Lopez Jr., Buddhism and Science (2008)
Catholic
Selectively adopted
The magisterium permits research and teaching on the evolution of the body (Humani generis, 1950) and John Paul II called the theory ‘more than a hypothesis’ in 1996, while reserving the direct creation of each soul and rejecting materialist readings that make humanity an accident without meaning. Evolution as biology: accepted. Evolution as total philosophy: refused.
- Pius XII, Humani generis (1950)
- John Paul II, Message to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences (1996)
Evangelical
Contested within the tradition
The tradition is publicly divided: young-earth creationism (consolidated after 1961), old-earth and intelligent-design positions, and evolutionary creation (BioLogos) all claim the evangelical name, and all cite Scripture as their warrant. The register records the division rather than an average of it.
- Ronald L. Numbers, The Creationists (expanded ed., 2006)
Hindu
Reinterpreted
Cyclical cosmologies and the transmigration of souls made descent and transformation familiar categories; Hindu teachers from the nineteenth century onward have commonly mapped evolution onto the unfolding of consciousness, while reading the mechanism theistically or as līlā, divine play.
- C. Mackenzie Brown, Hindu Perspectives on Evolution (2012)
Islamic
Contested within the tradition
Qur’anic creation language and the Adam narrative generate a genuine spread: scientific exegesis that reads evolution into the text, an Adam-exception model (evolved humanity, specially created Adam), widespread popular creationism (the Harun Yahya literature), and working Muslim biologists who accept the theory entire. The fiqh academies have not issued a single binding line.
- Muzaffar Iqbal, Islam and Science (2002)
Jewish
Embraced
Under Maimonides’ rule, a demonstrated natural history governs reading: most Jewish authorities across the denominations accept evolution, with parts of Orthodoxy dissenting on human origins or on the age of the world. No central Jewish body has condemned the theory.
- Moses Maimonides, Guide for the Perplexed, II.25
Mainline Protestant
Embraced
Mainline seminaries and study documents receive evolution as the established account of life’s history and re-read doctrines of creation and providence accordingly; the debate inside these churches is about the theology, not the biology.
- ELCA, Genetics, Faith and Responsibility (2011)
Orthodox
Contested within the tradition
Orthodox responses range from theistic evolution taught without alarm in the theological faculties to creationist currents fed by some monastic and imported literature; the mainstream holds the biology while guarding the doctrine that humanity bears God’s image, which it does not treat as a biological claim.
- Elizabeth Theokritoff, Living in God’s Creation (2009)