The Story of the Earth and Man

by Sir John William Dawson

The creation hypothesis is also free from some of the difficulties of evolution. It avoids the absurdity of an eternal progression from the less to the more complex. It provides in will, the only source of power actually known to us by ordinary experience, an intelligible origin of nature. It does not require us to contradict experience by supposing that there are no differences of kind or essence in things. It does not require us to assume, contrary to experience, an invariable tendency to differentiate and improve. It does not exact the bridging over of all gaps which may be found between the several grades of beings which exist or have existed.

Why, then, are so many men of science disposed to ignore altogether this view of the matter? Mainly, I believe, because, from the training of many of them, they are absolutely ignorant of the subject, and from their habits of thought have come to regard physical force and the laws regulating it as the one power in nature, and to relegate all spiritual powers or forces, or, as they have been taught to regard them, “supernatural” things, to the domain of the “unknowable.” Perhaps some portion of the difficulty may be got over by abandoning altogether the word “supernatural,” which has been much misused, and by holding nature to represent the whole cosmos, and to include both the physical and the spiritual, both of them in the fullest sense subject to law, but each to the law of its own special nature. I have read somewhere a story of some ignorant orientals who were induced to keep a steam-engine supplied with water by the fiction that it contained a terrible djin, or demon, who, if allowed to become thirsty, would break out and destroy them all. Had they been enabled to discard this superstition, and to understand the force of steam, we can readily imagine that they would now suppose they knew the whole truth, and might believe that any one who taught them that the engine was a product of intelligent design, was only taking them back to the old doctrine of the thirsty demon of the boiler. This is, I think, at present, the mental condition of many scientists with reference to creation.

Here we come to the first demand which the doctrine of creation makes on us by way of premises. In order that there may be creation there must be a primary Self-existent Spirit, whose will is supreme. The evolutionist cannot refuse to admit this on as good ground as that on which we hesitate to receive the postulates of his faith. It is no real objection to say that a God can be known to us only partially, and, with reference to His real essence, not at all; since, even if we admit this, it is no more than can be said of matter and force.

I am not about here to repeat any of the ordinary arguments for the existence of a spiritual First Cause, and Creator of all things, but it may be proper to show that this assumption is not inconsistent with experience, or with the facts and principles of modern science. The statement which I would make on this point shall be in the words of a very old writer, not so well known as he should be to many who talk volubly enough about antagonisms between science and Christianity: “That which is known of God is manifest in them (in men), for God manifested it unto them. For since the creation of the world His invisible things, even His eternal power and divinity are plainly seen, being perceived by means of things that are made.”[BD] The statement here is very precise. Certain things relating to God are manifest within men’s minds, and are proved by the evidence of His works; these properties of God thus manifested being specially His power or control of all forces, and His divinity or possession of a nature higher than ours. The argument of the writer is that all heathens know this; and, as a matter of fact, I believe it must be admitted even by those most sceptical on such points, that some notion of a divinity has been derived from nature by men of all nations and tribes, if we except, perhaps, a few enlightened positivists of this nineteenth century whom excess of light has made blind. “If the light that is in man be darkness, how great is that darkness.” But then this notion of a God is a very old and primitive one, and Spencer takes care to inform us that “first thoughts are either wholly out of harmony with things, or in very incomplete harmony with them,” and consequently that old beliefs and generally diffused notions are presumably wrong.

[BD] Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, chap i.

Is it true, however, that the modern knowledge of nature tends to rob it of a spiritual First Cause? One can conceive such a tendency, if all our advances in knowledge had tended more and more to identify force with matter in its grosser forms, and to remove more and more from our mental view those powers which are not material; but the very reverse of this is the case. Modern discovery has tended more and more to attach importance to certain universally diffused media which do not seem to be subject to the laws of ordinary matter, and to prove at once the Protean character and indestructibility of forces, the aggregate of which, as acting in the universe, gives us our nearest approach to the conception of physical omnipotence. This is what so many of our evolutionists mean when they indignantly disclaim materialism. They know that there is a boundless energy beyond mere matter, and of which matter seems the sport and toy. Could they conceive of this energy as the expression of a personal will, they would become theists.

