(SECOND LETTER.) DEAR MR. EDITOR,
Having shown that evolution after all is only a “working hypothesis” which remains to be proved, I desire in a few words to point out to your readers that evolution as expounded by Professor Drummond and others, by impugning the power and wisdom of God, tends to destroy faith in Him and His word.
It is intended to refer to two points only, but these are of the highest importance, viz.—that evolution denies (1) the Biblical account of creation (2) the Biblical doctrine of sin.
In the first place, then, we are taught in the Scripture that God, after the chaotic state described in Gen. 1:2, in six days made the world fit for the habitation of man, creating him and placing him at its head as His vicegerent. And we are specially told that the same power, that in the beginning called all things into being when they were not, made “every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew,” and that, too, without the aid of rain and tillage; “for the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was not a man to till the ground” (Gen. 2:5).
But this account is a flat contradiction of the theory of evolution. The passage quoted makes it clear that vegetation was created in a state of perfection and maturity; and the same appears from Gen. 1:11: “And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed and the fruit-tree yielding fruit after his kind whose seed is in itself, upon the earth; and it was so.” Thus the tree preceded the seed, and not vice versa; but evolution insists upon the universal law of progression from “low to high,” from immaturity to maturity, from the structureless cell to the perfect organization. So that we are called to accept either an unproved theory or an inspired history; and in this the believer has no choice.
In the Biblical account of creation we learn that the being of man, as indeed everything organic and inorganic sprang into life and perfection and beauty at the divine word. And we are thus given to see that God is not One such as ourselves, but One Who could and did act at the beginning in a way, beyond human analogy, without the aid or use of “natural laws” or intermediate causes of any kind. But evolution seeks to overthrow this conception, giving us the picture of a Being, called Nature, struggling through “incalculable ages” to make a man. Just as the mighty steam engines of the present day have been gradually evolved, by means of a long series of experiments which began with a boy playing with his mother's tea-kettle; so man, the head and crown of the animal kingdom, was similarly evolved from a formless cell, millions of which could find accommodation in a raindrop. Nature, the God of evolution, was apparently unable to see the end from the beginning, had no ideal plan before it, was hindered by its own laws, learned wisdom (with uncommon slowness) by its mistakes and failures, and finally, after astonishing perseverance, with a supreme effort produced the genus homo, one of whom is now able to scientifically review the methods of his Maker and explain them with much assurance to a delighted American audience.
Thus do the blind leaders of the blind fall into the ditch for who does not see that this “Nature” is but a “graven image,” the fruit of men's vain imaginings and utterly opposed to the God of the Bible? It is a man-made idol as much as Baal or Astarte, and, whatever its pretensions, is no more from heaven than was Diana of the Ephesians. Let believers beware of this studied attempt to supplant the living God by a plastic deity which is forced to accommodate itself to every scientific guess. It is not now said for the first time that the Darwinian theory turns the Creator out of doors and leaves not the smallest room for such a Being. This is bold work for an unfledged hypothesis that was hatched in a dream, and has no more basis in real science than in scripture.
It is plain the latter utterly refuses to countenance the fairy tale of evolution, that Adam was an Anthropoid ape, who managed to cross the great gulf now fixed between apehood and manhood. The Holy Ghost records the creation of man in these words, “And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul” (Gen. 2:7). It is useless to object that this is only a metaphorical way of describing the ascent of the human species through “incalculable ages” from the alleged primal monad. For the very opposite is confirmed by Gen. 3:19: “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return to the ground; for out of it wast thou taken; for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.” Nothing is clearer than that Adam was not simply a lower organism raised to a higher form, but a subject of special creatorial power. For it is stated to be one of the sad results of his fall that his body must return to the dust of the ground from whence he was taken. He was therefore a true creation, and moreover created for life, and not for death; seeing that death came in by sin.
Moreover, the position which man was created to occupy in regard to the brutes is irreconcilable with the evolutionary theory. Thus, having received the inbreathing of the Almighty, he was thereby fitted to represent God here below, and to have rule and dominion over the works of His hands. In consonance with this, man appeared the sixth day. But the Darwinian theory will have it that he was unknown ages coming. So that for immense periods the earth was without any fitted for the place of sovereignty that man even now occupies. The truth is that man was specially prepared for his post by special intervention of the Most High.
It is usual for scientists to seek to throw a stigma on the teaching of Gen 1. and 2. by high-sounding phrases intended to throw people off the track. Listen to Professor Geddes:— “Evolution supersedes those cruder anthropomorphism of arbitrary creation and of mechanical contrivance which present the universe as an aggregate of finished products." But long words prove no arguments, and here like the discolorations of the cuttlefish only serve to cover a retreat. Anthropomorphism literally means the imputation of the form of man to God; though it is sometimes applied to scriptural expressions such as “And God said,” &c. But what the skeptic insinuates is that such terms are less illustrative of the majesty and power of God than the formulas of evolution. In other words, for man to be created in immediate response to the words “Let us make man in our image” is too crudely anthropomorphic, too human a way of doing it. We submit, however, that it is much more after the manner of men, to represent the Deity experimenting on various forms of life from the amæba upwards, “trusting to the chapter of accidents for variation,” only to arrive at the ideal after untold millenaries. This smacks more of human weakness than of infinite power. We might learn from the Gospels that, when the deed followed the word without the medium of ordinary causes, it was not a “crude anthropomorphism” but a Divine act. This expression therefore, as well as others in the above quotation, is loose, inaccurate, and misleading; yet it is a fair sample of the shifts evolutionists resort to in order to obtain a hearing for their theory of creation.
