The Church, the Schools and Evolution

by J. E. Conant

Now, the Church has vital reasons for fighting this philosophical guess. One reason is, that it is entirely unsupported by facts, and is therefore altogether unproven. But if this were the only reason, the Church could be convicted of the supreme folly of her entire history, for turning aside to fight an unproven guess. A more vital reason is that the theory does not stop with the natural realm, but goes right on up into the realm of spiritual truth, and assumes to pronounce on the most vital spiritual realities in such a way that the logic of the theory, if consistently accepted, utterly [p 11] destroys both the foundations of the Church and the content of the Gospel. Indeed, evolution has been proclaimed to the world as the ally of a philosophy which boasts of its capacity to drive Christianity out of existence.

For the Church, therefore, to fail to fight a theory that strikes at her very vitals would be to become a traitor to the Lord who bought her and sent her into the world to preach His gospel. And so she is compelled to choose between submitting to an unproven and destructive theory, which has never saved any one who has believed it, and preaching the gospel of God's grace, which has infallibly saved every one who has believed it. The true Church is fighting the theory of evolution in order that the message she is commissioned to preach may not be rendered of no effect by a non-belligerent attitude toward it being mistaken for approval of it.

Not only the fact that the theory is entirely unproven, but also and more particularly the nature of its influence on faith in the Bible compels the Church to reckon with it. We will go into these two reasons for antagonizing this speculative guess.

I. The Theory of Evolution is Unproven.

The reason we reflect on this for a few moments lies in what has already been said. If evolution is a fact, then for the Church to refuse it and fight against it would be to fight against God, which ought to bring her to swift judgment for her mad folly. But if it is only an unproven theory, then she is justified if she has good reasons for fighting its propagation. We will therefore note what the scientists themselves have to say regarding the theory.

[p 12] 1. Testimony for Evolution.

There are teachers of science who do not hesitate to assure us that the doctrine of evolution is now no longer a theory but an assured fact. A few representative quotations from that class will suffice.

Dr. P. C. Mitchell says, in a late edition of the “Encyclopedia Britannica”: The vast bulk of botanical and biological work on living and extinct forms published during the last quarter of the nineteenth century increased almost beyond all expectation the evidence for the fact of evolution.

Prof. S. C. Schmucker, of the West Chester, Pennsylvania, State Normal School, in his book, “The Meaning of Evolution,” says: Among students of animals and plants there is no longer any question as to the truth of evolution. That the animals of the present are the altered animals of the past, that the plants of today are the modified plants of yesterday, that civilized man of today is the savage of yesterday and the tree dweller of the day before, is no longer debatable to the mass of biologists.

Professor Fish, then of Denison University, Granville, Ohio, not long ago dictated to his class, of which the writer’s daughter was a member, the following statement: Organic evolution is the key to all biological thinking of today. It is not a theory but a fact, because the main facts are true. Man is the off-spring of the lower animals, and the ancestry can be traced back to the simplest forms of animals known. All medical research takes that fact into account.