The Bible itself contains evidences of evolution. As the Jews climbed
up in the scale of civilization their ideals, their conception of what
should constitute a God, also arose. It is a far cry from the ancient
Hebraic conception of God, down through the prophets to the idea of
divinity as taught by Jesus. Let the reader lay aside his prejudice, if
any he has, be honest with himself, and compare Jehovah of the early
Jews with Jesus’ portrayal of God as a father, as one whose synonym is
live.
Jehovah, according to the early writers, was stern, wrathful,
vengeful--“I will mock you in your calamities”; vain and jealous--“I,
the Lord thy God, am a jealous God”; cruel--hardening the hearts of his
powerless victims in order to punish them for doing what they could not
help doing, and according to Joshua, Jehovah commanded him to kill all
his enemies, old and young, even the children, and he gave the captured
wives of the enemy to the soldiers of the Jewish army; deceptive--“I
have sent lying spirits unto Ahab”; in short, and in very truth, he was
a god having all the frailties and imperfections of man, and not man at
his best either.
Take the Genesis story of creation:--When Jehovah created Adam he knew
(being an all-wise God) that Adam would fall. Therefore, Adam could not
have done otherwise than to yield to temptation; for to have resisted
would have proved God’s foreknowledge false. Then why pronounce a
curse on one (and his billions of descendants) for doing what God’s
foreknowledge made unavoidable?
Again it is said that when Jehovah made up his mind to destroy
the human race “it repented the Lord that he had made man on the
earth”--that is, he had made a mistake, like you and I, and was
sorry of it, like you and I. How like a man was Jehovah in his
short-sightedness!
And this is a part of that story of the origin of man which we are
asked to accept by the anti-evolutionists instead of the scientific
explanation.
Before history there was mythology. Beyond the earliest ascertained
historic facts of every people, of every early nation, was a mass
of myths portraying its childish beliefs concerning its origin, its
gods, its heroes, etc. The Jewish nation was no exception. Scriptural
literalists, those who believe in the verbal inspiration of the Bible,
know that all ancient peoples had their myths--all except the Jews.
In the face of a million facts they still contend that the impossible
stories of the early Jews are true as gospel--in fact that they are a
part of the gospel.
The greatest obstacle to the popular acceptance of the doctrine of
evolution is a belief in the verbal inspiration of the Bible and its
literal interpretation. The more conservative or orthodox element of
the churches regards the Bible as a direct quotation of the exact
words of God. Their conception of inspiration is that the various
writers merely held the pen while God caused it to move over the
surface of the parchment tracing the characters that spelled his
very words. The fact that the various books of the Bible are written
in almost as many different styles would seem to disprove verbal
inspiration to any thinking mind. Certainly, those books called the
Bible are inspired, and in precisely the same sense as Shakespeare’s
plays, Burns’ poems and Emerson’s essays are inspired--that is, the
writers felt strongly an impulse to write; and in every instance the
writings were stamped with the individuality of the author.
All inspiration is not on the same level--the higher the spirituality
the deeper the source. For example, as one writer has pointed out,
when Paul said, “Alexander the coppersmith did me much evil; the Lord
reward him according to his works,” he was not inspired in the same
sublime degree as was Jesus, when, rising above his own sufferings, he
remembered his tormentors in the prayer: “Father, forgive them; they
know not what they do.”
The belief in verbal inspiration has scotched the wheels of progress
at every turn. Four hundred years ago those who taught the rotundity
of the earth were denounced as heretics. It was a belief in verbal
inspiration that inspired the church to force Galileo, who taught that
the earth is not the center of the universe, but that it revolves
around the sun, to make the recantation: “I, Galileo, being in my
seventieth year, being a prisoner and on my knees before your
eminences * * abjure, detest and curse the error and the heresy of the
movement of the earth.” Even Newton’s great discovery of the law of
gravitation was denounced as “subversive of natural, and inferentially,
of revealed religion.”
A hundred years ago the use of anesthetics in childbirth was opposed in
Scotland on the ground that it was seeking to remove the curse God had
placed upon the daughters of Eve for her transgression.
