The Pentateuch, in Its Progressive Revelations of God to Men

by Henry Cowles

1. His system requires indefinite, almost infinite, ages of time back of the Silurian strata, i. e. back of the oldest known remains of life, vegetable or animal, on our globe.[11] That is, he requires for the development of his system an almost infinite extension of time back beyond the earliest traces or proofs of life, vegetable or animal, on our globe. And this, he would have men believe, is the perfection of modern Science!—a science which pushes its sphere in time back indefinitely beyond all known facts upon the bare evidence of theories and assumed analogies!——But even this gives not the full force of the objection made by true Science to his system. It is not merely that he builds upon assumed facts where no known facts are—which is building upon nothing—but where no facts can be, which is building not merely upon negatives but upon impossibilities. There is no room for his assumed facts where he locates them. If Geology proves any thing it proves that vegetable and animal life commenced on our planet as soon as the planet was ready and not sooner, and that we have the remains of the earliest living organisms in the oldest fossil-bearing rocks. His scheme is therefore conditioned upon impossibilities and must be false.

2. His system requires a close succession of animal races, differing from parent to offspring by only theleast possible amount, with no leaps, no gaps whatever. Thus from monkey up to man the system calls for at least a few scores not to say hundreds of intermediate links. Where are they? His suffering theory cries out for their support: there is no answer. The earth’s surface responds not to the call; even “the depths say—They are not in me!” From the original monad up to man all the way through at least the long line of the vertebrates—reptile, fish, bird, mammal—that is to say, through the serpent tribe; the fish kingdom; the swallow, blackbird and eagle, and especially through the quadruped family—the horse and camel and particularly the monkey household—through all this remarkable line of ancestry, Darwin’s system demands a very gradual upward march by the shortest possible stages of progress, so that the intermediate links must be barely less than infinite. It certainly ought to be very easy to trace a genealogical line so well represented. It is estimated that thirty thousand fossil species have been recognized. How many of these can be formed into this genealogical line from the aboriginal vertebrate—supposed to be aquatic and Ascidian—up to man? Has Mr. Darwin set himself to marshal this proof-line of witnesses to his system? No. Not only has he not done this very appropriate thing, but he has said little, quite too little on this most vital point, in the way of showing what could be done. He reiterates that the geological records are very imperfect. Doubtless they quite fail to come up to meet the demands of his system. It is the fatal weakness of his theory that just where it should find facts in animal history for its support, they are not there!He himself admits that if you believe in a tolerably full showing of animal history in the geological records of our globe, you must disbelieve his system.[12] He needs quite another geological record for his proofs.

3. His argument is essentially materialistic. In his reasonings and assumptions, all there is of mind in man or any animal is of the brain and the nervous organism. All animals have wants and are moved by a sense of want to supply them. This begets self-originated activity, and this activity involves thought—yet only as a function of the material brain. Most of the animals are social by nature: hence another member in this family of wants and enjoyments, begetting another class of impulses and activities. But whether it be man or monkey, dog or kitten, these activities and these plans and thoughts underlying them, come of the nervous organism, of which the brain is the center. On his theory and in his words (Origin of Species, pp. 93, 94) “the moral sense is fundamentally identical with the social instinct.” Hence it becomes the burden of his argument that the brain in man and in monkey is homologous—almost perfectly the same in shape, in quality, and in its bony incasement. He seems to be quite unaware that there may be something in the human brain that a twelve-inch rule will not measure, nor the nicest made scales weigh, nor the sharpest chemical tests discern. It seems never to have occurred to him that even if the brain of man and of monkey weighed in the same notch, fitted into the same cast, responded alike to the same chemical tests (which, however, is a good way from being the case), yet there might be material qualities in the human brain too subtle and ethereal to be appreciable under any known physical test; and much more still might be a spirit inhabiting the human brain and working through it which the monkey has not. “That the breath of the Almighty hath given to man understanding” is a fact higher than the range of Darwin’s philosophy. The prima facie probability thence arising that God would fit up a special material organism for the one only mind made in his own image seems to have entirely escaped Mr. Darwin’s notice. The record by Moses onthis point—that God created man by a special act, entirely independent of all other forms of life, vegetable or animal, commends itself to the good sense of most men as more than probable, as indeed supremely rational and unquestionably true.

