INTRODUCTION.
“The myths of paganism,” says Professor Huxley, [3] “are as dead as Osiris or Zeus, and the man who should revive them, in opposition to the knowledge of our time, would be justly laughed to scorn; but the coeval imaginations current among the rude inhabitants of Palestine, recorded by writers whose very name and age are admitted by every scholar to be unknown, have unfortunately not yet shared their fate; but even at this day are regarded by nine-tenths of the civilised world as the authoritative standard of fact, and the criterion of the justice of scientific conclusions in all that relates to the origin of things, and among them of species.
“In this 19th century, as at the dawn of modern physical science, the cosmogony of the semi-barbarous Hebrew is the incubus of the philosopher and the opprobrium of the orthodox. Who shall number the patient and earnest seekers after truth . . . whose lives have been embittered and good name blasted by the mistaken zeal of bibliolaters? Who shall count the host of weaker men whose sense of truth has been destroyed in the effort to harmonise impossibilities,—whose life has been wasted in the attempt to force the generous new wine of science into the old bottle of Judaism? It is true that if philosophers have suffered, their cause has been amply avenged. Extinguished theologians lie about the cradle of every science, as the strangled snakes beside that of Hercules; and history records that whenever science and orthodoxy have been fairly opposed, the latter has been forced to retire from the lists, bleeding and crushed, if not annihilated; scotched, if not slain. But orthodoxy is the Bourbon of the world of thought: it learns not, neither can it forget; and though at present bewildered and afraid to move, it is as willing as ever to insist that the first chapter of Genesis contains the beginning and the end of sound science, and to visit with such petty thunderbolts as its half-paralysed hands can hurl those who refuse to degrade Nature to the level of primitive Judaism.”
We purpose, in this pamphlet, with all possible brevity, to show that Scripture is irreconcilable with science, experience, and even with its own statements.
Part I.
SCRIPTURE IRRECONCILABLE WITH SCIENCE.
(1.) The Mosaic Cosmogony.
It is not our intention to go with any minuteness into the thrice-told tale of the antagonism between the Mosaic cosmogony and the revelations of geology. That only five days intervened between the creation of heaven and that of man is contradicted by every stratum of the earth.
We readily admit that the word “day” is used in Scripture in a very vague sense, and that even the limiting phrase “evening and morning” by no means circumscribes the interval to twenty-four hours. As the sun did not even exist till the fourth of these days, the three preceding ones could not possibly have been divided by its setting and rising.
In like manner it may be admitted that Daniel’s “vision of the evening and morning” (viii., 26) covers a period of 2,300 days, and his “seventy weeks” (ix., 24) may be 490 years, that is seventy weeks of years; but all this gives very little relief to the real difficulties. It is not true that there ever was a period like that called by Moses “the third day;” a period when the earth was drained, the sea gathered into its bed, the rivers and lakes confined to their proper boundaries, grass growing on the mountains, trees in the forests, fruits in the vineyards, and all the vegetable kingdom complete; yet no fish in the waters, no creeping thing on the earth, no bird in the air. Even in the Cambrian period may be traced the rudiments of animal life; and in the Silurian, long before any trace of land plants can be detected, certain molluscs were so abundant that the period of this formation has been distinctly called “The age of brachiopods.”
Next to the Silurian or mollusc period comes the Devonian or “age of fishes,” when the seas literally swarmed with inhabitants, and it is not till we arrive at the coal formation that we come to the “vegetable age.” And what were these vegetables? principally ferns and mosses, a rank production, which can in no wise answer to the description: “The earth brought forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind . . . and the evening and the morning were the third day.”