God's two books; or, Plain facts about evolution, geology, and the Bible

Front matter

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Introduction

IT seems high time that the church of Christ got her bearings amid the many conflicting claims put forth in the name of modern science. It is time that she caught the inspiration there is for her in the fact that all the more recent discoveries, and a more sane, a more truly scientific estimate of the older discoveries, are reaffirming, in a manner as unexpected as it is conclusive, the divine harmony shown in the two great revelations which the Creator has given us of himself.

It is no new crisis that now confronts the church. Down through all the ages these great , questions regarding our origin, our relation to the Ruler of the universe, have continued to force themselves on thoughtful minds; and on the answers given to them have been built all the great systems of man-made religion, from 'those of Chaldea and India down to the Theosophy and so called ** New Thought " of our day. It is a common mistake to regard the religions of Greece and Rome, of Egypt and Babylon, or those of modern India and China, as consisting merely i^

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THE GRAVE THAT SHALL NEVER BE OPENED

This Stone tomb is in Hannover, Germany, and is a little over a hundred years old. It was made of large slabs of stone bound together by iron bands, and surmounted by a huge block weighing a ton and a half. On it was this inscription, " This grave is purchased for eternity; it shall riever he opened." But a little poplar seed was somehow inclosed in the mold within the tomb, and the power of God in the little germ caused it to grow ; a slender shoot found a crevice between two of the great stones, and its hidden power in the tender plant broke the iron bands asunder, and moved every stone from its original position. The tree of forms and ceremonies and idol-worship. This both the ancient and modern systems may have been, or may be, to a large class of their unthinking devotees. But in their beginnings, and to all their more intelligent followers, they were much more than this. Rather should it be said that all of them originated as philosophical systems for explaining the phenomena of nature, the origin of things, and man's relationship to the universe.

The forms and ceremonies of worship came in only incidentally and as a secondary matter. There is abundant evidence that each

THE SERPENT AND THE TREE OF LIFE

Babylonian Cylinder " The wicked serpent," " the serpent of the darkness." was mentioned in Sumerian texts, and Mr. Boscawen has lately found a Babylonian fragment, forming part of the third .tablet in the Creation-series, in of these systems which the fall of man seems to be de-

1 lie Higher Criticism and the Verdict

ligion took those of the Monuments," pages loj, 104, fourth

degenerate relics ''^'''''''^

of purer and more ancient forms of faith nearest at hand,

and, after changing, and adapting them to suit its theories

of cosmogony and philosophy, gradually incorporated and still lives, and waves victorious branches over the rent sepulcher, which man in his impotent and limited knowledge declared should " never be opened." The mighty power of God in a tiny plant that a child could have broken off for a toy whip to lash his wooden horse, laughs to scorn the finished work of man to shut out God from his own creationr

ADOLF HARNACK (1851- )

A modern leader of theological thought in Germany, and foremost of living church historians.

DR. R. J. CAMPBELL (1867- )

Pastor of the City Temple, London, England. Author of New Theology," etc.

The assimilated them, and thus grew into the system of religion as we know it.

Nor is such a process confined to ancient history. During the last half century we moderns have seen the birth and rapid growth of another great system of religion — we can call it nothing else — that of Evolution. To-day its leading thoughts, in opposition to the literal creation of the Scriptures, are nearly universal over the civilized world. In India and Japan the educated classes are as familiar with the current teachings of geology and biology as we are in America or Europe. The general idea that life has been on our globe for untold millions of years, that our modern forms of plants and animals have sprung by natural development from other older forms, and these again from still older ones, has become so much a part of the modern system of education that to many it seems the most self-evident thing in the world. And, after standing aloof from one another for some time, we have, during the last decade or so, witnessed the almost complete blending of Evolution as a philosophy and current Protestantism as a religion, resulting in the " Theistic Evolution," " New Theology," etc., now so universally taught in the universities, colleges, and seminaries of the Western world, as well as from many Protestant pulpits.

As already intimated, this modern instance is not by any means the first or only one where men have tried to solve these deepest questions of life, and origin, and duty, independent of a revelation from the only Being who really knows. The nations of antiquity all tried their hand at it. The Greeks especially filled several centuries quite full of speculations about the origin and make-up of the universe.

Those of Plato and Aristotle, for example, became quite popular, and shaped the science and philosophic thought

And if, mp friend, this onward, upward movement

Has held since earth from blazing gas began. Explain me Tvhy this miracle of improvement

Must stop when reaching man.

