The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, February, 1880

by Various

Darwinism Weighed In The Balances.

Scientists who claim to be followers of Darwin in scientific investigation are known as evolutionists. The majority of them seem to enjoy themselves very much in opposing the statements of Moses respecting the creation. It might be well for them to remember that Darwin himself was compelled by his better sense to declare that science demands a miracle in order to the existence of the living unit lying at the base of the series of [pg 073] evolution. So after all it remains a fact that Darwinism is chained to miracle. If Strauss had remembered this he need not have said, Darwin deserves to be praised as one of the benefactors of the race because of having learned us how to get rid of miracles. If there is any value in evolution against the Bible it lies in the use that men make of it to destroy the idea that God created man out of the dust of the earth and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life. Where does Darwinism take you to to study the origin of man? To the dust of the earth? Not exactly! It takes you to the slime of the sea, or the mud of the Nile, just one step behind the pulpy mass of protoplasm, or the moneron. God is there working a miracle; such is Darwinism. According to Moses, He was doing just as well yonder in Eden working a miracle with the dust of the earth. Now, in all candor, tell us which statement is most worthy of God, the one that finds the origin of man in the Eden earth with a miracle wrought upon the dust of the ground, or the one that finds his origin in a miracle wrought upon the mud of the Nile or the slime of the sea? The one that stands him up erect, a man, with Godlike attributes, or the one that lays him down in the slimy mass to pass through ages upon ages in order to get out of his low, slimy paternity and beastly traits of mere instinct, with groveling habits of life? Darwin, conscious of the axiomatic truth that no more can be evolved than there is involved, teaches the doctrine that variation or change of species is brought about by causes which already existed in the common progenitor. Such being true, we ask: In what link below man, in the great evolutionary chain, is intellect and moral nature to be found? Sensible men are turning, however, away from the old, threadbare, worn-out guess-work. The time is not far distant when it will retire once more from scientific thought. It is very old. Pliny, eighteen centuries ago, said: “The various kinds of apes offer an almost perfect resemblance to man in their physical nature.” This is just equal to Huxley's statement made in our own nineteenth century, that, “So far as structure is concerned, [pg 074] man differs to no greater extent from the animals which are immediately below him, than these do from other members of the same order.” Hence his conclusion: “Man has proceeded from a modification or an improvement of some lower animal, some simpler stock.” This idea was fully expressed in the early Pagan mythologies. Their satyrs or forest divinities were creatures blending the animal with the human. So Anaximander, although an advocate of the old hypothesis of evolution, was not the originator of the thought. The old guess-up had its origin in Pagan mythology. The Fauns of the Roman legend were supposed to be the transition species, or bridge across the chasm between the brute creation and man—a notion found in Hawthorne's “Marble Faun.” So it is plain that evolution, in Darwin's sense of the term, does not lie between new discoveries in science and old dogmas in religion, but it does lie between speculation in science and old dogmas in paganism—poor science, she carries much that does not belong to her! Evolution of species from other species is an idea found in heathen mythology; it is also found in the ancient heathen cosmogonies. The God of flocks and shepherds among the Greeks was a compound creature having the horns and feet of a goat and the face of a man. He was, doubtless, as near an approach to man as Darwin's imaginary link at some imaginary point in his imaginary evolution.

This question is not one of progressive order in the same species, but a question relative to one species rising out of another of lower grade, and especially the development of man from the lower animals. Agassiz says, “Some have mistaken the action and reaction which exists everywhere in one and the same species for a causal connection,” that is to say, these influences produced the species, whereas the species must exist before any such action and reaction can take place. The action of physical influences, or external surrounding, or environments upon species could not take place unless the species first existed. Action and reaction in one and the same species already existing, furnishes no evidence upon the manner in which the species was first brought into existence. Darwin [pg 075] says: “The creation of organic matter having already taken place, my object is to show in consequence of what laws, or what demonstrable properties of organic matter, and of its environments, such states of organic nature as those with which we are acquainted must have come about.” Well, Mr. Darwin will never get nearer the truth upon this great question than he was when he marched boldly up to miraculous intervention in order to get his first unit, or living organism to place at the beginning of his evolutionary series, unless he comes back to Moses and takes Christian ground. Geology does not teach that species have been evolved from lower species. Geology declares that new forms are new expressions of creative power. All the physical forces that were operating upon our earth in the inorganic period, are in operation now. Why, O why, has it been that the experience and observation of the ages, as well as the record in the rocks, have failed to give, in all the earth, one sensible demonstration in support of the proposition that man, or any other species, was evolved from an inferior species? The answer is easy—blind physical forces were, and are, insufficient to bring into existence living being. Throughout every department of creation there are evidences of invisible or spiritual powers that lie behind the events that come under observation in science. Chemical affinity lies behind, and produces important changes that take place in organic matter. But chemical affinities do not explain living, organic, being; for we have our existence at the expense of chemical affinities. The living force, whatever it may be, lies behind chemical affinities, and controls them. Instinct influences many of the manifestations in animal life, and intelligence controls the sober conduct of men. Yet above all these there is that wonderful builder and overseer of the organism called life. As nature was perfect in all her elementary principles during the inorganic period, and as inertia was, and is, a property of matter, it follows, necessarily, that life was a new principle, from an immaterial source, otherwise inertia is not a property of matter; for a thing can not be—exist and not be at the same time.

