4. Finally Evolution fails in the fourth step. It admits again and again that it has not demonstrated its case. Not a single instance of evolution of species has been shown or produced, and no law of the change is given. The gaps it does not bridge are many. We specially need to notice that it gives no account of the origin of matter or force. It can give no account of the origin of life. It utterly fails to account for man's self-consciousness or intellectual, moral or spiritual nature. It takes no account whatever of the other world or life and entirely disregards the facts of Christian experience. In short, so far from being a great universal philosophy, it is simply a disjointed combination of unproven theories.
The evolutionist, Prof. Conn, admitting the missing factors, says candidly, "It is therefore impossible to make Evolution a complete theory." (Evolution of To-day, p. 6.)
Sir J. William Dawson thus sums up the evidence: "The simplicity and completeness of the evolutionary theory entirely disappear when we consider the unproved assumptions on which it is based and its failure to connect with each other some of the most important facts in nature; that in short, it is not in any true sense a philosophy, but a mere arbitrary arrangement of facts in accordance with a number of unproved hypotheses. Such philosophies, falsely so-called, have existed ever since man began to reason on nature, and this last of all is one of the weakest and most pernicious of all. Let the reader take up either Darwin's great book or Spencer's Biology and merely ask, as he reads each paragraph, What is here assumed and what is proved? and he will find the fabric melt away like a vision. Spencer often exaggerates or extenuates with reference to facts and uses the art of the dialectician where argument fails." (Story of the Earth and Man, p. 330.)
Prof. William Jones tells us Evolution is "a metaphysical creed and nothing else; an emotional attitude rather than a system of thought." (Homiletic Review, August, 1900.)
EVOLUTION RESTS ON IMAGINATION.
The evolutionist not only uses his imagination but claims the right to do so. Tyndall has written an essay on the Scientific Use of the Imagination. Now when the pictures of an evolutionist's imagination are held up as facts, as in the description of man's development from the brute, he leaves the realm of science and enters that of fiction. Mr. Gladstone has said of this: "To the eyes of an onlooker their pace and method seem to be like a steeple-chase. They are armed with a weapon always sufficient if not always an arm of precision, 'the scientific imagination.' They are impatient of that most wholesome state a Suspended Judgment." (Homiletic Review, October, 1900, quoted by Dr. Jesse B. Thomas.)
EVOLUTION IS THE DOCTRINE OF CHANCE.
The language used by the evolutionist is peculiar for persons claiming to believe in law as the great agency of nature and to base their conclusions on the operation of fixed causes. The changes which together make up the birth of a new species are occasioned they say by "chance happenings," "undesigned variations," "accidental variations," "utterly undetermined antecedents," "unintentional variations," and other like expressions. The synonyms of this idea are exhausted by them in describing the way in which the changes first occurred, by which one species began the journey up to another stage of existence. It is simply a revival and revamping of the old doctrine of chance.
Prof. Frank Ballard says of this: "Chance manufactured protoplasm out of nebulosity.... To accept this after rejecting faith on the ground of its difficulty, is to quibble and cavil."