For if 'tis easy in the opening portals

Of science thus mans climb from slime to solve,

'Tis quite as easy to suppose from mortals That angels may evolve!

— Independent, Aug. 9, 1906.

of many succeeding centuries. It is true we have long outgrown the crude scientific guesses of those days; and, like the Ptolemaic astronomy, which said that the earth was the center of the universe, and that the sun and stars all circled about it, we have long since consigned them to the limbo of literary curiosities. With them also have gone the numerous chemical and geological theories of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, equally contrary to the Word of God.

But what assurance have the modern advocates of the Evolution doctrine that their now popular theory will not also be outgrown and discarded for something more in harmony with the better-known facts of science, and more in harmony with the Bible? It certainly has no more inherent finality about it than any of the previous theories already mentioned. Evolution is precisely like all other cosmogonies

Up to his time the astronomers had been following blindly for over a thousand years the false hypothesis of Ptolemy that the earth is the center of the universe, and that the sun and all the stars revolve about it. Accumulated discoveries had made this theory so top-heavy with absurdities that it was a great relief in being an attempt to solve the riddle of the universe by unassisted human reason. What probability is there that it has succeeded at this any better than its predecessors? In one form or another it may be now almost universally accepted among scientific men, but were not the astronomical theory of Ptolemy and the philosophy of Aristotle absolutely universal for over a thousand years?

We must not forget the long centuries during which the follies of alchemy were regarded as science, and the paramount influence of the planets over human destiny was exalted into a kind of religion. Already the discoveries of recent years have made many of the foundation principles of the current geology and Evolution as hard for well-informed scientists of the twentieth century to believe as the "deferents" and "epicycles" of Ptolemy were to Kepler and Newton. How long may it be ere it will be evident that we have outgrown the geological absurdities about the successive forms of life that have peopled the globe, as we have the crude speculations and the infant lispings of all the other sciences? And who will then care for the brilliant theories which entertained the people during the latter part of the nineteenth century? The shores of time are strewn with the sad wrecks of human philosophies and cosmogonies, built with the greatest care by giant minds, who were confident that they could thread the channels of the great unknown without a Pilot.

when Galileo took these facts and proved the sun to be the center of the solar system. Modern geology is in about the same condition that astronomy was then, and sadly needs some one to reconstruct it on a basis of common sense and true scientific reasoning. When thus reconstructed, it will be found to be in perfect harmony with the Bible.

CHARLES DARWIN (1809-1882)

He had seen the idea develop and become recognized that the world had been peopled during successive ages by different sets of plants and animals, and that the geological changes of the past were of the same sort as the changes said to be now going on in our modern world. Surely, thought he, why not suppose that these early types gradually developed into those that succeeded

It may be well right here to glance briefly at the general history and teachings of the Evolution theory. A more complete history of the doctrine and presentation of its teachings has been given elsewhere, but a brief outline seems essential here in understanding its bearings upon religion.

Modern Evolution is much older and broader than Darwinism. It can be readily traced back to the eighteenth century, perhaps further; for back of Darwin lie geology and the nebular hypothesis. With the latter we have nothing to do now, though it may be remarked in passing that it is a crude and by no means universally accepted theory of how our solar system may have condensed, from a great mass of matter scattered through space, into the sun and its family of planets, including the earth. But older than even this is geology, which by such men as Leibnitz ( 1 646- 1716), Buffon (1707-1788), Cuvier (1769-1832), and William Smith (1769-1839), was gradually gaining the confidence of many educated men in asserting that the world had been peopled for untold ages by successive assemblages of plants and animals, until, at a comparatively " modern " date, man was created and placed upon it.

The next stage in the development of the theory came when Lyell, about 1830, began teaching the quietistic theory; viz., that all the successive geological changes could

them ? The modern world has grown tired of his pet theory of " Natural Selection " for explaining how this development was brought about, for no such gradual change of one species into another has ever yet been proved. But almost all modern scientists still cling to the doctrine of Descent or development somehow, though " Darwinism " is expressly repudiated by many of them, and there is little agreement among them as to how this development was brought about.

THOMAS H. HUXLEY

One of the most clear and fascinating writers that ever handled the English language. To this fact, as well as to his manifest candor and honesty, we must attribute in large measure the quick success attained by the doctrine of Darwinism. He was the victim of too much faith in the unproved assumptions of geology as then taught, though he saw more of the illogical reasoning lying be understood as the result of causes similar to those now in every-day operation around us. That is, the geology of Lyell not only denied the Bible record of a universal world-catastrophe, the deluge, but it smoothed the way for regarding all the operations of Providence, even creation, as only similar to the commonplace things taking place about us every day.

