Many statements of the doctrine of evolution err by regarding it as an eternal or self-originated process. But the process requires an originator, and the forces require an upholder. Each forward step implies increment of energy, and progress toward a rational end implies intelligence and foresight in the governing power. Schurman says well that Darwinism explains the survival of the fittest, but cannot explain the arrival of the fittest. Schurman, Agnosticism and Religion, 34—“A primitive chaos of star-dust which held in its womb not only the cosmos that fills space, not only the living creatures that teem upon it, but also the intellect that interprets it, the will that confronts it, and the conscience that transfigures it, must as certainly have God at the centre, as a universe mechanically arranged and periodically adjusted must have him at the circumference.... There is no real antagonism between creation and evolution. 59—Natural causation is the expression of a supernatural Mind in nature, and man—a being at once of sensibility and of rational and moral self-activity—is a signal and ever-present example of the interfusion of the natural with the supernatural in that part of universal existence nearest and best known to us.”
Seebohm, quoted in J. J. Murphy, Nat. Selection and Spir. Freedom, 76—“When we admit that Darwin's argument in favor of the theory of evolution proves its truth, we doubt whether natural selection can be in any sense the cause of the origin of species. It has probably played an important part in the history of evolution; its rôle has been that of increasing the rapidity with which the process of development has proceeded. Of itself it has probably been powerless to originate a species; the machinery by which species have been evolved has been completely independent of natural selection [pg 392]and could have produced all the results which we call the evolution of species without its aid; though the process would have been slow had there been no struggle of life to increase its pace.” New World, June, 1896:237-262, art. by Howison on the Limits of Evolution, finds limits in (1) the noumenal Reality; (2) the break between the organic and the inorganic; (3) break between physiological and logical genesis; (4) inability to explain the great fact on which its own movement rests; (5) the a priori self-consciousness which is the essential being and true person of the mind.
Evolution, according to Herbert Spencer, is “an integration of matter and concomitant dissipation of motion, during which the matter passes from an indefinite incoherent homogeneity to a definite coherent heterogeneity, and during which the retained motion goes through a parallel transformation.” D. W. Simon criticizes this definition as defective “because (1) it omits all mention both of energy and its differentiations; and (2) because it introduces into the definition of the process one of the phenomena thereof, namely, motion. As a matter of fact, both energy or force, and law, are subsequently and illicitly introduced as distinct factors of the process; they ought therefore to have found recognition in the definition or description.” Mark Hopkins, Life, 189—“God: what need of him? Have we not force, uniform force, and do not all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation, if it ever had a beginning? Have we not the τὸ πᾶν, the universal All, the Soul of the universe, working itself up from unconsciousness through molecules and maggots and mice and marmots and monkeys to its highest culmination in man?”
(b) Development is recognized.—The Mosaic account represents the present order of things as the result, not simply of original creation, but also of subsequent arrangement and development. A fashioning of inorganic materials is described, and also a use of these materials in providing the conditions of organized existence. Life is described as reproducing itself, after its first introduction, according to its own laws and by virtue of its own inner energy.
Martensen wrongly asserts that “Judaism represented the world exclusively as creatura, not natura; as κτίσις, not φύσις.” This is not true. Creation is represented as the bringing forth, not of something dead, but of something living and capable of self-development. Creation lays the foundation for cosmogony. Not only is there a fashioning and arrangement of the material which the original creative act has brought into being (see Gen. 1:2, 4, 6, 7, 9, 16, 17; 2:2, 6, 7, 8—Spirit brooding; dividing light from darkness, and waters from waters; dry land appearing; setting apart of sun, moon, and stars; mist watering; forming man's body; planting garden) but there is also an imparting and using of the productive powers of the things and beings created (Gen. 1:12, 22, 24, 28—earth brought forth grass; trees yielding fruit whose seed was in itself; earth brought forth the living creatures; man commanded to be fruitful and multiply).
The tendency at present among men of science is to regard the whole history of life upon the planet as the result of evolution, thus excluding creation, both at the beginning of the history and along its course. On the progress from the Orohippus, the lowest member of the equine series, an animal with four toes, to Anchitherium with three, then to Hipparion, and finally to our common horse, see Huxley, in Nature for May 11, 1873:33, 34. He argues that, if a complicated animal like the horse has arisen by gradual modification of a lower and less specialized form, there is no reason to think that other animals have arisen in a different way. Clarence King, Address at Yale College, 1877, regards American geology as teaching the doctrine of sudden yet natural modification of species. “When catastrophic change burst in upon the ages of uniformity and sounded in the ear of every living thing the words: ‘Change or die!’plasticity became the sole principle of action.” Nature proceeded then by leaps, and corresponding to the leaps of geology we find leaps of biology.
