The Origin of the World According to Revelation and Science

by Sir John William Dawson

D.—PRESENT CONDITION OF THEORIES OF LIFE.

One of the most learned and ingenious essays on this subject recently published [153] states on its first page that all the varieties of opinion may be summed up under two heads:

"1. Those which require the addition to ordinary matter of an immaterial or spiritual essence, substance, or power, general or local, whose presence is the efficient cause of life; and,

"2. Those which attribute the phenomena of life solely to the mode of combination of the ordinary material elements of which the organism is composed, without the addition of any such immaterial essence, power, or force."

It is quite true that physiologists have up to this time argued out these two alternatives, and that at present the second is probably the more prevalent. It is however also true that neither includes or can possibly include the whole truth, and that enlightened theism may enable us to hold both, or all that is true in either. Undoubtedly we must hold that a higher spiritual power or Creator is necessary to the existence of life; but then this is necessary also to the existence of dead matter and force. So that if physiologists think proper to trace the whole phenomena of life to material causes, they do not on that account in any way invalidate the evidence for a spiritual Creator, nor for a spiritual element in the higher nature of man. Yet so inconceivably shallow is much of the biological reasoning of the day, that it is quite common to find physiologists referring all life to spontaneous and uncaused material agencies, because they have concluded that the arrangements of matter and force are sufficient to explain it; and, on the other hand, to find theistic writers accusing physiology of materialism, if it finds the causes of vital phenomena in material forces, as if God could be present only in those processes which we can not understand.

What we really know as to the material basis of life may be summed up in a few words. Chemically, life is based on compounds of the albuminous group. These are highly complex in a molecular point of view, and seem to be formed in nature only where certain structures, those of the vegetable cell, exist under certain conditions. These albuminous substances do not necessarily possess vital properties. They may exist in a dead state just as other substances. Under certain conditions, however, those of forming part of a so-called living organism, they present phenomena of mechanical movement and molecular change, and of transformation or transmission of force, which enable them to transform themselves into various kinds of tissues, to nourish these when formed, and to establish a consensus of action between different parts of the organism; and these properties are vastly varied in detail according to the kind of organism in which they take place, and the conditions under which the organism exists. The actually living matter presents no distinct structure recognizable by the microscope, and can not be distinguished chemically from ordinary albumen or protoplasm; but when living it must either exist in some peculiar and complex molecular arrangement unknown as yet to chemistry and physics, or must be actuated by some force or form of force called vital, and not as yet isolated or reduced to known laws or correlation. It does not concern theism or theology which of these may eventually prove to be the true view, or if it should be found, which is quite possible, that there is no real difference between them. In any case it is certain that in the lower animals, and in the merely physiological properties of man himself, living matter may act independently of any higher spiritual nature in the individual, though of course not independently of the higher power of God, which gave matter its properties and sustains them in their action. It is farther certain that in man the spiritual nature dominates and controls the vital, except when under abnormal conditions the latter unduly gains the mastery, and quenches altogether the spirit. In the language of the Bible, the merely vital endowments of the man belong to the flesh ([Greek: sarx]), and to the rational mind or soul ([Greek: psychê]). The higher nature which man derives directly from God is the spirit ([Greek: pneuma]). Either of these parts of the complex humanity is capable of life ([Greek: zôê]) and of immortality. Either of them is capable of being in a state of death, though the import of this differs in its application to each. In Genesis, the body is composed of the ordinary earth-materials—the "dust of the ground." The higher nature is seen in the "shadow and likeness of God," and in the inbreathing of the Divine Spirit whereby man became a "living soul" in a higher sense than that in which the animals possess the ordinary "breath of life." With these views agree the later doctrines of the Bible as to the "trichotomy" of "body, soul, and spirit" in man, and of the added influence of the Spirit of God as acting on humanity.

E.—RECENT FACTS AS TO THE ORIGIN AND ANTIQUITY OF MAN.

Several recent statements as to new facts supposed to prove a preglacial antiquity for our species have been promulgated in scientific journals; but so great doubt rests upon them that they do not invalidate the statement that the earliest human remains belong to the postglacial age. I may refer to the following: