quoted that he considers its characteristic feature is not evolution,
nor even natural selection, but the denial of teleology, or of
intelligent control. Mr. Darwin admits the original creation of one or a
few forms of life; and Mr. Mitchell, in his comments on Mr. Warington's
defence of his theory, asks, "Why am I to limit the work of the Creator
to the simultaneous or successive creations of ten or twelve
commencements of the animate creation? Why, simply for the purpose of
evading the evidence of design as manifested in the adaptation of all
the organs of every animate creature to its wants, which can only be
done by so incredible an hypothesis as that of Mr. Darwin. I say
fearlessly, that any hypothesis which requires us to admit that the
formation of such complex organs as the eye, the ear, the heart, the
brain, with all their marvellous structures and mechanical adaptations
to the wants of the creatures possessing them, so perfectly in harmony,
too, with the laws of inorganic matter, affords no evidence of design;
that such structures could be built up by gradual chance improvements,
perpetuated by the law of transmission, and perfected by the destruction
of creatures less favorably endowed, is so incredible, that I marvel to
find any thinking man capable of adopting it for a single moment." It is
useless to multiply quotations. Darwinism is never brought up either
formally or incidentally, that its exclusion of design in the formation
of living organisms is not urged as the main objection against the whole
theory.
FOOTNOTES:
[36] _The Credibility of Darwinism_. By George Warington, Esq., F. C.
S., M. V. I.
[37] _On certain Analogies between the Methods of Deity in Nature and
Revelation_. By Rev. G. E. Henslow, M. A., F. L. S., M. V. I.
[38] The second part of Mr. Henslow's paper concerns "the methods of the
Deity as revealed to us in the Bible." The same is substantially true of
his work, _The Theory of Evolution_.
_Principal Dawson._
Dr. Dawson, as we are informed, is regarded as the first palæontologist,
and among the first geologists, in America. In his "Story of Earth and
Man,"[39] he passes in review the several geological periods
recognized by geologists; describes as far as knowable the distribution
of land and water during each period, and the vegetable and animal
productions by which they were distinguished. His book from beginning to
end is anti-Darwinian. In common with other naturalists, his attention
is directed principally to the doctrine of evolution, which he endeavors
to prove is utterly untenable. That Mr. Darwin's theory excludes
teleology is everywhere assumed as an uncontroverted and
uncontrovertible fact. "The evolutionist doctrine," he says, "is itself
one of the strangest phenomena of humanity. It existed, and most
naturally, in the oldest philosophy and poetry, in connection with the
crudest and most uncritical attempts of the human mind to grasp the
system of nature; but that in our day a system destitute of any shadow
of proof, and supported merely by vague analogies and figures of speech,
and by the arbitrary and artificial coherence of its own parts, should
be accepted as philosophy, and should find able adherents to string on
its thread of hypotheses our vast and weighty stores of knowledge, is
surpassingly strange.... In many respects these speculations are
important, and worthy the attention of thinking men. They seek to
revolutionize the religious belief of the world, and if accepted would
destroy most of the existing theology and philosophy. They indicate
tendencies among scientific thinkers, which, though probably temporary,
must, before they disappear, descend to lower strata, and reproduce
themselves in grosser forms, and with most serious effects on the whole
structure of society. With one class of minds they constitute a sort of
religion, which so far satisfies the craving for truth higher than those
which relate to immediate wants and pleasures. With another and perhaps
larger class, they are accepted as affording a welcome deliverance from
all scruples of conscience and fears of a hereafter. In the domain of
science evolutionism has like tendencies. It reduces the position of
man, who becomes a descendant of inferior animals, and a mere term in a
series whose end is unknown. It removes from the study of nature the
ideas of final cause and purpose; and the evolutionist, instead of
regarding the world as a work of consummate plan, skill, and adjustment,
approaches nature as he would a chaos of fallen rocks, which may present
forms of castles, and grotesque profiles of men and animals, but they
are all fortuitous and without significance." (pp. 317, 318)
"Taking, then, this broad view of the subject, two great leading
alternatives are presented to us. Either man is an independent product
of the will of a Higher Intelligence, acting directly or through the
laws and materials of his own institution and production, or he has been
