Evolution and Christianiy

Front matter

S NSS.

WS SSSR

SS »*

Preface

It is several years since the first notes were made for this book. I have been persistently hindered from working upon it—the last few years by continued illness, so that it has been produced with difficulty and at widely separated times and places. Doubtless it contains repetitions and other faults of such composition, but I am not able to do anything more for it. |

Except as otherwise indicated, the references in the first part of Chapter I are to Darwin’s “Origin of Species,” and “Descent of Man,” Haeckel’s “The Riddle of the Universe,’ Spencer’s ‘Synthetic Philosophy,” and Huxley’s “Man’s Place in Nature,” “Science and Christian Tradition,” and “Evolution and Ethics.”

It would greatly encumber the text to insert references to all the Scripture passages comprehended in the very condensed statement of Scriptural truth set out in the second part of Chapter II. It is assumed that the reader is sufficiently familiar with Scripture to recognize this statement as substantially correct.

In Chapter XI, all quotations from Dr. Shailer Mathews are from “The Gospel and the Modern

Man,” and all from Dr. Harry E. Fosdick are from Vv vi PREFACE

“The Modern Use of the Bible,” except those on the subject of immortality, which are from ‘‘The Assurance of Immortality.”

I earnestly hope that those who read this book will take the pains to look up the Scripture passages cited. My whole aim in writing it has been to direct attention back to the Scriptures and to exhibit their supreme authority.

Jesste W. GrIBBs

CHAPTER I, THE EvoLutTIONARY PHILOSOPHY AND CHRIS- TIANITY (Defined and Contrasted)

II. Botu Cratmm To BE FouNDED ON REASON III. Witt tHe EvoLutTionary PurtosopHy BEAR THE TEST OF PURE REASON? ; IV. Witt Curistianity BEAR THE TEST OF PURE REASON? i var, V. Tue Test or INDIVIDUAL EXPERIENCE VI. Tue Test or Wortp History VII. Wuere tHe Naturat Scientist Is RIGHT AND WHERE HE Is WRONG .

VIII. Wat Is EvoLution? .

IX. Wuat Is CHRISTIANITY?

X. BErRGsoN’s ‘CREATIVE EVOLUTION”’ XI. THe CHURCH AND THE EVOLUTIONARY PHI- LOSOPHY esis Urn 2 XII. AppENDUM. THE SCIENTIFIC TEST

Vii

PAGE

159 207 a aca ap } it ay i hr J

THE EVOLUTIONARY PHILOSOPHY AND CHRISTIANITY

Pr “HE thought of the modern world is rent by a - schism between natural science and faith, and the conflicting philosophical systems that grow

out of their diverse points of view.

Natural science, which is the distinctive development of modern times, occupies the foreground of attention, with its inductive method of inquiry into truth, its revelation of the reign of natural law, and its evolutionary philosophy. So wonderful have been the discoveries of the secrets of nature made through this inductive method, and so marvellous the works accomplished through the new understanding of nature’s laws and operation through them, that the scientist appears as the modern revelator, wonderworker, emancipator and saviour. He points to his _ works as the demonstration of his truth and his own authentication, and speaks with boundless assurance in propounding his philosophy.

Over against this modern salvation stands the an- | 1 cient background of the Christian faith, with its claim of a direct revelation of truth from God, authenticated by supernatural works, which furnishes the only hope of salvation for men, and in which they are morally bound to believe.

It is remarkable that science arose after Christianity had quickened men’s minds with “the love of the truth,” and that it then brought forth a philosophy to challenge the authority of the Christian faith. Many shades of religious belief and unbelief are, indeed, to be found among the adherents of both these systems. Men of faith, struggling to be intellectually honest in the bedazzlement of modern science; and men of science, bound by tradition and affection to the ancient faith, have sought to bridge the chasm between the two and reconcile them to each other. But the prevailing tendency among scientists has been toward religious agnosticism or atheism, and the faith of those who accept the evolutionary philosophy becomes so distorted as to be unrecognizable as Christian. More and more the cleavage widens and deepens between the intellectualsk—men of science, who hold to the evolutionary philosophy,—and the spirituals—men of faith, who still maintain the truth of Christianity.

