But—no Adam, no Fall; no Fall, no Atonement; no Atonement, no Saviour. Accepting Evolution, how can we believe in a Fall? When did Man fall? Was it before he ceased to be a monkey, or after? Was it when he was a tree man, or later? Was it in the Stone Age, or the Bronze Age, or in the Age of Iron?
There never was any "Fall." Evolution proves a long slow rise.
And if there never was a Fall, why should there be any Atonement?
Christians accepting the theory of evolution have to believe that God allowed the sun to form out of the nebula, and the earth to form from the sun, that He allowed Man to develop slowly from the speck of protoplasm in the sea. That at some period of Man's gradual evolution from the brute, God found Man guilty of some sin, and cursed him. That some thousands of years later God sent His only Son down upon the earth to save Man from Hell.
But evolution shows Man to be, even now, an imperfect creature, an unfinished work, a building still undergoing alterations, an animal still evolving.
Whereas the doctrines of "the Fall" and the Atonement assume that he was from the first a finished creature, and responsible to God for his actions.
This old doctrine of the Fall, and the Curse, and the Atonement is against reason as well as against science.
The universe is boundless. We know it to contain millions of suns, and suppose it to contain millions of millions of suns. Our sun is but a speck in the universe. Our earth is but a speck in the solar system.
Are we to believe that the God who created all this boundless universe got so angry with the children of the apes that He condemned them all to Hell for two score centuries, and then could only appease His rage by sending His own Son to be nailed upon a cross? Do you believe that? Can you believe it?
No. As I said before, if the theory of evolution be true, there was nothing to atone for, and nobody to atone. Man has never sinned against God. In fact, the whole of this old Christian doctrine is a mass of error. There was no creation. There was no Fall. There was no Atonement. There was no Adam, and no Eve, and no Eden, and no Devil, and no Hell.