produced by an unconscious evolution from lower things. It is true that
many evolutionists, either unwilling to offend, or not perceiving the
logical consequences of their own hypothesis, endeavor to steer a middle
course, and to maintain that the Creator has proceeded by way of
evolution. But the bare, hard logic of Spencer, the greatest English
authority on evolution, leaves no place for this compromise, and shows
that the theory, carried out to its legitimate consequences, excludes
the knowledge of a Creator and the possibility of his work. We have,
therefore, to choose between evolution and creation, bearing in mind,
however, that there may be a place in nature for evolution, properly
limited, as well as for other things, and that the idea of creation by
no means excludes law and second causes." (p. 321)
"It may be said, that evolution may be held as a scientific doctrine in
connection with a modified belief in creation. The work of actual
creation may have been limited to a few elementary types, and evolution
may have done the rest. Evolutionists may still be theists. We have
already seen that the doctrine, as carried out to its logical
consequences, excludes creation and theism. It may, however, be shown
that even in its more modified form, and when held by men who maintain
that they are not atheists, it is practically atheistic, because
excluding the idea of plan and design, and resolving all things into the
action of unintelligent forces. It is necessary to observe this, because
it is the half-way-evolutionism, which professes to have a creator
somewhere behind it, that is most popular; though it is, if possible,
more unphilosophical than that which professes to set out with absolute
and determined nonentity, or from self-existing stardust containing all
the possibilities of the universe."
In reference to the objection of evolutionists, that the origin of every
new species, on the theistic doctrine, supposes "a miracle," an
intervention of the divine efficiency without the agency of second
causes, Principal Dawson asks, "What is the actual statement of the
theory of creation as it may be held by a modern man of science? Simply
this: that all things have been produced by the Supreme Creative will,
acting either directly, or through the agency of the forces and material
of his own production." (p. 340)
He thus sums up his argument against the doctrine of evolution,
specially in its application to man: "Finally, the evolutionist picture
wants some of the fairest lineaments of humanity, and cheats us with the
semblance of man without the reality. Shave and paint your ape as you
may, clothe him and set him up upon his feet, still he fails greatly of
the 'human form divine;' and so it is with him morally and spiritually
as well. We have seen that he wants the instinct of immortality, the
love of God, the mental and spiritual power of exercising dominion over
the earth. The very agency by which he is evolved is of itself
subversive of all these higher properties; the struggle for existence is
essentially selfish, and, therefore, degrading. Even in the lower
animals, it is a false assumption that its tendency is to elevate; for
animals, when driven to the utmost verge of the struggle for life,
become depauperated and degraded. The dog which spends its life in
snarling contention with its fellow curs for insufficient food, will not
be a noble specimen of its race. God does not so treat his creatures.
There is far more truth to nature in the doctrine which represents Him
as listening to the young ravens when they cry for food. But as applied
to man, the theory of the struggle for existence, and survival of the
fittest, though the most popular phase of evolutionism at present, is
nothing less than the basest and most horrible of superstitions. It
makes man not merely carnal but devilish. It takes his lowest appetites
and propensities, and makes them his God and Creator. His higher
sentiments and aspirations, his self-denying philanthropy, his
enthusiasm for the good and true, all the struggles and sufferings of
heroes and martyrs, not to speak of that self-sacrifice which is the
foundation of Christianity, are, in the view of the evolutionist, mere
loss and waste, failure in the struggle of life. What does he give us in
exchange? An endless pedigree of bestial ancestors, without one gleam of
high and holy tradition to enliven the procession; and for the future,
the prospect that the poor mass of protoplasm, which constitutes the sum
of our being, and which is the sole gain of an indefinite struggle in
the past, must soon be resolved again into inferior animals or dead
matter. That men of thought and culture should advocate such a
philosophy, argues either a strange mental hallucination, or that the
higher spiritual nature has been wholly quenched within them. It is one
of the saddest of many sad spectacles which our age presents." (p. 395)
FOOTNOTE:
[39] _The Story of Earth and Man_. By J. W. Dawson, LL. D., F. R. S., F.
