But where are these links to be found? and what naturalist can discover them? If the theory be true, the process must still be going on, and the world must be teeming with these intermediate races. But where are they? Bishop Temple as attempted to answer this question thus:
If it be asked why this variety does not range by imperceptible degrees from extreme forms in one direction to extreme forms in the other, the answer is to be found in the enormous prodigality, and the equally enormous waste of life and living creatures . . . Eggs, and seeds, and germs are destroyed by millions, and so in a less but still enormous proportion are the young that come from those that have not been destroyed. There is no waste like the waste of life that is to be seen in nature . . . The inevitable operation of this waste, as Darwin’s investigation showed, has been to destroy all those varieties which were not well fitted to their surroundings, and to keep those that were. (P. 165.)
But if this be the solution of the difficulty, how is it that those at the bottom of the scale remain? One of the great principle employed to explain the theory is “the survival of the fittest.” The result therefore must be continuous progress, and the raison d’être of each successive formation is its superior fitness above the form from which it sprang. A1 survives because it is superior in fitness to A, and A2 because it is superior to A1, and so forth. The effect therefore of the Bishop’s principle would be that the inferior forms at the bottom of the scale would perish, while the superior that have risen out of them, by reason of their greater adaptation to their environment, would survive. But this is not the fact. As a matter of fact, A, at the bottom of the scale, survives, though A99, at the top, is gone. The countless multitude of intermediate formations has disappeared, but the parent stock remains. If ever there was a race of animals so near man as to render it nothing more than natural that it should give birth to man, that race has wholly disappeared, while animals vastly inferior still exist in all their strength. Such a fact appears to me to be fatal to the theory.
(iii.) But the geological evidence is stronger still. If all these creatures have arisen in succession, and perished, we may well ask, “Where are their bones?” Each successive race, according to the theory, has been sufficiently powerful to overpower its predecessors, and to reproduce its own kind. It is clear, therefore, that we should naturally look for the geological remains of those once-powerful animals. But here we are met by the hard, stubborn, rocky fact, that there is no trace of them in the geological record. We find the remains of A, B, C, D, etc., but between them there is a complete hiatus; and if there were 1000 links between A and B, the geologist cannot show you one of them. He can show you A, and he can show you B; but as for A 20, 30, and 40, he can only tell you that they are not yet discovered. I know that some good Christian people are afraid of geology, and in that I believe they make a great mistake; for though I grant there may be danger in shallow, superficial, theoretical geology, I never can doubt that the real record of the rocks is in perfect harmony with the real record of Scripture. So, in this instance, it has furnished us with an unanswerable proof that the evolutionist theory is not founded in fact, and that nothing has yet been discovered in the geological record to shake our confidence in the grand, old, Scriptural statement, “God made the beast of the earth after its kind, and the cattle after their kind, and everything that creepeth upon the ground after its kind: and God saw that it was good.” We all know that it is not the object of the Book of Genesis to teach science; and some, I grieve to think, are not afraid of calling it a myth, or even a poem for the childhood of the world; but I venture to affirm that the statement of the Inspired Book which describes each kind as a separate creation is more in accordance with well-known geological facts, and is therefore more scientifically accurate than the theories of those who adopt the conjecture that the various kinds, species, or groups evolved themselves either from each other or from a common stock.
(2) Cosmical Evolution.
But if this be the case with Biological Evolution, how is it with Cosmical Evolution, or the evolution of inanimate matter? Bishop Temple describes it as “that which begins with Laplace, and explains the way in which the earth was fitted to be the habitation of living creatures;” [11a] and again he says: [11b]
It cannot, then, be well denied that the astronomers and geologists here made it exceedingly probable that this earth on which we live has been brought to its present condition by passing through a succession of changes from an original state of great heat and fluidity, perhaps even from a mixture mainly consisting of gases; that such a body as the planet Jupiter represents one of the stages through which it has passed; that such a body as the moon represents a stage toward which it is tending; that it has shrank as it cooled, and as it shrank formed the elevations which we call mountains, and the depressions which contain the seas and oceans; that it has been worn by the action of heat from within and water from without, and in consequence of this action presents the appearance when examined below the surface of successive strata or layers; that different kinds of animal and vegetable life have followed one another on the surface, and that some of their remains are found in these strata now: and that all this has taken enormous periods of time. All this is exceedingly probable, because it is the way in which, as Laplace first pointed out, under well established scientific laws of matter, particularly the law of gravitation and the law of the radiation of heat, a great fluid mass would naturally change.
There is nothing in that explanation to militate against the Scriptural accounts of the formation of the present world; and it may have pleased God to make use of the laws of gravitation and radiation of heat in order to bring our world into its present form. But the structure of the earth is not all, or nearly all.
There is found on the earth, and within it, an infinite variety of substances. There are metals; such as gold, silver, lead, iron, etc. There are precious stones of gorgeous beauty, diamonds, rubies, etc., etc. There is vegetable matter of every description, from the tenderest blade of grass to the hard wood of the forest oak. And there are animals of all classes and all characters, from the lowest mollusk to the most perfect and elaborate vertebrate. And the question is, What made them? Were they produced by the cooling of the earth? Was it gravitation or radiation that made the gold, the ruby, the fern, the oak, the animal, and the water?
But in addition to these various substances, the world abounds with what we call “Laws.” There are the laws of electricity, of heat, of chemistry, of force, of motion, etc.; besides those to which all these great changes are ascribed, the laws of heat and gravitation—and, What made them? Are they all the result of the cooling of the earth? Was one mass of fluid matter cooled into iron, one into gold, one into wood, and one into flesh? and did they all evolve from themselves by some mysterious power, those wonderful laws of nature to which they are all subject and which they all obey? In their case there was no “struggle for existence,” no “survival of the fittest,” and no “natural selection”—no thought, no mind, no design, and no plan in themselves; and it is indeed hard to suppose that they not only evolved themselves, but also evolved laws of such marvellous subtlety and power, that their discovery and use form the greatest achievement of modern science.