Scientists who claim to be followers of Darwin in scientific investigation
are known as evolutionists. The majority of them seem to enjoy themselves
very much in opposing the statements of Moses respecting the creation. It
might be well for them to remember that Darwin himself was compelled by
his better sense to declare that science demands a miracle in order to the
existence of the living unit lying at the base of the series of evolution.
So after all it remains a fact that Darwinism is chained to miracle. If
Strauss had remembered this he need not have said, Darwin deserves to be
praised as one of the benefactors of the race because of having learned us
how to get rid of miracles. If there is any value in evolution against the
Bible it lies in the use that men make of it to destroy the idea that God
created man out of the dust of the earth and breathed into his nostrils
the breath of life. Where does Darwinism take you to to study the origin
of man? To the dust of the earth? _Not exactly!_ It takes you to the
_slime_ of the sea, or the _mud_ of the Nile, just one step behind the
pulpy mass of protoplasm, or the moneron. God is there working a miracle;
such is Darwinism. According to Moses, He was doing just as well yonder in
Eden working a miracle with the dust of the earth. Now, in all candor,
tell us which statement is most worthy of God, the one that finds the
origin of man in the Eden earth with a miracle wrought upon the _dust_ of
the ground, or the one that finds his origin in a miracle wrought upon the
_mud of the Nile or the slime of the sea_? The one that stands him up
erect, a man, with Godlike attributes, or the one that lays him down in
the slimy mass to pass through ages upon ages in order to get out of his
low, slimy paternity and beastly traits of mere instinct, with groveling
habits of life? Darwin, conscious of the axiomatic truth that no more can
be evolved than there is involved, teaches the doctrine that variation or
change of species is brought about by causes which already existed in the
common progenitor. Such being true, we ask: In what link below man, in the
great evolutionary chain, is intellect and moral nature to be found?
Sensible men are turning, however, away from the old, threadbare, worn-out
guess-work. The time is not far distant when it will retire once more from
scientific thought. It is very old. Pliny, eighteen centuries ago, said:
“The various kinds of apes offer an almost perfect resemblance to man in
their physical nature.” This is just equal to Huxley’s statement made in
our own nineteenth century, that, “So far as structure is concerned, man
differs to no greater extent from the animals which are immediately below
him, than these do from other members of the same order.” Hence his
conclusion: “Man has proceeded from a modification or an improvement of
some lower animal, some simpler stock.” This idea was fully expressed in
the early Pagan mythologies. Their satyrs or forest divinities were
creatures blending the animal with the human. So Anaximander, although an
advocate of the old hypothesis of evolution, was not the originator of the
thought. The old _guess-up_ had its origin in Pagan mythology. The Fauns
of the Roman legend were supposed to be the transition species, or bridge
across the chasm between the brute creation and man—a notion found in
Hawthorne’s “Marble Faun.” So it is plain that evolution, in Darwin’s
sense of the term, does not lie between new discoveries in science and old
dogmas in religion, but it does lie between speculation in science and old
dogmas in paganism—poor science, she carries much that does not belong to
her! Evolution of species from other species is an idea found in heathen
mythology; it is also found in the ancient heathen cosmogonies. The God of
flocks and shepherds among the Greeks was a compound creature having the
horns and feet of a goat and the face of a man. He was, doubtless, as near
an approach to man as Darwin’s imaginary link at some imaginary point in
his imaginary evolution.
This question is not one of progressive order in the same species, but a
question relative to one species rising out of another of lower grade, and
especially the development of man from the lower animals. Agassiz says,
“Some have mistaken the action and reaction which exists everywhere in one
and the same species for a _causal_ connection,” that is to say, these
influences produced the species, whereas the species must exist before any
such action and reaction can take place. The action of physical
influences, or external surrounding, _or environments_ upon species could
not take place unless the species _first existed_. Action and reaction in
one and the same species already existing, furnishes no evidence upon the
manner in which the species was first brought into existence. Darwin says:
“The creation of organic matter having already taken place, my object is
to show in consequence of what laws, or what demonstrable properties of
organic matter, and of its environments, such states of organic nature as
those with which we are acquainted must have come about.” Well, Mr. Darwin
will never get nearer the truth upon this great question than he was when
he marched boldly up to miraculous intervention in order to get his first
unit, or living organism to place at the beginning of his evolutionary
series, unless he comes back to Moses and takes Christian ground. Geology
does not teach that species have been evolved from lower species. Geology
declares that new forms are new expressions of creative power. All the
physical forces that were operating upon our earth in the inorganic
period, are in operation now. Why, O why, has it been that the experience
and observation of the ages, as well as the record in the rocks, have
failed to give, in all the earth, one sensible demonstration in support of
the proposition that man, or any other species, was evolved from an
inferior species? The answer is easy—blind physical forces were, and are,
insufficient to bring into existence living being. Throughout every
department of creation there are evidences of invisible or spiritual
powers that lie behind the events that come under observation in science.
Chemical affinity lies behind, and produces important changes that take
place in organic matter. But chemical affinities do not explain living,
organic, being; for we have our existence at the expense of chemical
affinities. The living force, whatever it may be, lies behind chemical
affinities, and controls them. Instinct influences many of the
manifestations in animal life, and intelligence controls the sober conduct
of men. Yet above all these there is that wonderful builder and overseer
of the organism called life. As nature was perfect in all her elementary
principles during the inorganic period, and as inertia was, and is, a
property of matter, it follows, necessarily, that life was a new
principle, from an immaterial source, otherwise inertia is not a property
of matter; for a thing can not be—exist and not be at the same time.