Man himself presents a microcosm of matter and force, raised to a higher plane than that of the merely chemical and physical. In him we find not merely that brain and nerve force which is common to him and lower animals, and which exhibits one of the most marvellous energies in nature, but we have the higher force of will and intellect, enabling him to read the secrets of nature, to seize and combine and utilize its laws like a god, and like a god to attain to the higher discernment of good and evil. Nay, more, this power which resides within man rules with omnipotent energy the material organism, driving its nerve forces until cells and fibres are worn out and destroyed, taxing muscles and tendons till they break, impelling its slave the body even to that which will bring injury and death itself. Surely, what we thus see in man must be the image and likeness of the Great Spirit. We can escape from this conclusion only by one or other of two assumptions, either of which is rather to be called a play upon words than a scientific theory. We may, with a certain class of physicists and physiologists, confine our attention wholly to the fire and the steam, and overlook the engineer. We may assume that with protoplasm and animal electricity, for example, we can dispense with life, and not only with life but with spirit also. Yet he who regards vitality as an unmeaning word; and yet speaks of “living protoplasm,” and “dead protoplasm,” and affirms that between these two states, so different in their phenomena, no chemical or physical difference exists, is surely either laughing at us, or committing himself to what the Duke of Argyll calls a philosophical bull; and he who shows us that electrical discharges are concerned in muscular contraction, has just as much proved that there is no need of life or spirit, as the electrician who has explained the mysteries of the telegraph has shown that there can be no need of an operator. Or we may, turning to the opposite extreme, trust to the metaphysical fallacy of those who affirm that neither matter, nor force, nor spirit, need concern them, for that all are merely states of consciousness in ourselves. But what of the conscious self this self which thinks, and which is in relation with surroundings which it did not create, and which presumably did not create it? and what is the unknown third term which must have been the means of setting up these relations? Here again our blind guides involve us in an absolute self-contradiction.

Thus we are thrown back on the grand old truth that man, heathen and savage, or Christian and scientific, opens his eyes on nature and reads therein both the physical and the spiritual, and in connection with both of these the power and divinity of an Almighty Creator. He may at first have many wrong views both of God and of His works, but as he penetrates further into the laws of matter and mind, he attains more just conceptions of their relations to the Great Centre and Source of all, and instead of being able to dispense with creation, he hopes to be able at length to understand its laws and methods. If unhappily he abandons this high ambition, and contents himself with mere matter and physical force, he cannot rise to the highest development either of science or philosophy.

It may, however, be said that evolution may admit all this, and still be held as a scientific doctrine in connection with a modified belief in creation. The work of actual creation may have been limited to a few elementary types, and evolution may have done the rest. Evolutionists may still be theists. We have already seen that the doctrine, as carried out to its logical consequences, excludes creation and theism. It may, however, be shown that even in its more modified forms, and when held by men who maintain that they are not atheists, it is practically atheistic, because excluding the idea of plan and design, and resolving all things into the action of unintelligent forces. It is necessary to observe this, because it is the half-way evolutionism which professes to have a Creator somewhere behind it, that is most popular; though it is, if possible, more unphilosophical than that which professes to set out from absolute and eternal nonentity, or from self-existent star-dust containing all the possibilities of the universe.

Absolute atheists recognise in Darwinism, for example, a philosophy which reduces all things to a “gradual summation of innumerable minute and accidental material operations,” and in this they are more logical than those who seek to reconcile evolution with design. Huxley, in his “lay sermons,” referring to Paley’s argument for design founded on the structure of a watch, says that if the watch could be conceived to be a product of a less perfect structure improved by natural selection, it would then appear to be the “result of a method of trial and error worked by unintelligent agents, as likely as of the direct application of the means appropriate to that end, by an intelligent agent.” This is a bold and true assertion of the actual relation of even this modified evolution to rational and practical theism, which requires not merely this God “afar off,” who has set the stone of nature rolling and then turned His back upon it, but a present God, whose will is the law of nature, now as in times past. The evolutionist is really in a position of absolute antagonism to the idea of creation, even when held with all due allowance for the variations of created things within certain limits.