It is possible here only to speak broadly of the outstanding tenets and prevailing tendencies of these two systems. For the purpose of analysis and comparison it is necessary first to define them briefly.

The natural scientist finds his authority in nature. He opens her book confident of finding there reality.

Examining the changing forms which she presents, the nineteenth century scientist found that two things were always present to his senses—matter, which extends in space, and motion, which extends in time—and that these were inseparable. He found that matter could be re-combined into multitudinous forms, but that none of its atoms was lost in the process; they could all be accounted for. He found that the force which produces motion and change in matter could itself be changed from one form into another, as from latent energy into heat, light, electricity, etc., and back again, but that the force itself persisted quantitatively through all these changes. And he concluded that these inseparable factors of matter and force are the indestructible elements of nature; above all, that force is the ultimate causal factor in all the flux of things. (Haeckel, Spencer.)

According to his lseone Nt this) constant flux of things is due to the conflict of opposing forces which tend either to the integration of matter from a diffused state into certain forms, or to its disintegration into the diffused state once more. When these two forces balance each other, the material form is in equilibrium. While the first is in the ascendency, the form is evolving. But evolution has an impassable limit beyond which the opposing force gets the ascendency and dissolution of the form ensues. (Spencer.)

This was illustrated first in the heavenly bodies. The primordial diffused matter is found in the gaseous

nebule which are dispersed through space. The centripetal and centrifugal forces acting upon such a nebula integrate and differentiate the matter into a central sun and planets revolving around it and control the whole in a moving equilibrium like that of our solar system. So the unimaginably vast bodies and innumerable systems of the heavens have been evolved and are kept revolving in their spheres. But the time comes when the equilibrium of a system is disturbed. The centrifugal force gets the ascendency. Then worlds go wild and crash into each other; the heat which they so generate resolves their matter into the diffused gaseous state again, and the age-long process of evolution re-commences. Thus the whole natural universe, which was believed to be infinite, was said to be interminably going through vast cycles of evolution and dissolution according to “iron laws,” though the beginning and ending of these cycles had no more reason in them than mad chance. In view of this stupendous spectacle, man, who has exalted himself to “the image of God,” is, to Haeckel, no more than “a fly of a summer’s day.” Blind force becomes infinite, eternal, resistless, and we are helpless in its grasp. (Haeckel.)

Coming back to earth, the nineteenth century scientist saw the climax.of physico-chemical activity in protoplasm, the most complex and unstable of chemical compounds, and the physical basis of life. With the emergence of this compound, so ready to explode its energy, he conceived that life was spontaneously generated. The forces of life were merely transmutations of that persistent force which inheres in inorganic matter.

He found the unit of all living matter in the cell, a microscopic speck of protoplasm with a central “nucleus.” He found plants and animals of one cell, some of which propagate themselves by division;— other higher plants and animals with greater and greater aggregations of cells and more and more highly complex organization. He saw individual plants and animals of higher types developing from a single fertilized seed, egg, or germ cell, by innumerable. divisions, and reasoning from the particular to the general, concluded that all the higher forms of life developed in the first place from one-celled forms, by a long process of evolution.

This process was explained as follows: First, all living forms tend to increase faster than they can be fed, with the result that they must struggle for existence with one another. Second, all living things tend to vary, accidentally, or in adaptation to changes in the conditions of life. Third, those organisms whose variations are most favorable tend to survive in the struggle for life. (Darwin.) There are constant slight changes in the environment necessitating constant slight adaptations on the part of organisms. (Spencer.) Variations, however caused, are inherited and added up through long lines of descent. Thus the multiplicity of complex living forms which we behold in the world today were elaborated from the original

cell by inordinate reproduction, natural selection, and the accidents of environment. Darwin taught, of course, that natural selection only preserved and added up the variations which nature gave. But nature could never have done this without natural selection. Natural selection was the determining factor in the origin of species. Evolution proceeds from the general to the particular, from the simple to the complex. There is an increase of mass and a differentiation of organs. (Spencer.)

Embedded in the earth’s crust were found fossil remains of plants and animals, some of which are now extinct, and these were so arranged as to show an evolutionary. succession. The development of the embryos of living forms was said to reproduce this development. (Darwin, Huxley, Haeckel.) Haeckel enunciated this as the law of biogenesis: “Ontogenesis is a brief and rapid recapitulation of phylogenesis.”’

The Darwinian evolutionary process required long ages, millions of years, for its accomplishment, as the favorable variations which it selected were admittedly very slight. The geologist Lyell paved the way for Darwin’s theory by his method of explaining the condition of the earth’s crust by the action of such ordi- | nary forces as are now operating upon it—rains, winds, rivers; volcanoes, earthquakes, etc. The changes that are shown to have taken place in geologic times are so vast that they could be accounted for by these forces only on the supposition that they operated through many millions of years.

Man’s descent from the brute creation was traced through the similarity of his gross bodily structure to that of certain types of ape, through purported skeletal remains of extinct sub-human forms, through ~ certain so-called ‘‘vestigial characters” in his body, said to indicate a lower previous form of existence, and through the development of the human embryo, said to recapitulate the history of his animal ancestry. (Darwin, Huxley, Haeckel.)

Man’s faculties were said to differ in no way from those of the animals, except in degree. The reflex action of the lowest forms of life develops into instinct, and instinct into the reason of man. The mind of man. is just a form of the universal motion become conscious through the development of the nervous system. “Mind is motion.” “The unit of consciousness is a nerve shock.” (Spencer.) “The human soul is not an independent, immaterial substance, but, like the soul of all the higher animals, merely a collective title for the sum-total of man’s cerebral functions; and these are just as much determined by physical and chemical processes as any of the other vital functions, and just as amenable to the law of substance.” (Haeckel.) In all this literature, man is merely a species of animal, and the appeal is constantly made to the law of animal life to account for everything : human.

Man carries forward the interminable struggle of nature in his tribal and national wars, out of which organized societies grow. ‘The animals have a law of the herd, and: this gives man the clue to the law of justice within the society of which he is a member. Desiring liberty for himself, he must allow an equal liberty to his fellows. As industrial development advances, war declines, and ultimate unity and peace are to be obtained through a universal interchange of services. A standard of ethics approximating that of the Golden Rule is thus arrived at. Spencer propounded an absolute ethics, but he declared it to be impossible of realization at the present time. Ethics can take no cognizance of wars for conquest, but defensive wars are necessary. Even to love one’s neighbor as oneself would be suicide at present. One must love himself most, in order to survive. Haeckel declared that to love one’s enemies “‘is a very ideal precept, but as useless in practice as it is unnatural.” Pleasure is the end of action—pleasure both near and remote, both of oneself and of others. Ultimately we will learn from experience to take pleasure in the things | that bring the greatest happiness to all. In the meantime, we must not throttle too much our immediate desires. Pleasure promotes function and is necessary to self-preservation. Yet egoism should be modified by some beneficence toward others. (Spencer.)

In our country the current popular evolutionary teaching has been that the peoples of the world are rising up everywhere against the kings who have hurled them to destruction in war, and are overthrowing these kings and so overcoming war by war and bringing in a final reign of brotherhood and peace on the earth, called democracy.

But the Marxian socialist declares that the battle of democracy has not half been fought until the possessing classes are dispossessed of their property and the exploited wage slaves given control of the state with the means of production in their hands. Thus he expects to bring about equality. He refuses to fight _in national wars, which he believes to be promoted by capital in its program of oppressing labor. But he is not above using the coercion of strikes or the violence of revolution to bring about the establishment of his Utopia.

In a word, the world is imperfect, and always has been: imperfect, but it is evolving into perfection by a natural and necessary purgatorial process.

This philosophy offers no hope of salvation, of justification or eternal life, to the individual. Spencer, Huxley and Haeckel, while approving self-preservation as the first law of life in this world, deprecate any hope of life beyond the grave as selfish. The individual must fight and breed and die, that the race may progress. It precludes the possibility of human freedom, since it unfolds everything mechanically from the given factors of matter, force, and iron laws. (Haeckel, Huxley.)

If this philosophy has any god, he is not separable from nature. He has no supernatural power. He is the personification of nature’s forces. Spencer identified the unknowable First Cause with the persistent force of nature. Even to Renan, he was unconscious. He is really a finite, struggling god, limited by his own works and at war with himself. He creates to destroy. He brings forth countless sons to turn them to destruction. His hope of ultimate perfection is in inordinate reproduction, in the war by which the unfit are eliminated and the fit selected, and in the accidents by which new forms arise. He is the god of lust and force and chance. His goal is not very definitely conceived, but his glory is in the manifest progress which he is making.

The evolutionist begins with nature. He sees a process of almost unlimited proliferation, struggle, and survival of the strong, going on in nature, which he calls evolution, and in which he finds the key to the riddle of the universe. Nature is liberating itself by its own interminable and agonizing travail. ‘This is the process by which whatever god may be is working out some ultimate perfection.

This philosophy teaches man to hope in nature. Its wisdom is in discovering the law of nature and conforming to it. It believes that the great law of nature is progress; that we have only to follow her to find a religion of truth, beauty and goodness, and an organization of humanity that will realize the Christian’s expectation of the City of God. (Haeckel.) The source of such aspirations in divine Revelation is overlooked. All testimony to the supernatural is rejected. Spencer derives all religions, without exception, from the gross superstitions of savages. The idea of an anthropomorphic God arose from the worship of ancestral ghosts. The Scriptural teaching of the special creation of species was the product of ignorance and. is unethical, since it implies that the species were deliberately designed to destroy one another in the bitter struggle for existence. Religion demands obedience to authority, to God’s will, rather than inculcating ethical principles. It has had some educational value, but has been outgrown. We learn by suffering the consequences of our acts. Huxley attached more ethical value to the Scriptures, but would have them taught in the schools by men of science, who would eliminate the element of superstition from them, and not by men of faith. Haeckel would banish from the school all religious teaching except that of his scientific Monism.

In the wake of Huxley’s and Spencer’s infidelity and Haeckel’s blasphemies, there arose in Germany a still madder prophet. Nietzsche cast to the winds not only the Christian faith, but the whole of Christian ethics. He called himself ‘‘the first immoralist.” Unselfishness was for weaklings, who might profit by it. The lust of life and the will to power were the true right and virtue of the superior man. The glory of life was in fighting and breeding the Superman, a being as far above men and their “slave morality” as men are above the ape. A nation should be a super-nation, - with the determination to dominate the world.

The utterance of this demon-possessed prophet was taken up by Bernhardi and others, and translated into a national religion of militarism.

The struggle for existence is, in the life of nature, the basis of all healthy development. All existing things show themselves to be the result of contesting forces. So in the life of man, the struggle is not merely the destructive, but the life-giving principle.

The law of the stronger holds good everywhere. . This struggle is a creator, since it eliminates. .. . Without war, inferior or decaying races would easily choke the growth of budding elements, and a universal decadence would follow. ... No power exists which can judge between states and make its judgment prevail. Nothing, in fact, is left but war to secure to the true elements of progress the ascendency over the spirits of corruption and decay. (Bernhardi, Germany and the Next War.)

The world knows the issue of this philosophy in the greatest war of history. A few vain men, drunk with the pride of their own intellect, dared defy God and sowed the wind of their infidelity throughout the world, and the world reaped the whirlwind.

