Sec. 2. Whence and Whither
Has man descended from worms, fishes, lizards, opossums, hedgehogs and apes as Haeckel says? Is he a son of an ape? No! A Son of God!
Does death annihilate both soul and body; or does the soul live after the death of the body? Shall we see and know our children, fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, husbands, wives, and friends after death? Shall we enjoy forever, the society of the good, the true and the beautiful? Shall we be free from want, pain and sorrow? Shall we be happy throughout eternity? This is my belief and hope!
Darwin (Origin of Species, vol. 1, p. 228) says: “Have we any right to suppose that the Creator works by intellectual powers like those of man?” On the same page he refers to “the works of the Creator” as being superior to those of man. In the same work (vol. 2, p. 304) he refers to “the laws impressed on matter by the Creator.” Again (p. 306) he refers to life as “having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one,” animal, at the beginning of life on the earth. In his Descent of Man (p. 95) he says: “There is no evidence that man was aboriginally endowed with the ennobling belief in the existence of the omnipotent God.” Referring to the question: “Whether there exists a Creator and Ruler of the Universe.” On the same page he says: “And this has been answered in the affirmative by some of the highest intellects that have ever existed.” In the same work (p. 627) he says: “The idea of a universal and beneficent Creator does not seem to arise in the mind of man, until he has been elevated by long continued culture.” On the same page he says: “Few persons feel any anxiety from the impossibility of determining at what precise period, in the development of the individual, from the first trace of a minute germinal vesicle, man becomes an immortal being.” Again (pp. 627-628) he says: “The birth, both of the species and of the individual are equally parts of that grand sequence of events which our minds refuse to accept as the result of blind chance. The understanding revolts at such a conclusion.” Thus it appears that Darwin believed in the existence of a personal God and in the immortality of the human soul. But he also believed “that the production and extinction of the past and present inhabitants of the world” have been “due to secondary causes, like these determining the birth and death of the individual.” (Origin of Species, 2, p. 304.) In brief, Darwin maintained that the Creator directly and specially made one or a few primordial forms, and turned them loose upon the earth to shift for themselves, subject to the “factors of evolution.”
Although Darwin appears to believe in the special creation of the first one, or the first few, animals and plants, and in the immortality of the human soul, yet his theory of evolution is highly materialistic; and the publication of this Origin of Species gave materialism an immense impetus.
The Encyclopedia Britannica (9 ed., vol. 2, p. 109), referring to “thinkers, who hold materialistic views,” says:
“According to this school, man is a machine, no doubt the most complex and wonderfully adapted of all known machines, but still neither more nor loss than an instrument whose energy is provided by force from without, and which, when set in action performs the various operations, for which its structure fits it, namely: to live, move, feel and think.”
The materialist maintains that there is no substance in man, which is alone conscious, distinct and separable from the body; that matter is the only substance in existence; and that matter and its motions constitute the universe. (Cent. Dic. 5, p. 3658.) This work, on the same page quotes J. Fisk (Evolutionist, p. 277) as saying that “Philosophical materialism holds that matter, and the motions of matter, make up the sum total of existence; and that what we know as psychical phenomena in man and other animals, are to be interpreted, in an ultimate analysis as simply the peculiar aspect, which is assumed by certain enormously complicated motions of matter.” (Cent. Dic. 5, p. 3658)
According to this view, if one should meet a friend, the sight of him would set certain atoms in his eyes and brain in motion; and these atoms would inform the Ego that the man is his friend, Smith or Jones.