G. S., Principal and Vice-Chancellor of McGill University, Montreal.
Author of _Archaia, Acadian Geology_, etc. Second edition. London, 1873,
pp. 397.
_Relation of Darwinism to Religion._
The consideration of that subject would lead into the wide field of the
relation between science and religion. Into that field we lack
competency and time to enter; a few remarks, however, on the subject
may not be out of place. Those remarks, we would fain make in a humble
way irenical. There is need of an Irenicum, for the fact is painfully
notorious that there is an antagonism between scientific men as a class,
and religious men as a class. Of course this opposition is neither felt
nor expressed by all on either side. Nevertheless, whatever may be the
cause of this antagonism, or whoever are to be blamed for it, there can
be no doubt that it exists and that it is an evil.
The first cause of the alienation in question is, that the two parties,
so to speak, adopt different rules of evidence, and thus can hardly
avoid arriving at different conclusions. To understand this we must
determine what is meant by science, and by scientific evidence. Science,
according to its etymology, is simply knowledge. But usage has limited
its meaning, in the first place, not to the knowledge of facts or
phenomena, merely, but to their causes and relations. It was said of
old, "[Greek: hoti] scientiæ fundamentum, [Greek: dioti] fastigium." No
amount of materials would constitute a building. They must be duly
arranged so as to make a symmetrical whole. No amount of disconnected
data can constitute a science. Those data must be systematized in their
relation to each other and to other things. In the second place, the
word is becoming more and more restricted to the knowledge of a
particular class of facts, and of their relations, namely, the facts of
nature or of the external world. This usage is not universal, nor is it
fixed. In Germany, especially, the word _Wissenschaft_ is used of all
kinds of ordered knowledge, whether transcendental or empirical. So we
are accustomed to speak of mental, moral, social, as well as of natural
science. Nevertheless, the more restricted use of the word is very
common and very influential. It is important that this fact should be
recognized. In common usage, a scientific man is distinguished specially
from a metaphysician. The one investigates the phenomena of matter, the
other studies the phenomena of mind, according to the old distinction
between physics and metaphysics. Science, therefore, is the ordered
knowledge of the phenomena which we recognize through the senses. A
scientific fact is a fact perceived by the senses. Scientific evidence
is evidence addressed to the senses. At one of the meetings of the
Victoria Institute, a visitor avowed his disbelief in the existence of
God. When asked, what kind of evidence would satisfy him? he answered,
Just such evidence as I have of the existence of this tumbler which I
now hold in my hand. The Rev. Mr. Henslow says, "By science is meant the
investigation of facts and phenomena recognizable by the senses, and of
the causes which have brought them into existence."[40] This is the main
root of the trouble. If science be the knowledge of the facts perceived
by the senses, and scientific evidence, evidence addressed to the
senses, then the senses are the only sources of knowledge. Any
conviction resting on any other ground than the testimony of the senses,
must be faith. Darwin admits that the contrivances in nature may be
accounted for by assuming that they are due to design on the part of
God. But, he says, that would not be science. Haeckel says that to
science matter is eternal. If any man chooses to say, it was created,
well and good; but that is a matter of faith, and faith is imagination.