Christianity finds its authority in an unfolding revelation of spiritual truth recorded in the sacred Scriptures. The Scriptures begin with God, an absolute spiritual Being, infinite in wisdom, righteousness, power and love, having in His own Being a love relationship through which He made all things. This good God created the universe good and so declared it. He created this world, a place of beauty, riches and peace, for the dwelling-place of man, designing all its lower mineral, vegetable and animal orders for man’s sustenance, use, or service. Last He created man in His own image, a being allied to the world. through his body and its need of material sustenance, but in whose nostrils was the breath of the divine Spirit. Man was not a mere animal, but a living soul, endowed with the spiritual capacity of faith for apprehending and communing with God. He was created pure, in harmony with God, and sharing the freedom, spiritual knowledge, and immortal life of God, and God’s power over the lower orders of creation. God placed him in the paradise of this world and gave him dominion over it.

All this God wrought by the word of His power, through the agency of His Son. And He placed in all living creatures the power to reproduce after their kind.

Man was the climax and end of the earthly creation. In him the Spirit of God was liberated. All things were made for him, but he himself was made for God, for joyous fellowship with God, and for God’s service. He was to accept and use the things of the lower orders of creation as the good gifts of God, with gratitude to Him, but he was not to make them the end of his being. To do so would be to sin against God and the higher law of his own soul. He was therefore forbidden, on pain of death, to seek his utmost satisfaction or knowledge in the garden, but was to seek them directly from God, the Author of all things, in Whom alone he could find a knowledge or power sufficient for his life.

Into this Paradise in which man lived and loved and ruled as the vicegerent of God intruded an evil spiritual personality—one who had rebelled against the reign of God in other realms and was bent on destroying His works. He was subtle and powerful in evil, as man was innocent. He presented to man the attractiveness of the world, promised him life through the unlimited indulgence of his physical desires and a knowledge growing out of the experiences of his senses that would rival the wisdom of God. This was why God had forbidden man this knowledge, the tempter said—to keep man in subjection to Himself. Man should not die, but become as God, through the uttermost probing of the material world by his senses.

Thus man was seduced to subject his soul to his body, to barter the love and truth of God for the pleasures of the world and the lies of the destroyer. Both he and the world whose center and end he was came under the curse of broken law and fell together into a pit of perversity and corruption. His body became the seat of lust, so that he himself was ashamed of it and sought to cover it from his own view. In his selfcondemnation he found himself estranged from God and sought to hide from Him. He lost the power of. self-control and of control over the lower orders of nature, which now became hostile to him and tyrannized over him. The ground brought forth briars and noxious weeds. The animals preyed upon him. The elements lashed themselves into fury against him. He was able to live only by heavy toil, murderous warfare, and sore travail. Ruinous diseases attacked his body

‘from within. He was harassed by continual fear and. chastisement, and sooner or later must succumb to the unequal struggle and die. |

This was the judgment of God. Man had believed the lie of the destroyer, disobeying the command of the Creator, and now he must suffer the rule of the destroyer.

Yet God pitied man in his fall and planned his redemption from the power of the evil one. The race was to be perpetuated through the immeasurable sufferings of the woman, and in pronouncing judgment on the first pair, God gave to her a promise of hope in her punishment of bringing forth in pain a race of lustful and dying men—the promise of a Son Who should one day be given her with power to overcome the enemy and destroyer of her race. In the meantime men must learn the lesson of broken law. Only as they experienced the just consequences of their sin would they understand its nature; only as they felt its destructive power would they realize their need of salvation from it.

It soon became clear that the stream of man’s reproductive power had been polluted. The first-born son of man became the murderer of his brother. The race quickly sank into utter corruption and violence and was swept away by a flood, God giving it a fresh _ start through the family of one believing man to whom He had revealed Himself.

Again, in the vanity of their sensual minds, men thought to build a city and in it a material tower into the material sky, and so to scale the heights of Heaven, but God scattered and dismembered them in alien groups as they made this attempt. These groups made to themselves gods of the lustful and bloody forces of nature and in their names made war on one another, destroying and being destroyed. Still men did not understand their error. They were not able, of themselves, to find their way back to the light of truth.