Here, then, was the whole skeleton or outline of the Evolution theory, needing only something to articulate together its several parts. This was supplied by the works of Charles Darwin, who published his " Origin of Species " in 1859. His theory was only an elaboration in more detail of the general thought that each successive stage of the geological series was not a new creation of plants and animals, but that each of these new sets, appearing (as the geologists said) so abruptly and mysteriously, probably grew naturally out of the preceding.

For scores of years those scientists who believed in these successive " ages " of geology had felt the necessity of some such explanation of this mysterious phenomenon, but had hitherto failed to find any plausible theory to fit the case. But now Darwin's theory of natural selection supplied the long- felt want; and, assisted by the brilliant pleading of such men as Huxley, Spencer, Haeckel, and Tyndall, the world declared the chain of evidence complete. The result has been this strange phenomenon of practically the whole educational world receiving this flimsy tissue of guesses as the proved facts of science, and either abandon-

at the basis of the science than any man of his time. Spencer wrote nearly as strongly in criticism of " Illogical Geology," but was more pedantic and less bewitching in his literary style, and far less open to the claims of religion.

ing all their religious hopes, as in the philosophy of Spencer and Haeckel, or else changing and adapting their religious views in such a way as to harmonize with this idea, as in the system of such men as Lyman Abbott, Le Conte, or Huxley; for, considered from the standpoint of old-fashioned Christianity, there is no material difference between the modern Theistic Evolution and the agnosticism of T. H. Huxley.

The sad results to the church of accepting the Evolution doctrine are thus vividly set forth by the New York Independent of June 24, 1909: —

When we found that the world was more than six thousand years old, that there was no universal flood four thousand years ago, that Adam was not made directly from dust, and Eve from his rib, and that the tower ' of Babel was not the occasion of the diversification of languages, we had gone too far to stop. The process of criticism had to go on from Genesis to Revelation, with no fear of the curse at the end of the last chapter. It could not stop with Moses and Isaiah; it had to include Matthew and John and Paul. Every one of them had to be sifted; they had already ceased to be taken as unquestioned, final authorities, for plenary inspiration had followed verbal inspiration just as soon as the first chapter of Genesis had ceased to be taken as true history. The miracles of Jesus had to be tested as well as those of Elijah. The date and purpose of the Gospel of John had to be investigated historically as well as that of the prophecy of Isaiah; and the conclusion of historical criticism had to be accepted with no regard to the old theologies. We have just reached this condition, and there is repeated evidence that it makes an epoch, a revolution, in theologic thought. . . . To this present teaching, which has invaded all our denominations, Jesus is the world's prime teacher, but it can assert nothing more. There is, it declares, no reasonable proof of his birth from a virgin, no certainty of a physical resurrection; the Gospels must be analyzed, for they contain mythical elements, non-historical miracles, unverified assertions. . . .

But this doubt, even this questioning or denial, changes the old, evangelistic theology. It questions or denies the Trinity, the resurrection, the sacrifice of the cross, even all miracles, and it undermines all authority of inspiration or even revelation, and sends us back to human reason, with such divine guidance as may be allowed; the authority of the Bible and the authority of the church both to be validated only by human reason.

There is really no half-way position possible for the church of to-day. At the beginning of the nineteenth cen-

/ k^orv nothing about the origin of man except what I am told in the Scripture, — that God created him. I do not know anything more than that, and I do not know an^hod]) who does. I would say with Lord Kelvin, " There is nothing in science that reaches the origin of anything at all.'' — Sir William Dawson.

tury, when the species found by the geologists in the rocks were all supposed to be extinct species and different from the forms now alive on the earth, many well-meaning church people admitted the " ages " of geology, but assigned them to a period long anterior to the present creation. But as the living species of sea-shells, fishes, insects, mammals, and plants became better known, and the identity of the living with the fossil forms was proved in case after case.

the church people began to say that the " days " of creation mentioned in Genesis were immense periods of time, corresponding to some of the successive " ages " of the geologists. Hugh Miller, Dawson, and others, were the means of making this explanation quite popular for many years. But while a trace of similarity may thus be made out for the two, no reputable scientist could now be found who would admit anything more than a fancied resemblance between these days of Genesis and the " ages " of the geologists; so that the scientist and the theologians alike admit that the Mosaic record can not thus be made to harmonize with the results of modern geology, and they have long since given up the attempt to do so, concluding that the first chapters of Genesis are only a myth, or at the most a beautiful poem.

