1. It destroys the doctrine of the inspiration of the Bible, by denying its inerrancy and infallible and final authority.
Over and again in the early verses of Genesis we are told that God created the various species to reproduce after their kind. But evolution says that this is not true, for as a matter of fact, the various species have continuously evolved from one to another all the way to man.
[p 24]To a mind that is working normally, these two propositions are mutually exclusive. And so those who retain their intellectual integrity and consistency, and who therefore cannot accept two contradictory propositions at the same time, are compelled to make a choice between them.
Huxley saw this when he said: The doctrine of evolution is directly antagonistic to that of creation. Evolution, if consistently accepted, makes it impossible to believe the Bible.
When Professor Schmucker; therefore, speaks of the creation story as the poetical account of Genesis; when Dr. S. B. Meeser, of Crozer Theological Seminary, describes the Scriptures as the survivals of the fittest of those communion experiences which men, who have lived intensely in the moral interest, have had with God; when Dr. H. C. Vedder, of the same seminary, says the Scriptures "grew in ... accuracy" as they were written; when Dr. W. H. P. Faunce, President of Brown University, can say: Mr. Gladstone's last book is called "The Impregnable Rock of Holy Scripture." The very title shows a conception of the Bible at the farthest removed from the present Biblical scholarship, to which the Bible is a growth, not a rock; [p 25] when Dr. Ernest D. Burton, of the University of Chicago, says: Some among us have been constrained to admit that the books [of the Bible] are not infallible in history or in matters of science, and not wholly consistent and therefore not ultimately and as a whole inerrant in the field of morals and religion; and when Dr. Shailer Mathews, of the same University, urges us to think the gospel in terms of evolution, and then shows us what that means to him when he says: For in the New Testament there are conceptions which the modern world under the dominance of science [at the heart of which lies the evolutionary philosophy] finds it impossible to understand, much less to believe; these men are simply demonstrating the fact that they still retain their intellectual integrity and consistency, and that they are therefore entirely unable to accept the doctrine of evolution and believe in an inerrant Bible at the same time. That is, the logic of the doctrine of evolution destroys for them the faith that, in its original manuscripts, the Bible as it came from God to man was "truth unmixed with error," with the resulting confidence that He who gave it has preserved it to us by His providence essentially as it was given.
This means that these men and all who agree with them have rejected that Word which is forever settled in heaven, in order to accept a hypothesis which [p 26] is never settled on earth; that they have given up the Book which has stood unchanged through the centuries against every conceivable form of assault, and taken in its place a set of scientific speculations that have either to be revised or discarded for new speculations every few years; that they have turned from an inspired, inerrant and authoritative revelation of God, and turned to an unproven theory which makes the Bible a human document, of supreme value, so they say, as unfolding the religious evolution of the race, but full of errors because of the human element in it.
The result of this is the so-called “scientific” or “historical” method of interpreting the Bible, which means, to quote Dr. Meeser, that while the Scriptures have the wisdom of experts in religion, [yet] "authority" is scarcely the term to describe their value, and may, when applied to them, obscure their real character.
“But why make all this ado about it,” say the evolutionists; “it is all simply a question of interpretation.”
That is absolutely right. It is the interpretation of the evolutionists set in opposition to that of the Holy Spirit; and the true Church, compelled to make a choice, takes that of the Holy Spirit.