Ulrici quotes a distinguished German physiologist who believes in
vital, as distinguished from physical forces; but he holds to
spontaneous generation, not, as he admits, because it has been proved,
but because the admission of any higher power than nature is
unscientific.[41]
It is inevitable that minds addicted to scientific investigation should
receive a strong bias to undervalue any other kind of evidence except
that of the senses, _i. e._, scientific evidence. We have seen that
those who give themselves up to this tendency come to deny God, to deny
mind, to deny even self. It is true that the great majority of men,
scientific as well as others, are so much under the control of the laws
of their nature, that they cannot go to this extreme. The tendency,
however, of a mind addicted to the consideration of one kind of
evidence, to become more or less insensible to other kinds of proof, is
undeniable. Thus even Agassiz, as a zoölogist and simply on zoölogical
grounds, assumed that there were several zones between the Ganges and
the Atlantic Ocean, each having its own flora and fauna, and inhabited
by races of men, the same in kind, but of different origins. When told
by the comparative philologists that this was impossible, because the
languages spoken through that wide region, demonstrated that its
inhabitants must have had a common descent, he could only answer that as
ducks quack everywhere, he could not see why men should not everywhere
speak the same language.
A still more striking illustration is furnished by Dr. Lionel Beale, the
distinguished English physiologist. He has written a book of three
hundred and eighty-eight pages for the express purpose of proving that
the phenomena of life, instinct, and intellect cannot be referred to any
known natural forces. He avows his belief that in nature "mind governs
matter," and "in the existence of a never-changing, all-seeing,
power-directing and matter-guiding Omnipotence." He avows his faith in
miracles, and "those miracles on which Christianity is founded."
Nevertheless, his faith in all these points is provisional. He says that
a truly scientific man, "if the maintenance, continuity, and nature of
life on our planet should at some future time be fully explained without
supposing the existence of any such supernatural omnipotent influence,
would be bound to receive the new explanation, and might abandon the
old conviction."[42] That is, all evidence of the truths of religion not
founded on nature and perceived by the senses, amounts to nothing.
Now as religion does not rest on the testimony of the senses, that is on
scientific evidence, the tendency of scientific men is to ignore its
claims. We speak only of tendency. We rejoice to know or believe that in
hundreds or thousands of scientific men, this tendency is counteracted
by their consciousness of manhood--the conviction that the body is not
the man,--by the intuitions of the reason and the conscience, and by the
grace of God. No class of men stands deservedly higher in public
estimation than men of science, who, while remaining faithful to their
higher nature, have enlarged our knowledge of the wonderful works of
God.
A second cause of the alienation between science and religion, is the
failure to make the due distinction between facts and the explanation of
those facts, or the theories deduced from them. No sound minded man
disputes any scientific fact. Religious men believe with Agassiz that
facts are sacred. They are revelations from God. Christians sacrifice to
them, when duly authenticated, their most cherished convictions. That
the earth moves, no religious man doubts. When Galileo made that great
discovery, the Church was right in not yielding at once to the evidence
of an experiment which it did not understand. But when the fact was
clearly established, no man sets up his interpretation of the Bible in
opposition to it. Religious men admit all the facts connected with our
solar system; all the facts of geology, and of comparative anatomy, and
of biology. Ought not this to satisfy scientific men? Must we also admit
their explanations and inferences? If we admit that the human embryo
passes through various phases, must we admit that man was once a fish,
then a bird, then a dog, then an ape, and finally what he now is? If we
admit the similarity of structure in all vertebrates, must we admit the
evolution of one from another, and all from a primordial germ? It is to
be remembered that the facts are from God, the explanation from men; and
the two are often as far apart as Heaven and its antipode.
