What the Positions Actually Disagree About

The six documented positions do not disagree along a single axis, and treating the debate as one simple line between religion and science obscures more than it clarifies. The age of the universe and earth separates Young Earth Creationism from every other position listed, since Old Earth Creationism already accepts the standard scientific chronology while still rejecting common descent, showing that accepting geological and cosmological age does not by itself settle the separate question of evolutionary common ancestry. Whether the human soul specifically requires distinct, non-evolutionary divine creation is a further, separate question on which Theistic Evolution as taught within Catholicism takes an explicit position, accepting bodily evolution while requiring the soul's direct creation, a combination not available to positions that either reject evolution outright or that reject any specially created element within the human person at all.

The most basic disagreement running underneath all six positions concerns biblical interpretive method, whether Genesis is read as making claims of the same kind natural science makes, which non-concordist and literary readings deny, or as making claims that must be reconciled with or checked against scientific findings on shared ground, which the other positions in different ways affirm. This atlas records each position as its proponents state it, without adjudicating which reading of Genesis or which account of human origins is correct.