But why should we not draw courage from the very universality of the false views regarding creation now prevailing? God will not, he can not, allow this situation to continue. My faith in the Bible compels me to believe that God must soon vindicate before the world the harmony of his two books, just as he vindicated the Bible in the days of the Reformation. In those days a blasphemous church claimed a power superior to the written Word; the Bible was vindicated, and given its rightful place as the guide of the church. To-day a skeptical world has arrayed God's two books against each other, and men justify themselves in rejecting the one because they say it does not agree with the other. Other reforms have been based on various parts of the Bible here and there; the one now due is based on the first part of the Bible. Hence, with the cloud under which this part of the Bible now rests in the minds of most people, the logic of the situation demands that God shall vindicate his record of the flood and of creation in a marvelous way before this generation. His two books must be shown to agree, so that the world may be left without excuse.

The present volume is at least an honest effort to indicate the lines that this vindication must take, and to show some of the inspiring lessons already deciphered from God's larger book of nature confirmatory of his written Word. It does not profess to be complete; but at least it indicates the direction in which the most returns are to be looked for in connection with this field of study. There have been scientific commotions and revolutions in the past; but when the world once awakens to the meaning of the modern discoveries, an outline^of which is given in the following pages, there must follow a return to old-fashioned Bible Christianity such as the world has not seen since the Reformation of the sixteenth century. Nothing is settled until it is settled aright; and the only way in which these matters can be settled is by showing the absolute harmony between the book of nature and God's written Word.

CHAPTER II Moral and Social Aspects of the Evolution Theory '

IT is rightly considered that the supreme test of any doctrine, religious, social, or scientific, is its bearing upon life and human action. " Ye shall know them by their fruits." Accordingly we may ask. What are the fruits or the natural results of the Evolution theory? The brief outline of the moral and social consequences of the theory given in the following pages may serve to show the implacable conflict there is between this theory and the teachings of Christianity. The arguments on this point may be conveniently grouped under three heads : —

(a) Evolution denies man's moral responsibility for the sin and misery of our world.

(b) It denies, or seeks to render useless, the gospel remedy for this state of things.

(c) Its logical and practical results in every-day life are producing social and civil evil effects, which threaten the foundations of civil and religious Hberty.

These three divisions of the argument must now be considered in order: —

(a) The basic principles of the moral and religious consciousness of man lead us to the concept of the Author of the universe as at once all-powerful, all-wise, and all-good or just — in complete harmony with the Creator revealed in the Christian's Bible. However, on looking at

^ For a more detailed statement of the arguments used in this chapter see the author's " Outlines of Modern Science and Modern Christianity," chapters 8 and 9.

ourselves, or the world around us, we see a strange conflict with these ideal principles. Sin and misery abound on every hand. As Shelley beautifully expresses it, —

** All my knowledge is that joy is gone. And this thing woe crept in among our hearts. There to remain."

This universal experience of misery and consciousness of sin is also in complete harmony with the Bible; for one of the most fundamental ideas contained in the latter is that man has sinned, and is not now in harmony with his Creator. Take this general thought out of the Bible, and what is there left?

Now there are but three possible suppositions regarding the evil and misery of our present world : —

1. The Creator may have made us out of hand in our present condition of misery and evil.

2. Or he may have produced our race by development from ruder and still lower conditions, and we be now on the road to a yet higher plane of development.

3. Or God may have created man " very good," *' upright," in perfect harmony with the highest moral ideals, but man may have lost the blessing and happiness necessarily conditioned on such a state, by violating fundamental moral law; just as a perfectly healthy man (if we can conceive of such a being) might lose his health by violating physical law.

The first of the above-mentioned suppositions is evidently not within the limits of discussion; for it charges with purposeless folly an evidently (on other grounds) wise Creator, if he deliberately made a being out of harmony with his own fundamental character.