These human explanations are not only without authority, but they are
very mutable. They change not only from generation to generation, but
almost as often as the phases of the moon. It is a fact that the planets
move. Once it was said that they were moved by spirits, then by
vortexes, now by self-evolved forces. It is hard that we should be
called upon to change our faith with every new moon. The same man
sometimes propounds theories almost as rapidly as the changes of the
kaleidoscope. The amiable Sir Charles Lyell, England's most
distinguished geologist, has published ten editions of his "Principles
of Geology," which so differ as to make it hard to believe that it is
the work of the same mind. "In all the editions up to the tenth, he
looked upon geological facts and geological phenomena as proving the
fixity of species and their special creation in time. In the tenth
edition, just published, he announces his change of opinion on this
subject and his conversion to the doctrine of development by law."[43]
"In the eighth edition of his work," says Dr. Bree, "Sir Charles Lyell,
the Nestor of geologists, to whom the present generation is more
indebted than to any other for all that is known of geology in its
advanced stage, teaches that species have a real existence in nature,
and that each was endowed at the time of its creation with the
attributes and organization by which it is now distinguished." The
change on the part of this eminent geologist, it is to be observed, is a
mere change of opinion. There was no change of the facts of geology
between the publication of the eighth and of the tenth edition of his
work, neither was there any change in his knowledge of those facts. All
the facts relied upon by evolutionists, have long been familiar to
scientific men. The whole change is a subjective one. One year the
veteran geologist thinks the facts teach one thing, another year he
thinks they teach another. It is now the fact, and it is feared it will
continue to be a fact, that scientific men give the name of science to
their explanations as well as to the facts. Nay, they are often, and
naturally, more zealous for their explanations than they are for the
facts. The facts are God's, the explanations are their own.
The third cause of the alienation between religion and science, is the
bearing of scientific men towards the men of culture who do not belong
to their own class. When we, in such connections, speak of scientific
men, we do not mean men of science as such, but those only who avow or
manifest their hostility to religion. There is an assumption of
superiority, and often a manifestation of contempt. Those who call their
logic or their conjectures into question, are stigmatized as
narrow-minded, bigots, old women, Bible worshippers, etc.
Professor Huxley's advice to metaphysicians and theologians is, to let
science alone. This is his Irenicum. But do he and his associates let
metaphysics and religion alone? They tell the metaphysician that his
vocation is gone; there is no such thing as mind, and of course no
mental laws to be established. Metaphysics are merged into physics.
Professor Huxley tells the religious world that there is over-whelming
and crushing evidence (scientific evidence, of course) that no event has
ever occurred on this earth which was not the effect of natural causes.
Hence there have been no miracles, and Christ is not risen.[44] He says
that the doctrine that belief in a personal God is necessary to any
religion worthy of the name, is a mere matter of opinion. Tyndall,
Carpenter, and Henry Thompson, teach that prayer is a superstitious
absurdity; Herbert Spencer, whom they call their "great philosopher,"
_i. e._, the man who does their thinking, labors to prove that there
cannot be a personal God, or human soul or self; that moral laws are
mere "generalizations of utility," or, as Carl Vogt says, that self
respect, and not the will of God, is the ground and rule of moral
obligation. If any protest be made against such doctrines, we are told
that scientific truth cannot be put down by denunciation (or as Vogt
says, by barking). So doubtless the Pharisees, when our blessed Lord
called them hypocrites and a generation of vipers, and said: "Ye compass
sea and land to make one proselyte; and when he is made, ye make him
twofold more the child of hell than yourselves," doubtless thought that
that was a poor way to refute their theory, that holiness and salvation
were to be secured by church-membership and church-rites. Nevertheless,
as those words were the words of Christ, they were a thunderbolt which
reverberates through all time and space, and still makes Pharisees of
every name and nation tremble. Huxley's Irenicum will not do. Men who
are assiduously poisoning the fountains of religion, morality, and
social order, cannot be let alone.
Haeckel's Irenicum amounts to much the same as that of Professor Huxley.
He forbids the right to speak on these vital subjects, to all who are
not thoroughly versed in biology, and who are not entirely emancipated
from the trammels of their long cherished traditional beliefs.[45] This,
as the whole context shows, means that a man in order to be entitled to
be heard on the evolution theory, must be willing to renounce his faith
not only in the Bible, but in God, in the soul, in a future life, and
become a monistic materialist.[46]