So here again it is utterly impossible for the consistent evolutionist to accept the Bible doctrine of the fall of man.
3. The logic of evolution destroys the doctrine of sin.
The Bible makes man’s fall deliberate and wilful, and his continued attitude of sinful enmity against God, in spite of all God’s offered power to change it into love, one of excuseless lawlessness and rebellion.
This makes man entirely responsible for his sin and accountable to God for everything sin does in his life. And so the Bible says: Every one shall give account of himself to God.
And those who go out of this life in the unconfessed and therefore unforgiven sin of rejecting God's mercy in Christ shall “go away into everlasting punishment,” where there will be “weeping and gnashing of teeth.”
But to the evolutionary philosophy, sin cannot be [p 30] “exceeding sinful,” for it is either inherent in the process of evolution, or, at worst, but an unfortunate slip in the working out of that process, if, indeed, it is not even a mark of budding virtue.
John Fiske says: Theology has much to say about original sin. This original sin is neither more nor less than the brute inheritance that every man carries with him.
Rev. Dwight Bradley, a Cleveland, Ohio, pastor, says: There is no escape for intelligent people today from the acceptance of the law of evolution.... It follows that what we call evil [sin] is the remains of a lower form of life.... We are in the midst of the slow process of ridding ourselves of our animal inheritance.
And Dr. Shailer Mathews follows the evolutionary philosophy to its logical and necessary end when he says: But for men who think of God as dynamically imminent in an infinite universe, who think of man's relation to Him as determined not by statutory but by cosmic law, who regard sin and righteousness alike as the working out of the fundamental forces of life itself, the conception of God as King and of man as condemned or acquitted subject is but a figure of speech.
Such a doctrine as this absolutely and forever destroys man’s responsibility for sin. For if sin is what Dr. Mathews suggests it is,—“the working out of the fundamental forces of life itself,“—then it is inherent [p 31] in man’s natural constitution as a process of his evolution. And if this is so, man is in no way responsible for his sin.