At any rate one thing is settled: “The theological explanation must be rejected,” as Plate puts it. “It sees in adaptation the proof for the love and kindness of a Creator, who has ordered all organisms most conformable to their purpose. Natural Science cannot accept such an explanation.”
Is this the boasted spirit of truthfulness, which desires only the truth,—but is evading it persistently? Is this that unbiassed eye that seeks only the truth? Truly, it seems to be unsound, since it cannot bear the rays of truth. Let us go to another workshop of liberal science. It is known now that our earth has once been a ball of glowing fluid, with a temperature in which no living being could exist. Consequently the latter must have appeared at a later stage of evolution. As a fact, palæontology does not show any remnants of organisms in the lower strata of the earth. Now again a question suggests itself to the scientist, Whence did the first life come from? We have the choice of only two explanations: either it has risen by itself, out of unorganic, dead matter, or it was produced by [pg 241] the hand of a Creator: either by generatio aequivoca or the act of creation. Now there has never been observed a generatio aequivoca, as is testified to by natural science itself, and never has it been accomplished in the laboratory. Therefore, inasmuch as the natural laws of olden times cannot have been any different from those of the present, there has never been a primordial genesis. Do they perhaps give the Creator his due here, where the case is so obvious? Let us see.
The noted zoölogist, R. Hertwig, writes: “Inasmuch as there has doubtless been a time when the prevailing temperature of our globe made any life impossible, there must have been a time when life on it arose either by an act of creation or by primordial genesis. If, conformable to the spirit of natural sciences, we are relying only on natural forces for an explanation of natural phenomena, then we are necessarily led to the hypothesis of primordial genesis,” although it contradicts all experience. But the deduction is only brought forth as a “logical postulate”: there “must” be such genesis after creation is eliminated. “We natural scientists say,” states Plate, “that all living beings must have originated some time in former geological periods ... from dead, unorganic matter; to assume a creation would be no explanation at all, exactly as it would be no explanation to assume the creation of matter.” Which philosophy teaches that it is not an explanation of a fact to assume for it the only reasonable cause? But just this cause they do not want. Virchow says in this respect: “If I do not wish to assume a creative act, if I desire to explain the matter in my way, then it is clear that I must resort to generatio aequivoca. Tertium non datur. There is nothing else left, if one once has said: ‘I do not accept creation, but I want an explanation of it.’ If this is the first thesis, the second thesis is, ergo, I accept the generatio aequivoca. But we have no actual proof of it.” Hence Haeckel only follows the lead of others when he writes: “We admit that this process (primordial genesis) must remain a pure hypothesis, as long as it is not directly observed or duplicated by experiment. But I repeat that this hypothesis is indispensable for the entire coherence of the history of natural creation. Unless you accept the hypothesis of primordial genesis at this one point in the theory of evolution, you must take refuge in the miracle of a supernatural creation.”
Is this science, or is it not rather Theophobia? Does the freedom of science consist, first of all, in the privilege of emancipating one's self from truth, whenever truth is not to one's taste? True, liberal science will then be free from distasteful truths, but all the more shackled by its irreligious prejudices.
In modern times, the theory of evolution is in high favour. [pg 242] On earth we do not only see life, but life in a great variety of forms, from plant to man. The question, whence this variety, admits in its turn only of the alternative: either it was immediately created by God's hand, or it is the result of a slow evolution from common original forms. Whether there has been an evolution within the vegetable and animal kingdom is a problem for natural science. But it is a philosophical question, whether the essentially superior human soul, endowed with spirituality and reason, could have evolved from the inferior animal soul. Philosophy must answer: No, just as impossible as to evolve ten from two, or a whole book from a single proofsheet. Faith says the human soul is created by God. We do not intend to discuss the problem here any further, but shall only point out how science here, too, expressly or tacitly, is determined very energetically by the presumption of the exclusive natural causation; this is applied to the entire theory of evolution, but especially in regard to man.
“The notion of the evolution of the living world on earth,” thus states Weismann quite significantly, “extends far beyond the provinces of individual sciences, and it influences our entire range of thoughts. This notion means nothing less than the elimination of miracle from our knowledge of nature, and the classification of the phenomena of life on an equal footing with the rest of natural events.”The guiding motive is plainly in evidence.
The aim to eliminate the “miracle of creation” is manifested even more conspicuously in the question about the origin of man: man with his entire equipment, intellectual as well as cultural, must have evolved upward from the most imperfect rudiments; this is regarded as a self-evident proposition.
M. Hoernes, for instance, writes: “The Cosmogonies, i.e., the theories of creation, of all nations ascribe the origin of man to a supernatural act of creation, whereby the Creator is imagined as a human being, because at the intellectual stage corresponding to these notions something created could only be conceived as something formed, something constructed.” Thus the theory of creation, and the Christian doctrine of the genesis of man, is disposed of as a notion of the lower intellect. “On the contrary, we are taught by science to look upon the highest mammals as our nearest blood-relatives.” This “we are taught by science,” although it is confessed: “We know the fact of the existence of the man of the fourth, or glacial, period, but we have [pg 243]not a solitary fact that would throw light upon his origin and his previous existence.”
“The theory of miracles can be given up only when we shall cease to contemplate man as a creature apart from the rest of creation, and look upon him as a being developed within creation to what he is now. Then, however, reason and language, as well as man himself, are the products of a continuous evolution,” says Wundt in his “Psychology of Nations.” Fr. Müller, in a text-book on the science of language, argues: “According to Darwin and to modern natural science, man was not created but has evolved from a lower organism during a process of thousands and thousands of years.... For this reason, we must (?) assume that the first language of primitive man could not have ranked above the speech by which animals living in families communicate with each other.”
On the basis of this truly dogmatical presumption, that the “miracle theory” of creation must not be accepted, they proceed then to construe one hypothesis upon another, of the origin of language, of thought, of conscience, of religion, according to the method of Darwin and Spencer, hypotheses of utmost arbitrariness, and frequently most fantastic. “Ethnographical researches,” so we are told by E. Lehmann, “made by travellers, representatives of science and of practical life, in all parts of the globe, ... are starting to-day, almost without exception, from the tacit presumption that the civilization of peoples living in the primitive state represent an early and low stage in a historical chain of evolution.”