God next called a nation—Israel—and revealed to them the meaning of all this through great prophets and lawgivers. The whole race was lying in the darkness of spiritual blindness, of unbelief in the one true God, Who is the Creator, Supreme Ruler, and Judge of the whole world. God had ordained a moral law of which men were ignorant and against which they were sinning. ‘This law was in all the earth working out His judgments against an evil race. The destructions of the world were the chastisements of God’s law. The way to life and peace, therefore, was not through great material forces, but through faith in God and obedience to His law.

God made known to Israel certain requirements of His law and promised them deliverance from the hostility of nature and from their national foes in return for their faith in Him and obedience to His law. He even made them the executors of the chastisement of the law upon their enemies, who were also His, while they trusted and obeyed Him. He wrought supernatural deliverances for them, both in the lower orders — of nature and in their wars. Their victories were out of all proportion to their numbers; they were not victories of force, but of faith. Yet Israel failed of salvation through the judgments of the law, because she herself failed to measure up to the righteousness it required. She was forever falling away from her holy, invisible, almighty God to the lustful and violent gods of the heathen, disobeying His righteous commandments and committing the abominable practices of these natural deities, and so bringing on herself the terrific punishments of the law. It was apparent that the law was not a sufficient power for salvation.

Yet Israel was given through her prophets many intimations of a better salvation to come. From the first there had been implicit in the revelation of one God, the Creator of all men, Who required of them righteousness, the idea that He cared for all of them and desired to save them all. He had blessed Israel and set her in the midst of the nations that she might be a blessing to them, that He might reveal through her His righteousness and His salvation to the ends of the earth. Her greatest seers saw deeper into the heart of God and pictured Israel and her great coming King as the Suffering Servant of Jehovah, bearing the chastisement of the world’s peace and so redeeming the world from destruction; they foretold a new creative work in which God would write the law on men’s hearts, a day when His Spirit would be poured out on all flesh, a coming reign of universal righteousness and peace on the earth.

But Israel rejected her prophets and their voice became still. Having learned from heavy chastisement to fear the wrath of broken law, the Jews shut themselves in a narrow exclusiveness and self-righteousness, continuing to hope in the judgments of the law, and God took away from them the ancient vindication of the law and humbled them under the world-power of Rome. In the last analysis, Israel’s righteousness of the law was revealed in the scribes and Pharisees to be hypocricy.

The law having proven an insufficient means of salvation, God now sent forth His Son, the second Adam promised to the woman, the divine Redeemer-King promised through the prophets, Who should break the power of the deceiver and destroyer and restore men to the knowledge and life of God.

The Son of God and of man was meek and lowly, bearing no weapon in His hand, but in His mouth the sword of the Spirit—God’s uttermost truth. He came not to condemn men, not to destroy their lives, but to save them. He taught that God is love; that He is the Creator, Preserver, and Redeemer of men; that the works of destruction are the works of an evil spiritual power by whom men are deceived and betrayed to — death. The law, indeed, was from God; men must be destroyed because they trusted and served the destroyer; the destructions of the devil were thus also the judgments of God’s law. But men had no hope in these judgments, since they were all sinners together, condemned under the law, and in no position to judge or punish one another. Their only hope was in the mercy and forgiveness of God’s love, and in offering. them the final, absolute salvation of the Kingdom of Heaven, Christ required them to obey its higher law of absolute, redeeming love—to forgive and save one another. He called on men to repent of the lust, greed, anxiety, strife, confusion and chastisement of the world, and believe in Himself as the revealer and embodiment of God’s saving love, and receive His new law of love in their hearts and be saved in His new Kingdom of love and become saviours of their fellows. They were to relinquish the works of destruction and work the saving works of love alone.

He declared that the absolute love of God is the supreme law of the universe; that the devil and the lower orders of nature are subject to it; and He demonstrated this supreme law in supernatural saving works.