Darwin and Modern Science

by A. C. Seward

With regard to Man I leave out, acknowledging a grave omission, the doctrine of the Fall and of Sin. And I do so because these have not yet, as I believe, been adequately treated: here the fruitful reaction to the stimulus of evolution is yet to come. The doctrine of sin, indeed, falls principally within the scope of that discussion which has followed or displaced the Darwinian; and without it the Fall cannot be usefully considered. For the question about the Fall is a question not merely of origins, but of the interpretation of moral facts whose moral reality must first be established.

I confine myself therefore to Creation and the dignity of man.

The meaning of evolution, in the most general terms, is that the differentiation of forms is not essentially separate from their behaviour and use; that if these are within the scope of study, that is also; that the world has taken the form we see by movements not unlike those we now see in progress; that what may be called proximate origins are continuous in the way of force and matter, continuous in the way of life, with actual occurrences and actual characteristics. All this has no revolutionary bearing upon the question of ultimate origins. The whole is a statement about process. It says nothing to metaphysicians about cause. It simply brings within the scope of observation or conjecture that series of changes which has given their special characters to the different parts of the world we see. In particular, evolutionary science aspires to the discovery of the process or order of the appearance of life itself: if it were to achieve its aim it could say nothing of the cause of this or indeed of the most familiar occurrences. We should have become spectators or convinced historians of an event which, in respect of its cause and ultimate meaning, would be still impenetrable.

With regard to the origin of species, supposing life already established, biological science has the well founded hopes and the measure of success with which we are all familiar. All this has, it would seem, little chance of collision with a consistent theism, a doctrine which has its own difficulties unconnected with any particular view of order or process. But when it was stated that species had arisen by processes through which new species were still being made, evolutionism came into collision with a statement, traditionally religious, that species were formed and fixed once for all and long ago.

What is the theological import of such a statement when it is regarded as essential to belief in God? Simply that God's activity, with respect to the formation of living creatures, ceased at some point in past time.

"God rested" is made the touchstone of orthodoxy. And when, under the pressure of the evidences, we found ourselves obliged to acknowledge and assert the present and persistent power of God, in the maintenance and in the continued formation of "types," what happened was the abolition of a time-limit. We were forced only to a bolder claim, to a theistic language less halting, more consistent, more thorough in its own line, as well as better qualified to assimilate and modify such schemes as Von Hartmann's philosophy of the unconscious—a philosophy, by the way, quite intolerant of a merely mechanical evolution. (See Von Hartmann's "Wahrheit und Irrthum in Darwinismus". Berlin, 1875.)

Here was not the retrenchment of an extravagant assertion, but the expansion of one which was faltering and inadequate. The traditional statement did not need paring down so as to pass the meshes of a new and exacting criticism. It was itself a net meant to surround and enclose experience; and we must increase its size and close its mesh to hold newly disclosed facts of life. The world, which had seemed a fixed picture or model, gained first perspective and then solidity and movement. We had a glimpse of organic HISTORY; and Christian thought became more living and more assured as it met the larger view of life.

However unsatisfactory the new attitude might be to our critics, to Christians the reform was positive. What was discarded was a limitation, a negation. The movement was essentially conservative, even actually reconstructive. For the language disused was a language inconsistent with the definitions of orthodoxy; it set bounds to the infinite, and by implication withdrew from the creative rule all such processes as could be brought within the descriptions of research. It ascribed fixity and finality to that "creature" in which an apostle taught us to recognise the birth-struggles of an unexhausted progress. It tended to banish mystery from the world we see, and to confine it to a remote first age.

In the reformed, the restored, language of religion, Creation became again not a link in a rational series to complete a circle of the sciences, but the mysterious and permanent relation between the infinite and the finite, between the moving changes we know in part, and the Power, after the fashion of that observation, unknown, which is itself "unmoved all motion's source." (Hymn of the Church— Rerum Deus tenax vigor, Immotus in te permanens.)

With regard to man it is hardly necessary, even were it possible, to illustrate the application of this bolder faith. When the record of his high extraction fell under dispute, we were driven to a contemplation of the whole of his life, rather than of a part and that part out of sight. We remembered again, out of Aristotle, that the result of a process interprets its beginnings. We were obliged to read the title of such dignity as we may claim, in results and still more in aspirations.