King Charles of Spain declared that the digging of a canal across the
isthmus of Panama, thus severing North and South America, would be a
sin; for is it not written: “What God hath joined together let no man
put asunder”?
In America the famous Rev. Cotton Mather wrote a letter to John
Higginson informing him that the “general court” had given secret
orders to a sea captain to waylay William Penn and the one hundred
Quaker colonists--“heretics and malignants”--who were then on their
way to Pennsylvania, capture the “ungodly crew” and sell them “to
Barbadoes, where slaves fetch good prices in rum and sugar,” for in so
doing “the lord may be glorified and not mocked on soil of this new
country,” closing his pious letter with the felicitous phrase, “Yours
in the bowels of Christ.”
In 1826 the school board of Lancaster, Ohio, refused to permit the
use of the schoolhouse for a debate as to whether railroads were
practicable. The letter reads: “You are welcome to the schoolhouse
to debate all proper questions in, but such things as railroads
and telephones (the possibility of which were talked then) are
impossibilities and rank infidelity; there is nothing in the Word of
God about them. If God designed that his intelligent creatures should
travel at the frightful speed of 15 miles an hour He would have clearly
foretold it through his holy prophets. It is a device of Satan to lead
immortal souls down to hell.”
Is there needed stronger proof than this of the mental slavery to which
the belief in verbal inspiration reduces its devotees?
Today those who oppose evolution for biblical reasons occupy the same
absurd position as those who persecuted Galileo, denounced Newton,
opposed the use of anesthetics in childbirth, thwarted the digging
of a Panama canal, regarded the introduction of railroads and other
industrial innovations as tricks of the devil to damn our souls, and
approved the selling into slavery of the adherents of a rival Christian
sect.
This medieval belief of verbal inspiration has filled the Christian
world with strife and intolerance, and has drenched its soil with the
blood of tens of thousands of “heretics.” It was this belief that for
hundreds of years impelled whatever sect that had the power, be it
Catholic or Protestant, to persecute, imprison, torture, burn, kill in
every conceivable way those who differed with it in the interpretation
of certain scriptural texts. This narrow, intolerant belief, the very
negation of the Christ spirit, lives today--but, thanks to modern
science and intellectual progress, its teeth are drawn.
Let us get this straight: evolution is not, in the slightest degree,
opposed to religion; but it does conflict with the noxious growths
of superstition and doctrinalism which half conceals religion. True
Christianity will shine all the brighter with its concealments cleared
away. The study of evolution broadens and enlarges one’s conception of
religion. Those who are afraid that to accept evolution would cause
them to “lose their faith” are already weak in faith.
Those who insist on, as of paramount importance, a belief in some
mystical “plan of salvation,” including certain rites to be observed,
are Paulinists rather than Christians. Scattered throughout Paul’s
writings are expressions regarding the fall of Adam, the total
depravity of man, the atoning blood of Christ, etc., which are harmless
enough if regarded simply as rhetorical flourishes, but linked up in a
finely wrought out scheme of redemption, and coupled with an insistence
on the absolute necessity of belief in the same as the only means of
individual salvation--why, this Pauline gospel has catered to human
selfishness, has filled the world with theological disputations and
sectarian strife, and has relegated into the background the great,
yet simple spiritual truths of the lowly Nazarene. As a doctrine, its
mysticism has a natural affinity with inherent superstition, dregs of
which lie at the bottom of every human soul.
It is Jesus’ persistent insistence on the duty of each to serve
humanity that made him a great religious teacher. And it is His
teachings, if we heed them, that will “save” us, and not his shed
blood; _that_ dried up within a few hours of his crucifixion. To say
that we are “saved by the blood of the lamb” is a fine figure of
speech, though a well-worn one. Of course, the martyrdom of Jesus adds
emphasis to the truths he expounded, but it makes them not one whit
truer than they were.
Will the verbal inspirationalists please tell us when God quit sending
messages to the world couched in his own words? It may be that that
kind of inspiration ceased before Paul began preaching. If so, Paul is
no greater, _as an authority_, than Whitefield or Moody.
There is no reason why we should not read the Bible just as we would
any other book, with reason enthroned.