(b) But, on the other hand, the Scriptures do not disclose the method of man's creation. Whether man's physical system is or is not derived, by natural descent, from the lower animals, the record of creation does not inform us. As the command “Let the earth bring forth living creatures” (Gen. 1:24) does not exclude the idea of mediate creation, through natural generation, so the forming of man “of the dust of the ground” (Gen. 2:7) does not in itself determine whether the creation of man's body was mediate or immediate.
We may believe that man sustained to the highest preceding brute the same relation which the multiplied bread and fish sustained to the five loaves and two fishes (Mat. 14:19), or which the wine sustained to the water which was transformed at Cana (John 2:7-10), or which the multiplied oil sustained to the original oil in the O. T. miracle (2 K. 4:1-7). The “dust,” before the breathing of the spirit into it, may have been animated dust. Natural means may have been used, so far as they would go. Sterrett, Reason and Authority in Religion, 39—“Our heredity is from God, even though it be from lower forms of life, and our goal is also God, even though it be through imperfect manhood.”
Evolution does not make the idea of a Creator superfluous, because evolution is only the method of God. It is perfectly consistent with a Scriptural doctrine of Creation that man should emerge at the proper time, governed by different laws from the brute creation yet growing out of the brute, just as the foundation of a house built of stone is perfectly consistent with the wooden structure built upon it. All depends upon the plan. An atheistic and undesigning evolution cannot include man without excluding what Christianity regards as essential to man; see Griffith-Jones, Ascent through Christ, 43-73. But a theistic evolution can recognize the whole process of man's creation as equally the work of nature and the work of God.
Schurman, Agnosticism and Religion, 42—“You are not what you have come from, but what you have become.” Huxley said of the brutes: “Whether from them or not, man is assuredly not of them.” Pfleiderer, Philos. Religion, 1:289—“The religious dignity of man rests after all upon what he is, not upon the mode and manner in which he has become what he is.” Because he came from a beast, it does not follow that he isa beast. Nor does the fact that man's existence can be traced back to a brute ancestry furnish any proper reason why the brute should become man. Here is a teleology which requires a divine Creatorship.
J. M. Bronson: “The theist must accept evolution if he would keep his argument for the existence of God from the unity of design in nature. Unless man is an end, he is an anomaly. The greatest argument for God is the fact that all animate nature is one vast and connected unity. Man has developed not from the ape, but away fromthe ape. He was never anything but potential man. He did not, as man, come into being until he became a conscious moral agent.” This conscious moral nature, which we call personality, requires a divine Author, because it surpasses all the powers which can be found in the animal creation. Romanes, Mental Evolution in Animals, tells us that: 1. Mollusca learn by experience; 2. Insects and spiders recognize offspring; 3. Fishes make mental association of objects by their similarity; 4. Reptiles recognize persons; 5. Hymenoptera, as bees and ants, communicate ideas; 6. Birds recognize pictorial representations and understand words; 7. Rodents, as rats and foxes, understand mechanisms; 8. Monkeys and elephants learn to use tools; 9. Anthropoid apes and dogs have indefinite morality.
But it is definite and not indefinite morality which differences man from the brute. Drummond, in his Ascent of Man, concedes that man passed through a period when he resembled the ape more than any known animal, but at the same time declares that no anthropoid ape could develop into a man. The brute can be defined in terms of man, but man cannot be defined in terms of the brute. It is significant that in insanity the higher endowments of man disappear in an order precisely the reverse of that in which, according to the development theory, they have been acquired. The highest part of man totters first. The last added is first to suffer. Man moreover can transmit his own acquisitions to his posterity, as the brute cannot. Weismann, Heredity, 2:69—“The evolution of music does not depend upon any increase of the musical faculty or any alteration in the inherent physical nature of man, but solely upon the power of transmitting the intellectual achievements of each generation to those which follow. This, more than anything, is the cause of the superiority of men over animals—this, and not merely human faculty, although it may be admitted that this latter is much higher than in animals.” To this utterance of Weismann we would add that human progress depends quite as much upon man's power of reception as upon man's power of transmission. Interpretation must equal expression; and, in this interpretation of the past, man has a guarantee of the future which the brute does not possess.
(c) Psychology, however, comes in to help our interpretation of Scripture. The radical differences between man's soul and the principle of intelligence in the lower animals, especially man's possession of self-consciousness, general ideas, the moral sense, and the power of self-determination, show that that which chiefly constitutes him man could not have been derived, by any natural process of development, from the inferior creatures. We are compelled, then, to believe that God's “breathing into man's nostrils the breath of life” (Gen. 2:7), though it was a mediate creation as presupposing existing material in the shape of animal forms, was yet an immediate creation in the sense that only a divine reinforcement of the [pg 467] process of life turned the animal into man. In other words, man came not from the brute, but through the brute, and the same immanent God who had previously created the brute created also the man.
Tennyson, In Memoriam, XLV—“The baby new to earth and sky, What time his tender palm is pressed Against the circle of the breast, Has never thought that ‘this is I’: But as he grows he gathers much, And learns the use of ‘I’ and ‘me,’ And finds ‘I am not what I see, And other than the things I touch.’ So rounds he to a separate mind From whence clear memory may begin, As thro' the frame that binds him in His isolation grows defined.” Fichte called that the birthday of his child, when the child awoke to self-consciousness and said “I.” Memory goes back no further than language. Knowledge of the ego is objective, before it is subjective. The child at first speaks of himself in the third person: “Henry did so and so.” Hence most men do not remember what happened before their third year, though Samuel Miles Hopkins, Memoir, 20, remembered what must have happened when he was only 23 months old. Only a conscious person remembers, and he remembers only as his will exerts itself in attention.
Jean Paul Richter, quoted in Ladd, Philosophy of Mind, 110—“Never shall I forget the phenomenon in myself, never till now recited, when I stood by the birth of my own self-consciousness, the place and time of which are distinct in my memory. On a certain forenoon, I stood, a very young child, within the house-door, and was looking out toward the wood-pile, as in an instant the inner revelation ‘I am I,’ like lightning from heaven, flashed and stood brightly before me; in that moment I had seen myself as I, for the first time and forever.”
Höffding, Outlines of Psychology, 3—“The beginning of conscious life is to be placed probably before birth.... Sensations only faintly and dimly distinguished from the general feeling of vegetative comfort and discomfort. Still the experiences undergone before birth perhaps suffice to form the foundation of the consciousness of an external world.” Hill, Genetic Philosophy, 282, suggests that this early state, in which the child speaks of self in the third person and is devoid of self-consciousness, corresponds to the brute condition of the race, before it had reached self-consciousness, attained language, and become man. In the race, however, there was no heredity to predetermine self-consciousness—it was a new acquisition, marking transition to a superior order of being.