Vogt reasons in favor of evolution of species from a few abnormal—that is deteriorated—human beings, which is the mistake spoken of by Agassiz, that action and reaction in one and the same species produce species. Action and reaction does not produce the species, nor yet another species. Men and apes have lived side by side for thousands of years. Why is it that apes have made no advance towards the human form? Poor fellows! An ape is always an ape, and a man is always a man. The geological record upon the rocks is in favor of man's existence as man by creative interposition. The evolution hypothesis rests its conclusions upon effects that well-known causes have never been known to produce, for the evolution of species from lower species was never known anywhere in history or fact. In reference to Darwin's ideas upon the origin of species, Mr. Huxley said: “That, notwithstanding the clearness of the style, those who attempt fairly to digest the book find much of it a sort of intellectual pemmican—a mass of facts crushed and pounded into shape, rather than held together by the ordinary medium of a logical bond.” The impossibility of a scientific test is admitted, for vast periods of time in the infinite past are claimed for the work of natural selection. Countless ages form the basis of the system, without which it could not have brought about the present order of things. But an infinite series of life forms upon our earth could not be possible, for it has been shown, allowing that the heat has passed out of our earth uniformly, as it does at present, that inside of a comparatively limited period in the past, it must have been so intensely hot as to have been capable of melting a mass of rock equal to the bulk of the whole earth. Yet Darwin has his half developed—imaginary animals strewn along there in the infinite ages of the past. Men may get around this difficulty by disregarding the facts of science and of common sense, or by doing as Tyndall did; that is, by taking up the mechanism of the human body, the mind itself, emotion, intellect, will and all their phenomena, and latentizing them in a fire cloud. Tyndall says: “They were once latent in a fiery cloud.” Farewell to common sense [pg 077] or Darwinism—which shall it be? Darwin's idea that all the causes of evolution were placed in a common progenitor, by a miraculous creation of that common progenitor is in very poor harmony with his denial of design in nature, and also in poor harmony with the idea of environments contributing so extensively to the change of species; for if all the causes were placed in a common progenitor, of course, they are not to be found in the least degree in environment. If all was placed in a common progenitor, brought into existence by a miracle, as Darwin teaches, how is design to be excluded from nature? Imperfections in nature are urged against design in nature by all the school of evolutionists. But what kind of imperfection is that which is involved in the idea of God creating a common progenitor, lying at the base of Darwin's series of evolution, possessing all the causes of all effects in nature, without designing those effects? What wonderful undesigned results!

There are those, among unbelievers, who profess to see no evidences of a designing intelligence in all the harmonies of nature, and yet profess to see the far off man behind the old stone ax. What wonderful intelligence they have! There is no want of intelligence; it is want of something else, which Christianity requires. I think so much of your common sense that I will leave you to say what that is. Socrates said: “When I was young it was surprising how earnestly I desired that species of science which they call physical, for it appeared to me pre-eminently excellent in bringing us to know the causes of each, through what each is produced and destroyed. But happening to hear some one read in a book, that it is intelligence which is the parent of order and cause of all things, I considered that, if it were so, the ordering intelligence placed each thing where it was best.”

Is mind a development upward from the instinct of the brute creation, or is it an offspring from God? Man's reasoning intelligence separates him from the brute by a chasm that no man can carry the reasoning powers of mind across. All on that side is brutish. The science of the Bible, dealing with intelligence as its subject, is the highest order of science known [pg 078] to man. To limit the term science to physical phenomena is unjustifiable, unless matter is the only substance in the universe, and unless it be true, also, that some things resulting from matter lie outside of science; for if matter is the one, and only, substance, and if science deals with all there is, or may be, connected with that substance, then, according to materialists themselves, its province is to deal with life, mind and religion. But matter is not the only substance, unless a thing can be, exist, and not be at the same time; for if life is a property of matter inertia is not, and if mind is a property of matter it must be with all matter everywhere, or the thing is and is not at one and the same time.

The mind, in all its faculties, lies outside of the domain of the physical sciences. Each man gets his knowledge of his own mental and moral self-hood, not through the senses, but by his consciousness. So there is a mental science that looks inward, and a physical science that looks outward. Break down consciousness and philosophy is ruined. But some ignoramus is ready to say: What care I for philosophy? Poor fellow! He does not know what philosophy is; his ignorance is his trouble. Philosophy simply tells us how things are; it answers the question, how is it? There is nothing in which we are more interested than we are in the how is it? Let us not ruin philosophy; consciousness is her foundation with us; for in order to knowledge there must be primary and intuitive beliefs; the man who has no faith in his own ability to see truth, when it is presented through the medium of the senses, will never come to any definite conclusions about any thing. So mind is innate, and lies in consciousness, or self-hood, and is at the bottom of all our knowledge; otherwise we would not, and could not, be men.

Mind is above matter, and virtue and morals are above both in their results. The certainties are not all confined to physical nature, and hence science should not be. Personality and the freedom of the will, possessed in consciousness, are as certain as any facts in the physical world. Truth, justice, right and wrong are equally certain.