Vogt reasons in favor of evolution of species from a few abnormal—that is
deteriorated—human beings, which is the mistake spoken of by Agassiz, that
action and reaction in one and the same species produce species. Action
and reaction does not produce the species, nor yet _another species_. Men
and apes have lived side by side for thousands of years. Why is it that
apes have made no advance towards the human form? Poor fellows! An ape is
always an ape, and a man is always a man. The geological record upon the
rocks is in favor of man’s existence as man by creative interposition. The
evolution hypothesis rests its conclusions upon effects that well-known
causes have never been known to produce, for the evolution of species from
lower species was never known anywhere in history or fact. In reference to
Darwin’s ideas upon the origin of species, Mr. Huxley said: “That,
notwithstanding the clearness of the style, those who attempt fairly to
digest the book find much of it a sort of intellectual pemmican—a mass of
facts crushed and pounded into shape, rather than held together by the
ordinary medium of a logical bond.” The impossibility of a scientific test
is admitted, for vast periods of time in the infinite past are claimed for
the work of natural selection. Countless ages form the basis of the
system, without which it could not have brought about the present order of
things. But an infinite series of life forms upon our earth could not be
possible, for it has been shown, allowing that the heat has passed out of
our earth uniformly, as it does at present, that inside of a comparatively
limited period in the past, it must have been so intensely hot as to have
been capable of melting a mass of rock equal to the bulk of the whole
earth. Yet Darwin has his half developed—imaginary animals strewn along
there in the infinite ages of the past. Men may get around this difficulty
by disregarding the facts of science and of common sense, or by doing as
Tyndall did; that is, by taking up the mechanism of the human body, the
mind itself, emotion, intellect, will and all their phenomena, and
_latentizing_ them in a fire cloud. Tyndall says: “They were once _latent_
in a fiery cloud.” Farewell to common sense or Darwinism—which shall it
be? Darwin’s idea that all the causes of evolution were placed in a common
progenitor, by a miraculous creation of that common progenitor is in very
poor harmony with his denial of design in nature, and also in poor harmony
with the idea of environments contributing so extensively to the change of
species; for if all the causes were placed in a common progenitor, of
course, they are not to be found in the least degree in environment. If
all was placed in a common progenitor, brought into existence by a
miracle, as Darwin teaches, how is design to be excluded from nature?
Imperfections in nature are urged against design in nature by all the
school of evolutionists. But what kind of imperfection is that which is
involved in the idea of God creating a common progenitor, lying at the
base of Darwin’s series of evolution, possessing all the causes of all
effects in nature, without designing those effects? What wonderful
undesigned results!
There are those, among unbelievers, who profess to see no evidences of a
designing intelligence in all the harmonies of nature, and yet profess to
see the far off man behind the old stone ax. What wonderful intelligence
they have! There is no want of intelligence; it is want of something else,
which Christianity requires. I think so much of your common sense that I
will leave you to say what that is. Socrates said: “When I was young it
was surprising how earnestly I desired that species of science which they
call physical, for it appeared to me pre-eminently excellent in bringing
us to know the causes of each, through what each is produced and
destroyed. But happening to hear some one read in a book, that it is
intelligence which is the parent of order and cause of all things, I
considered that, if it were so, the ordering intelligence placed each
thing where it was best.”
Is mind a development upward from the instinct of the brute creation, or
is it an offspring from God? Man’s reasoning intelligence separates him
from the brute by a chasm that no man can carry the reasoning powers of
mind across. _All on that side is brutish._ The science of the Bible,
dealing with intelligence as its subject, is the highest order of science
known to man. To limit the term science to physical phenomena is
unjustifiable, unless matter is the only substance in the universe, and
unless it be true, also, that some things resulting from matter lie
outside of science; for if matter is the one, and only, substance, and if
science deals with all there is, or may be, connected with that substance,
then, according to materialists themselves, its province is to deal with
life, mind and religion. But matter is not the only substance, unless a
thing can be, exist, and not be at the same time; for if life is a
property of matter inertia is not, and if mind is a property of matter it
must be with all matter everywhere, or the thing is and is not at one and
the same time.
The mind, in all its faculties, lies outside of the domain of the physical
sciences. Each man gets his knowledge of his own mental and moral
self-hood, not through the senses, but by his consciousness. So there is a
mental science that looks inward, and a physical science that looks
outward. Break down consciousness and philosophy is ruined. But some
ignoramus is ready to say: What care I for philosophy? Poor fellow! He
does not know what philosophy is; his ignorance is his trouble. Philosophy
simply tells us _how things are_; it answers the question, _how is it_?
There is nothing in which we are more interested than we are in the _how
is it_? Let us not ruin philosophy; consciousness is her foundation with
us; for in order to knowledge there must be primary and intuitive beliefs;
the man who has no faith in his own ability to see truth, when it is
presented through the medium of the senses, will never come to any
definite conclusions about any thing. So mind is innate, and lies in
consciousness, or self-hood, and is at the bottom of all our knowledge;
otherwise we would not, and could not, be men.
Mind is above matter, and virtue and morals are above both in their
results. The certainties are not all confined to physical nature, and
hence science should not be. Personality and the freedom of the will,
possessed in consciousness, are as certain as any facts in the physical
world. Truth, justice, right and wrong are equally certain.