Biology versus Theology. The Bible: irreconcilable with Science, Experience, and even its own statements

by Julian

Having made man, the writer says: “God ended his work” (Gen. ii., 2). He made man and ceased the work of creation. Strange, that the writer should say this, and yet in the very same chapter contradict the statement, by the “new creation” of a woman! The dogma, however, that the creative work of God was sealed up, never to be re-opened when man was made, is in direct antagonism to the whole reading of the rocks. Geology shows us worlds of extinct vegetables and animals, the types of which, in one geological period differed entirely from those which existed at a succeeding one, and every anterior period had a flora and a fauna wholly unlike any of those with which we are familiar. There are hosts of creations at every era, and there has never been a period from the mystical “Beginning,” when the creative force has ceased from its operations. At one period we see nothing superior to shell-fish and sea-worms, and for a time the work of creation seems ended; but another set of rocks unfold themselves, and show us myriads of molluscs, especially of the arm-footed kind, trilobites and graptolites, stone-lilies and corals. Again a change comes over created things: mountains are upheaved, but no grass grows upon their sides, the ocean bed is contracted, and the waters are tenanted by innumerable swarms of fishes, for the most part unlike any which now exist. This dynasty of the fishy tribe gives place in time to the “age of ferns and mosses,” and the lizard race makes its appearance; but it is not till we come to the “secondary group of rocks” that we meet with the fish-lizards and the predacious plesiosaur, the bird-beaked saurian, and the labyrinthodon. Ages roll on, ages past all calculation, and new families of molluscs, fishes, and reptiles put in their appearance for the first time: ammonites and belemnites among the molluscs; eryons and horse-shoes among crustaceans; pterodactyls, teliosaurs, steneosaurs, and megalosaurs among reptiles, with here and there a sort of opossum, the first type of the mammal family. In the air flew the giant pterodactyl; on the dry land stalked the ponderous megalosaurus; in the sea whole hosts of marine lizards pursued their carnivorous instincts. Huge turtles crept along the muddy coasts, and strange fishes swam in the deep ocean; but no man existed; no flocks fed upon the mountains; no birds carrolled in the groves. The lordly lion commanded not in the forest; the majestic eagle was not the king of birds. The master spirits were saurians, whose sway was universal; and this brings us to the third great era, that of the tertiary rocks. This third series of rocks contain fossils more and more nearly allied to existing plants and animals; we meet with mammals in considerable numbers, but by far the largest number of them are thick-skinned, and, as a rule, they were both more bulky and longer in the legs than those which now exist.

Coming at last to the age of man and existing species, we still find the work of creation has not ceased. Every new manufacture brings forth some new form of plant or animal, so that creative force can no more cease from operation than any other form of force. If God is the Creator he must create; there can be no was or has been with deity; deity must of necessity be always the universal Now, the great I am. Infinite love must always be loving, for love without loving is no longer love. Infinite power must always be potential, for to remit the potentiality of power is to lose the power. Power and force are not latent faculties, but active only. In man it is otherwise, because man, as man, has a beginning and therefore an end, and the works of such a creature must have the same limits; but power, as power, cannot possibly begin and end; if it has a beginning that beginning must be the result of previous power, which is absurd; and if it has an end it is no longer power, which is a contradiction.

Man is the creature of a day, and when the day is over it can be said of man he was, and of the works of man they once were. As with man there is a past, so must there be a future. To every was there must belong a shall be. Man, therefore, can be an inventor, a doer, a maker, and cease inventing, doing, making, as he can cease living, or exhaust the limit of his faculties; but God cannot be a creator one day and not another, a doer yesterday and not to-morrow, an agent at one time and not another, or his works would have a past, and if a past a future also; and whatever has a past and future must belong to time; nay more, whatever has a past and future must of necessity be finite, limited, and imperfect. If God is infinite, the great “I Am,” the “same yesterday, today, and for ever,” it can never be said of His operations they once were, but are now ended; He was once a Creator, but is so no longer; His power to create was once active in its potentiality, but has ever since been in abeyance. Every faculty of the infinite, every act and attribute must itself be infinite, with no remission, and no shadow of turning. To say that God ended His work of creation on the sixth day and ceased from His labour, is to predicate change in the unchangeable, limitation in the infinite, rest in activity, repose in motion. It is to humanise deity, mortalise immortality, temporise eternity, limit infinity, and make a past to the everlasting “Now.” It is to make God a man, differing only in degree; eternity time, differing only in extension; the ever present a mere now between a “was” and a “will be.” Facts, therefore, as well as reflection must show the untruth of the dogma that for six days God was a creator, and then ended His work, and ceased from His labour.