We grant the probability that the great majority of what we call species were produced in some such ways. If science should render it certain that all the present species of living creatures were derived by natural descent from a few original germs, and that these germs were themselves an evolution of inorganic forces and materials, we should not therefore regard the Mosaic account as proved untrue. We should only be required to revise our interpretation of the word bara in Gen. 1:21, 27, and to give it there the meaning of mediate creation, or creation by law. Such a meaning might almost seem to be favored by Gen. 1:11—“let the earth put forth grass”; 20—“let the waters bring forth abundantly [pg 393]the moving creature that hath life”; 2:7—“the Lord God formed man of the dust”; 9—“out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree”; cf. Mark 4:28—αὐτομάτη ἣ γή καρποφορεῖ—“the earth brings forth fruit automatically.” Goethe, Sprüche in Reimen: “Was wär ein Gott der nur von aussen stiesse, Im Kreis das All am Finger laufen liesse? Ihm ziemt's die Welt im Innern zu bewegen, Sich in Natur, Natur in sich zu hegen, So dass, was in Ihm lebt und webt und ist, Nie seine Kraft, nie seinen Geist vermisst”—“No, such a God my worship may not win, Who lets the world about his finger spin, A thing eternal; God must dwell within.”
All the growth of a tree takes place in from four to six weeks in May, June and July. The addition of woody fibre between the bark and the trunk results, not by impartation into it of a new force from without, but by the awakening of the life within. Environment changes and growth begins. We may even speak of an immanent transcendence of God—an unexhausted vitality which at times makes great movements forward. This is what the ancients were trying to express when they said that trees were inhabited by dryads and so groaned and bled when wounded. God's life is in all. In evolution we cannot say, with LeConte, that the higher form of energy is “derived from the lower.” Rather let us say that both the higher and the lower are constantly dependent for their being on the will of God. The lower is only God's preparation for his higher self-manifestation; see Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 165, 166.
Even Haeckel, Hist. Creation, 1:38, can say that in the Mosaic narrative “two great and fundamental ideas meet us—the idea of separation or differentiation, and the idea of progressive development or perfecting. We can bestow our just and sincere admiration on the Jewish lawgiver's grand insight into nature, and his simple and natural hypothesis of creation, without discovering in it a divine revelation.” Henry Drummond, whose first book, Natural Law in the Spiritual World, he himself in his later days regretted as tending in a deterministic and materialistic direction, came to believe rather in “spiritual law in the natural world.” His Ascent of Man regards evolution and law as only the methods of a present Deity. Darwinism seemed at first to show that the past history of life upon the planet was a history of heartless and cruel slaughter. The survival of the fittest had for its obverse side the destruction of myriads. Nature was “red in tooth and claw with ravine.” But further thought has shown that this gloomy view results from a partial induction of facts. Palæontological life was not only a struggle for life, but a struggle for the life of others. The beginnings of altruism are to be seen in the instinct of reproduction and in the care of offspring. In every lion's den and tiger's lair, in every mother-eagle's feeding of her young, there is a self-sacrifice which faintly shadows forth man's subordination of personal interests to the interests of others.
Dr. George Harris, in his Moral Evolution, has added to Drummond's doctrine the further consideration that the struggle for one's own life has its moral side as well as the struggle for the life of others. The instinct of self-preservation is the beginning of right, righteousness, justice and law upon earth. Every creature owes it to God to preserve its own being. So we can find an adumbration of morality even in the predatory and internecine warfare of the geologic ages. The immanent God was even then preparing the way for the rights, the dignity, the freedom of humanity. B. P. Bowne, in the Independent, April 19, 1900—“The Copernican system made men dizzy for a time, and they held on to the Ptolemaic system to escape vertigo. In like manner the conception of God, as revealing himself in a great historic movement and process, in the consciences and lives of holy men, in the unfolding life of the church, makes dizzy the believer in a dictated book, and he longs for some fixed word that shall be sure and stedfast.” God is not limited to creating from without: he can also create from within; and development is as much a part of creation as is the origination of the elements. For further discussion of man's origin, see section on Man a Creation of God, in our treatment of Anthropology.