How unscientific then seems the following declaration of Darwin: “To my mind, it accords better with what we know of the laws impressed on matter [How could that be?] by the Creator, that the production and extinction of the past and present inhabitants of the world should have been due to secondary causes, like those determining the birth and death of the individual.” It does not remove the First Great Cause from active control of the world to call his acts “secondary causes.”
14. CHANCE OR DESIGN?
Evolution is the old heathen doctrine of chance. It professes to eliminate design and a personal active Creator. The theory of natural selection allows no design, no intelligence, no interference, no control, by the Creator. He does not interfere even by means of law. M. M. Metcalf, of Oberlin, O., (shades of Chas. G. Finney!), a prominent evolutionist, says, “The last stand was made by those who claim that supernatural agency intervenes in nature in such a way as to modify the natural order of events. When Darwin came to dislodge them from this, their last intrenchment, there was a fight.” Yes! the fight will last while any one tries to substitute chance for the control of Almighty God.
The universe teems with countless evidences of intelligent design of the highest order, whether it is found in the starry heavens, or in the law and order of the atoms hiding from the most powerful microscope. All things came by chance or by design. They say there is no design. We wonder that the hand that wrote the lie was not palsied. It would be, if the same Creator that filled every muscle, nerve, bone, and tissue of the sacrilegious hand, with numberless proofs of design, were not a long-suffering and merciful God.
Prof. Vernon Kellogg says: “Darwinism may be defined as a certain rational causo-mechanical (hence non-teleologic) explanation of the origin of species.” Translated into plain English, this euphemistic expression means that Darwinism excludes all design and control by a Creator. Chance pure and simple. All species originated by chance, without interference by a supreme Being. This senseless doctrine of chance has been condemned by man in every age.
We can only note a few of the evidences of design, found in bewildering numbers in every part of God’s great creation.
The Human Body. Can evolutionists imagine how the human body could be crammed fuller of the clearest proofs of the most intelligent design, indicating a mind of the highest order? Many of the most remarkable inventions of man were suggested by the wonderful contrivances found in the human body. Yet they say this marvelous piece of ingenuity did not come from the hand of the Creator but was developed by blind chance or “natural laws,” without a trace of intelligent design by the Creator, or by man or beast. The human body can no more be a product of chance or causo-mechanical evolution than a Hoe printing press, or Milton’s Paradise Lost.
On high medical authority, we are told that there are in the human body 600 muscles, 1000 miles of blood vessels, and 550 arteries important enough to name. The skin, spread out, would cover 16 square feet. It has 1,500,000 sweat glands which spread out on one surface, would occupy over 10,000 sq. ft., and would cover 5 city lots, 20 x 100 ft. The lungs are composed of 700,000,000 cells of honey comb, all of which we use in breathing,—equal to a flat surface of 2,000 square feet, which would cover a city lot. In 70 years, the heart beats 2,500,000,000 times, and lifts 500,000 tons of blood. The nervous system, controlled by the brain has 3,000,000,000,000 nerve cells, 9,200,000,000 of which are in the cortex or covering of the brain alone. In the blood are 30,000,000 white corpuscles, and 180,000,000,000,000 red ones. Almost 3 pints of saliva are swallowed every day, and the stomach generates daily from 5 to 10 quarts of gastric juice, which digests food and destroys germs. Two gallons daily! It is easy also to believe that the “very hairs of our heads are numbered,”—about 250,000.
Yet many an upstart, with thousands of the most marvelous contrivances in his own body, is ready to shout that there is no God and no design, or that there has been no interference since creation, and that our bodies have reached the dizzy heights of perfection, without intelligence, purpose or design. Absurd in the highest degree! “We are fearfully and wonderfully made.”
The Eye. Darwin says, “To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I frankly confess absurd in the highest degree.” (Italics ours). After admitting that it “seems absurd in the highest degree,” he proceeds, as if it were certainly true. Darwin has been admired for his candor, but not for his consistency. After admitting that an objection is insuperable, he goes on as if it had little or no weight. And many of his followers take the same unscientific attitude. They try to establish their theory in spite of overwhelming arguments.