4. It is but a natural result of his materialistic system that he should have no adequate conception of the pre-eminent glory of man’s intellectual and moral nature. With great ingenuity he labors to make it appear that Tray feels shame and guilt and even the moral sense of oughtness—all the same in kind with those of man. He does not say in definite words that the best developed dog is capable of knowing his divine Creator and of rendering to Him the obedience, love, and homage of an adoring heart—is capable of becoming consciously a trustful child of God and a temple of the Holy Ghost. He does not quite say this; indeed he does not seem to appreciate these exalted functions of a soul made in God’s image, or to think them worthy of particular notice. It is a capital fault in his reasoning that he ignores almost entirely these highest, noblest activities of man’s nature. Thus ignoring these most vital points which lift man so high above all the lower animals, how can it be expected that his reasoning upon the material relations of man and beast should be otherwise than lame and fallacious?

5. Scientifically it is a sufficient condemnation of this system that it is compelled to fritter away the fundamental law of species which God fixed, not upon its surface but deep in its nature, viz. that hybrids shall be infertile—incapable of propagation. The crossing and consequent interblending of distinct species, genera, families, and orders, if by their nature possible, would long ages ago have thrown the animal world into inextricable confusion, effacing every line of distinction. Such a result must have been simply fatal to all scientific classification. If Mr. Darwin’s theories had been taken as the divine plan, the world would have had more grades and orders of animal life than there have been days since the first monad came into being.

6. The scheme is in many points revolting to the common sense and sober convictions of men. Some of its assumptions lie close upon the border of the ridiculous. Think of the stride upward from vegetable lifeto animal—the plant pulling its roots out from the soil and beginning to use them for legs! And of the very analogous aspirations and endeavors of the fish to live out of water—to push out his fins into wings; convert his superabundant fat into muscle; expand his lung and soar off in mid-heaven—the very eagle himself! The effort to tone down these absurdities within the limits of sober sense by simply taking it little by little, spreading the change over a few thousands or millions of years and subdividing the work among a vast number of generations may help to confuse some minds and blunt the edge of its absurdity; but soberly considered, the absurdity is still there. Hence we may note the fact that most writers seem to find themselves quite unable to discuss this theory to any extent without sliding, perhaps unconsciously, from sober argument into ridicule and irony.

I am well aware that, to abate if not nullify the force of this apparent absurdity, it will be said that along the actual line between plant life and animal life, the vegetable and animal kingdoms are actually brought closely side by side; that plant life shades off by almost imperceptible stages till it comes so near to the lowest forms of animal life that the dividing line is scarcely if at all perceptible. This fact no scientist disputes. The real question turns upon its purposed object or ultimate reason. Is it, as Mr. Darwin’s theory assumes, to bridge over this dividing line and facilitate the march of “genealogical descent with variations” across what else would be a bad if not an impassable gulf?

This being the claim set up by Mr. Darwin, I answer—

(a.) The proper test of this theory is simple: Is there any “march” here at all—i. e. any progressive movement from one form of vegetable life to another, from lower forms to higher, or as this case seems to demand, from higher forms to lower, for along this dividing line we have the lowest known forms of both vegetable life and animal? Is this army of the lowest vegetable species and of animal life-forms, down in this dark microscopic valley, really on the march, or is it absolutely moveless and fixed? Are the flora on the vegetable side of the line really, doffing their plant-life uniform and regalia, and emerging on the other side of the line into fauna to swell the hosts of animal-life forms? This it wouldseem must be the test for the proof or disproof of Darwin’s theory.

(b.) But again, I would reply in this as in other points; Mr. Darwin misses not so much the facts of nature as the ultimate reason of those facts. What is the ultimate reason for the remarkable fact that the plant kingdom crowds itself so closely upon the confines of the animal? Not, I answer, to facilitate the transit of generations from the one province to the other. Of such transit there is not the first shade of evidence. But the reason is that the Great Author of nature out of his infinite resources has filled both kingdoms perfectly full of life-forms so that no territory between their respective domains lies unoccupied. It is simply a fecundity of life-forms or species, analogous to the fecundity of living representatives under most of these species—all alike traceable to the infinite resources of the Creator’s wisdom and power.