Evolution: An Investigation and a Critique

by Theodore Graebner

The history of Hindu belief presents testimony of a still more startling nature. In the Vedas we find statements and prayers which are clear proof of an early Monotheism. Thus the IX book of the Rig Veda contains the following prayer. "Who is the God to whom we shall offer our sacrifice? The one-born Lord of all that is; he established the heaven and sky; he is the one king of the breathing and awakening world; he through whom the heaven was established; he who measured out the light in the air—he who alone is God above all gods." Here the belief in one Supreme Being is clearly set forth. And yet this faith in one God in the course of time degenerated into a worship of 33,000 divinities—until Gautama the Buddha evolved a system that denied the very existence of God.

Turning to Greece we have the testimony of Prof. Max Mueller to this effect: "When we ascend to the distant heights of Greek history the idea of God, as the Supreme Being, stands before us as a simple fact." ("Essays," II, p. 146.) Carl Boettcher, in his great work on the Treeworship of the Greeks, maintains: "As far as the legends of the Greeks can be traced into prehistoric ages, the entire nation worshipped a single God, nameless, without statues, without a temple, invisible and omnipresent." This he regards as a tradition of "irrefutable inner truthfulness…. The beginning of Polytheism therefore represents the second phase of Greek religion, which was preceded by a Monotheism." Every student of Greek literature knows that this original belief at an early age gave place to a worship of the gods on Olympus, a worship which in turn gave way to openly avowed atheism. The Greeks were aware of this decay. Plato, in his Phaidros (274 B) quotes Socrates as saying: "I know of an old saying, that our ancestors knew what constituted the true worship of God; if we could but discover what it was, would we then have need of human theories and opinions on the matter?" Certainly a startling statement from the lips of a pagan. Undoubtedly Welcker was right when he asserted, as the ultimate result of his researches: "This (Greek) polytheism has settled before the eyes of men like a high and continuous mountain range, beyond which it is the privilege only of general historical study to recognize, as from a higher point of view, the natural primitive monotheism." Concerning the monotheistic ideas of later Greek thought, the same author says that they are to be regarded not as a result of an ascending line of evolution ("aufsteigende Linie der Entwickelung"), but as "a return of the profound wisdom of old age to the feeling of primitive simplicity."

Of the Phoenicians the greatest student of their history and religion, F. K. Movers, says: "Nature worship gradually obscured the purer God-idea of a more ancient stage of belief, but has never entirely obliterated it." He refers to an evident "adulteration of a purer and more ancient God-idea."

Regarding the Zoroastrians of ancient Persia, M. Haug, the famous Zend scholar, asserts that "Monotheism was the leading idea of Zoroaster's theology;" he called God Ahura-mazda, i. e., "the Living Creator." Zoroaster did not teach a theological Dualism. He arrived "at the idea of the unity and indivisibility of the Supreme Being," and only as "in course of time this doctrine was changed and corrupted … the dualism of God and the devil arose." "Monotheism was superseded by Dualism."

Both Dr. F. Hommel and Friedrich Delitzsch agree on the question of an early Arabian and Sumerian monotheism. Dr. Hommel demonstrates from the personal surnames contained in the inscriptions the existence of a "very exalted monotheism" in the most ancient times of the Arabian nation, about 2500 B. C., and among the Semitic tribes of northern Babylonia. This "monotheistic religion" degenerated under the influence of Babylonian polytheism. The same opinion was held years ago by Julius Oppert, the Assyriologist, who was led to a belief in "a universal primitive monotheism as the basis of all religions."

Expressions similar to the above might be adduced from Rawlinson, Legge ("Religions of China"), Doellinger, Victor v. Strauss-Torney (the Egyptologist), Jacob Grimm, and others. In short, the majority of independent and unprejudiced students of heathen beliefs, from the days of A. W. v. Schlegel to our own, have reached the conclusion, that all religions in their later stages exhibit a much lower conception of the Divinity than in their earlier form. It is only the hopelessly prejudiced who can say, as does John Fiske, that "to regard classic paganism as one of the degraded remnants of a primeval monotheism, is to sin against the canons of a sound inductive philosophy." Sinning against the consonant testimony of universal history is a venial offense, it would seem, when the integrity of this "sound inductive philosophy"—that is, of the Spencerian theory—is at stake. It needs but a glance at the well-known facts of religious history to show the working of this Law of Decay as influencing the development of every system of ethnic belief which has a recorded history or a literature.

The workings of this law can be traced even in the case of the savage tribes of our own day. Of the African negroes, P. Bandin says that "their traditions and religious doctrines … show clearly that they are a people in decadence…. They have an obscure and confused idea of the only God, …. who no longer receives worship." ("Fetichism," p. 7-10.) Winwood Reade testifies: "The negroes possess the remnants of a noble and sublime religion, though they have forgotten its precepts and debased its ceremonies." They still retain a recollection "of God, the Supreme, the Creator." Concerning the Zulus, Bastian records that they informed him that "their ancestors possessed the knowledge of …. that source of being which is above, which gives life to men." ("Vorgeschichtliche Schoepfungslieder.") A missionary of the Lutheran General Synod, Rev. J. C. Pedersen, wrote in "Lutheran Observer," August, 1910, concerning the African natives that they still have a considerable display of religion, but "ask him, who is the God in whom you trust? what do you mean by trusting? how can he help you? and he will answer, 'I don't know, but the old people used to say so, and taught us to say so.'" John Hanning Speke, in his "Journal of the Discovery of the Sources of the Nile" records reminiscences among the degraded savages among whom he dwelt, of a supreme God who dwells in heaven, but who no longer received worship. Mungo Park, in the diary of his "Travels in the Interior of Africa," says that the Mandingoes, a degenerate race of fetish worshippers, still possessed the knowledge of one God, but do not offer up prayers and supplications to him.

In the record of his famous circumnavigation of the globe, Captain Cook says that the cannibals of New Zealand still acknowledged a superior being, although their religion was a crude system of spiritualistic practices.

Concerning the Koreans Mrs. L. H. Underwood, medical missionary, says that a thousand unworthy deities now crowd the temples, although the great universal Ruler is still worshipped at times, and the "ancient purity of faith and worship has become sadly darkened."

The foremost student of modern missions, Johann Warneck, in "The Living Christ and Dying Heathenism" (F. H. Revell Co.,) comes to the conclusion that the Christian religion and its monotheism are not only not a development from lower origins, but that the heathen religions, historically considered, are a degeneracy from a higher knowledge of God. In other words, the application of the doctrine of evolution to the field of comparative religion is a mistake. "Any form of Animism known to me has no lines leading to perfection, but only incontestable marks of degeneration," says the author. "In heathenism the gold of the divine thought becomes dross."