The second, however, demands our very closest attention, for it is the real Evolution doctrine regarding the origin of man and his moral nature. Every scheme of Evolution (and there are some) which endeavors to explain man's physical frame and moral nature otherwise than by gradual development out of savage and bestial antecedents, is so far inconsistent with itself and with the general principles of the doctrine, that we may ignore it altogether. Le Conte has well expressed the moral teachings of the Evolution theory, as follows: —

*' What we call evil is not a unique phenomenon confined to man," and is not in any way whatever connected with man's free will as an intelligent being rebelling against his Creator. It " must be a great fact pervading all nature, and a part of its very constitution," the present conditions being but the outworking of principles implanted in nature long ages before man's existence. (" Evolution and Religious Thought," page 365.)

But where is there any essential difference between this idea and the first supposition, which we have already rejected? For it makes misery, evil, and sin the endowment of the Creator, just the same, something which he imparted to the universe when he started it evolving. It pushes the origin of evil further back in time, but it ends in either making evil the deliberate endowment of the Creator, bequeathed to his universe at its beginning, or else assumes that he was conditioned and hampered by the material on which he was working. Some ingenious acrobat in logic may endeavor to dodge these conclusions, but there is really no alternative for the consistent Evolutionist.

On the one hand, we can not believe that an all-wise and all-good Creator would deliberately make himself responsible for such a state of things, by implanting evil tendencies in his creatures, and then punishing them, even by the law of cause and effect, for living out the dictates of their hereditary natures. On the other hand, we may well refuse to discuss any pantheistic scheme which so identifies the Creator with the materials of his universe as to make him in any way hampered or conditioned by such material ; or which, in other words, makes evil a something inherent in the nature of the universe, something for which God himself is not responsible, and which he could not eliminate.

We may indeed safely ignore any philosophy which would make the Creator anything else than all-wise, and non-conditioned by any possible contingency. But with this granted, we must admit that the principles which such a Being has put into his works must be an expression of his character.

The *' tooth-and-claw " phase of nature, and especially the depraved, evil condition of human nature — '* here where men sit and hear each other groan," — must in some way express the character of our Designer, unless some free, conscious intelligence (such as man himself) has marred God's work and perverted the natural endowment of his creatures. If retaliation for injuries received, if pride and lust, are perfectly natural to the human heart, as we must all sadly confess they are, they must in some recondite manner express the character of our Creator, if he made us as we are, or on any lower or more undeveloped plane of being out of which these characters have naturally sprung; and therefore these things can not be really evil; they can not be immoral.

Let us be plain. Moral duties, in the broadest sense of the word " moral," are such as inhere in the relationship between the creature and his Creator. No other basis for morality can be found. Hence, if our Creator has endowed any of us with certain instincts and propensities, our moral duty to him obliges us not to repress and subdue, but to exercise and develop, these instincts and propensities to their utmost possible extent. It would be immoral to do otherwise — " sinful," if you please. Hence, the hatred, lust, and pride so natural to the human heart are in no sense wrong or punishable if they represent a natural endowment given us by our Creator, no matter through what process he formed us.

But every one knows that these instincts and passions bring misery and ruin alike to the subjects and objects of their force. Misery and woe are the inevitable results of their exercise. Hence we can go further and say that a being who would thus punish his creatures, even by the law of cause and effect, for doing as he taught them or endowed them, would be all that we understand by the word *' fiend." But such is the god of the Evolutionist, and there is no way of evading this issue.

There is no need of saying that there must be something wrong with a notion of man's origin that leads to such a frightful conclusion. And surely the moral issue, as set forth above, is a surer way of gauging the truth or falsity of the Evolution theory than the long, complicated methods connected with " variation " and " selection," " heredity " and " environment," and the other biological problems, even supposing the theory apparently capable of the most exact proof. In short, we need offer no apology for thus measuring this scientific hypothesis by other and far more certain standards of truth.

(b) Having now shown that the Evolution doctrine denies man's responsibihty for the sin and misery of our world, we must consider the second of the arguments with which we began this chapter; viz., that it also denies, or seeks to render useless, the gospel remedy for this state of things.

Our Lord's mission, as expressed by himself, was to " seek and to save that which was lost," not merely those who were lost, '* that which was lost," — ■ the world and all it contains. But where is the loss if man has been continually progressing from a crude beginning? If Evolution be true, our race has known only gain. And a thousandfold more progress must have been made previously, from the bestial condition up to the civilization of the Roman empire, when Christ spoke these words, than the race has ever made since. And surely in that case the principles of progression themselves would secure the ultimate redemption and perfection of the race without the intervention of a divine Mediator, and the death of a divine Sacrifice. Surely the Evolution theory converts into a gigantic farce the old, old story of the cross, and makes the whole Scripture a jargon of unmeaning folly.