This is going to sound dumb, but is there any other theory that’s widely accepted enough to rival evolution or creation? Heck, forget rivaling, is there anything outside some small cult’s beliefs? I would group most major religions as being supportive of the creation theory? I guess I’m more anxious to find out if there’s any scientific alternative theories. Like I said, sounds dumb since this is pretty much the only two theories you ever hear of but…I was wondering.
Aliens.
I thought that was just an X-files storyline. Are there a lot of people that actually believe that or are you making a funnY?
Interesting try klockwerk, however now you need to account for the aliens’ existance. 
Well when you put it that generally, those two cover everything: “God(s)/Godess(es) did it” or “lifeforms started simple and got more complicated”.
Of course, there are quite a few variants on evolution.
There was the Lamarckian form where traits acquired by parents during their life were passed on to their offspring: Mama and Papa giraffe stretched out their neck to get leaves, baby giraffe is born with a larger neck. Since there’s no way for traits acquired during your life to get encoded into your DNA allowing you pass those onto your children, I doubt there’s any proponents of this theory still around.
There’s “Punctuated” evolution, which hypothosizes large changes in species in a short amount of time, followed by long periods of time where no change takes place.
And then there are a bunch of theories about how life originated from inorganic matter (which evolutionary theory itself doesn’t really deal with). Heck, one of those posits that organic material was seeded on Earth from outside the solar system in the form of bacteria hitching a ride on an asteroid (do a google search on “panspermia”), so klockwerk’s “aliens” theory might not be too tongue-in-cheek. Well, depending on your definition of “aliens”.
No. The RC Church supports evolution, and a lot of Protestants and other Christians accept evolution as well. Not sure about Islam.
Hmmm, (you may have simply worded this for simplicity but…)
Be careful with your choice of words there SeanRonJohnson, of the two possibilities you mention for the existance for life (creation or evolution) only evolution is a theory (and an observed fact - the theory is for the mechanism). Further, the theory of evolution has testable hypotheses, creationism does not.
(no testable hypotheses = no theory = no science)
I’m not quite sure what you actually want Sean.
The first point to clear up is that evolution is not incompatible in any way with creationism. It’s not either/or. Even at the broadest level evolution does not dictate how life was generated. It is perfectly possible to subscribe 100% to the most orthodox scientific view of the Darwinian synthesis and yet still believe that life was created by Magical Sky Pixies. Evolution only concerns what occurred after life was present. It has nothing to say about how it originated.
That might seem like nitpicking, but it becomes important when you realise that many if not most systems of belief are hybrids of the evolution and creationism. What that means is that there is a philosophy that rivals and probably surpasses both E and C. That philosophy is E&C.
Now if you only want beliefs that fail to incorporate any form of evolution or creation at any stage then I doubt it is even possible. Either the current lifeforms were tampered with by outside intelligences, or they are purely the result of natural processes. The two concepts are all encompassing simply by definition. Anything that isn’t the result of artificial direction must be natural and vice versa. Simply substituting ‘hyper-intelligent aliens’ for ‘angels’ doesn’t stop a belief system from being creationism, or if the angels evolved naturally then the belief is pure evolution. And by the same token invoking some fundamental law of physics that makes life inevitable doesn’t stop the theory from being evolution. The two sets, E and C can overlap a great deal, but everything must fall into at least one of those groups.
Of course there are lots of variations within both camps, and many systems of belief involve a hybrid of the two, but everything must be either creation or evolution. There are scientists who reject the Darwinian synthesis to varying degrees, but they still subscribe to evolution of another form. There are many religions that are happy that the gods set up the system and then let evolution run its course at some point, but the belief system still involves creation, if not the involvement of directing intelligences.
There are some scientists who believe that there is some fundamental and as yet undiscovered physical principle that makes life inevitable. That is the only possible belief I can think of that doesn’t neatly fit into one group or the other. In many respects it seems almost theistic, but very broadly so. Of course these scientists still endorse evolution once life has appeared, so their core belief is evolution but there is an aspect of creationism to my mind.
Dinoboy, creationism, even fundamentalist creationism, can rightly be called a theory. There is an inherent testable hypothesis in that it names the order in which organisms appear. Of course it is a theory that has been falsified, but it is no less a theory for that. Usually Fundies then start invoking Godly interference, at which point it ceases to be a scientific theory, but up until someone does that they can legitimately call creationism a theory, even a scientific theory.
Urban Ranger, Roman Catholicism is a hybrid belief system. While the church does indeed endorse evolution they also strongly endorse creation and direction by God. Evolution is just another process under divine control, like gravity or magnetism. So it’s quite correct to say that the RC church support both creation and evolution.
Well, there’s the theory that we’re all (or just “you,” at least) just brains in jars, hallucinating what we know as reality. In which case the real universe is totally unknowable, and possibly beyond our comprehension even if we could know it.
Not that it’s a very popular theory. But there are probably at least a coupla people who believe it. (Me not included.)
You might find:
‘How the Leopard Changed its Spots’, by Brian Goodwin, interesting.
I believe one could describe it as advancing a theory of non-darwinian evolution.
It’s not exactly on easy read, but it’s a good one; it’s not dry or ponderous.
I really liked this book.