(2.) The Fall.

As a supplement to the cosmogony, comes the legend of the Fall. Of course, the object of this tale is to account for the fancied imperfection of the works of God. The gist of the matter is this: Adam and Eve were commanded to abstain from a certain tree growing in Eden. This abstinence was to be the test of their obedience. The devil tempted Eve to eat of the forbidden fruit, and Eve induced Adam to do the same. In consequence of this disobedience, God cursed the serpent whose form Satan had assumed;—he cursed the ground, causing it to bring forth thorns and thistles; cursed Eve in her instincts of love and maternal functions, and Adam in assigning him the toil of working for his daily bread. Over all came the sentence of death: “By one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin” (Rom. v., 12).

According to this legend, “death is the wages of sin.” It was Adam’s apostacy that brought both sin and death into the world, but neither sin nor death can possibly be due to such a cause. Adam’s apostacy could not bring “sin” into the world. The very act of disobedience is a proof that “sin” already existed. The sin preceded the overt act, was the cause of it, and the cause must inevitably exist before its effect. It was sin that produced apostacy, and not apostacy which produced sin. Take the case of Cain: It is said that Cain slew his brother Abel. What would be thought of the logician who should affirm that because Cain slew Abel, hatred was introduced into the heart of man, and that death should follow as a perpetual punishment? Should we not reply, it was because Cain hated Abel that he rose up and slew him? The passion of hatred preceded the act of murder. It was malice aforethought, and if anything resulted from the misdeed, it was not hatred but contrition, not thoughts of evil but thoughts of bitter grief. Hatred was the cause of murder, and murder the parent of sorrow. So with Adam and Eve. If there had not been already “an evil heart of unbelief,” there never would have been an act of disobedience. Eve sinned, not because she was innocent, but because she was sinful. She disobeyed, not because she was obedient, but because her heart “was not right with God.” The bare act was nothing, the sin was there already, and if she had never eaten of the tree, the thought of her heart would have been sin. It is not true, therefore, that sin is the consequence of Adam’s apostacy, inasmuch as it produced the apostacy itself. By one man’s disobedience sin did not enter into the world, neither is it true that death is “the wages of sin.”

Below the surface of the earth for the depth of some six or eight miles, thousands and millions of once living creatures lie buried in the rocks; creatures which lived and died before man had any being. Of these creatures, myriads were carnivorous; and one specimen, at least, has been disinterred of a fossil animal inclosed in the body of another, by whom it had been devoured for food.

Hence, death existed long, long before the very creation of man; millions upon millions of animals were buried in the rocks before Eve was made of the sleeper’s rib. So says geology, and what is the testimony of physiology?

Every leaf and blade of grass, every drop of water, and even the invisible air, are crowded with insects and animalcules; insomuch that not a leaf can be eaten, not a drop of water can be drank, not a gasp of air can be inhaled, without destroying the life of some insect creatures. If, however, only one insect or animalcule died before the Fall; if by the effect of earthquake or volcano, the force of tempest, the rending of rocks, the slip of an avalanche, the fall of a tree, or even by accident, one animal lost its life, the point is proved; for that one animal at least died, and therefore death was not the consequence of a disobedience not yet incurred.

Again, it is well known that carnivorous beasts and birds of prey have an anatomy adapted to their predacious habits. Their teeth or beak, their paws or talons, their whole structure and digestive organs, prove that they live on carrion, and a lion could no more eat straw like an ox, than an ox could eat carrion like a lion. If, therefore, there was no death before the Fall, we are reduced to one or other of these dilemmas: Either there were no animals that lived on prey, or else at the Fall all predacious animals were wholly recreated, their teeth and jaws were re-constructed, their beaks and talons, their organs of deglutition and digestion; in short, their entire anatomical structure. A gratuitous assertion wholly incapable of proof, and contradicted by every animal fossil in the pre-Adamite world.