But, in the second place, evolution is not less opposed to the Biblical account of the entrance of sin into the world. The Holy Spirit distinctly says “By one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin.” “By one man's disobedience the mass were constituted sinners” (Rom. 5:12-19). So that the rebellion of Adam in the garden of Eden, against the authority of God, is stated to be the mark of time and circumstances when sin made its appearance. Evolution however denies this in Coto, saying we inherit our evil habits from the brute beast. Sin, we are told, is a “vestigial structure” —in other words, “the residuum of the animal in man.” The “mal-formations of the moral nature” are simply remnants of the lower forms of organic life through which man has passed. “If man inherits the gill-slits of a shark” (which, by-the-bye, is an assumption without the shadow of a proof), “is it unscientific to expect that he will inherit the spirit of a shark “—&c., &c.? We answer that the analogy is false, and therefore it is most unscientific to expect anything of the sort. Supposing a man had the “gill-slits of a shark” (which we repeat has to be proved), they would be atrophied and useless; but if he had the spirit of a shark, it could only be known by the performance of its functions. We therefore deny that any real analogy can be maintained between an effete physical organ and a ferocious propensity only apparent in a high state of development. With a little exercise of the imagination we might find scores of such arguments, all equally worthless. For instance, is not the fondness of children for lollipops indicative that bears or hummingbirds were among their ancestors? Is not their inclination to play in the gutter and make mud-pies, strong proof that they are directly descended from ducks or eels? Is not the prevalence of the game of hide-and-seek in the nursery, conclusive evidence that they are not far removed from squirrels and monkeys? In short, the whole argument might be treated as highly ridiculous, were it not such a serious design to attenuate, if not to destroy, the responsibility of man and the heinousness of sin.
To show, however, that the extent to which this baseless theorizing is carried is not mis-represented, the following extract, professing to account for the origin of the mental and moral emotions, is given. “In creatures very far down the scale of life, the Annelids, Mr. Romanes distinguished what appeared to him to be one of the earliest emotions—Fear. Somewhat higher up, among the Insects, he met with the social feelings, as well as Industry, Pugnacity, and Curiosity. Jealousy seems to have been born into the world with Fishes; Sympathy with Birds. The Carnivora are responsible for Cruelty, Hate, and Grief; the Anthropoid Apes for Remorse, Shame, the Sense of the Ludicrous, and Deceit.” “These emotions, appear in the mind of the growing child in the same order as they appear on the animal scale.” We add to this Professor Drummond's confession in the former part of this lecture that “Evolution of Mind is an open question;” which is itself a sufficient warning to leave this quagmire of uncertain and unfounded speculation for the solid facts of revelation.
“In Thy light shall we see light “; but this theory is a return to pagan darkness. For after all, evolution is but a modification of the heathen doctrine of metempsychosis. What Pythagoras and others taught of the individual soul migrating to and from the brutes, Haeckel, Darwin, &c., taught, and Drummond echoes, of the race.
The lecturer on the “Ascent of Man” spoke of our derivation from lower organisms as an “unspeakable exaltation “ and sought with much fervor to bring his audience to the same mind. But we are not so enamored of the “gospel of dirt.” The poet's notion was much more respectable, though equally unfounded in the main, who said “Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting..... Trailing clouds of glory do we come From God, Who is our home.”
In reference, however, to this second point also, we must choose between the word of God and the word of evolutionists. According to God, sin is lawlessness, a life without Him in the world, a mind at enmity with Him; but according to so-called science, sin is merely the exercise of undesirable propensities, inherited from ancient animal ancestors, letting loose the blood of the tiger in family life, as Professor Drummond puts it. The Bible says, God made man upright, and that sin is the result of his fall from the upright state he had at the beginning; but evolution declares sin to be the remnant of an imperfect and undeveloped state from which he has now advanced and trusts that these “vestigial structures” will entirely disappear as he makes further progress. Scripture denounces sin as being committed against God; but evolution considers sin as that which opposes the social well-being of mankind. And we may be sure that whatever makes light of sin, as the theory in question does, can never be of God Who gave none other than His own Son to be His Lamb, the Remover of the sin of the world.
In conclusion, the sum of what these two letters have sought to show concerning evolution is:—
1.—That it is not founded upon facts, but is a theory unprovided with a proof.
2.—It denies the Biblical account of creation.
3. Denies the Scriptural revelation concerning the origin and nature of sin.
And we believe, in spite of the religious professions of its champion, that this development theory is dishonoring to God and defiling to the conscience. We pray, therefore, that the children of God may be preserved from its contaminations.
Yours faithfully in Christ,
“YOD.”