* This is the first of two extracts composing the last chapter of the Rev. Frank Allen’s “Evolution in the Balances,” reviewed in our pages some time ago. The book is published by the Fleming H. Revell Company, 158 Fifth Avenue, New York, price \$1.50. The publishers readily granted permission to reprinting this chapter in our Magazine.—Editor.
I.
WE have seen that the Written Book furnishes the key to unlock the great stone book; that to try to read the stone book apart from its Author and the history which He has revealed concerning the origin of the world, and the life which appears upon it, ends in hopeless confusion. We have seen that the Noachian Deluge enables us to account for the fossils which are found in the rocks throughout the world. The Biblical history of the Deluge not only records the fact of the general destruction of life, but it gives a moral reason. It informs us that it was a judgment of God which was sent on account of the sins of the world. Therefore, every fossiliferous rock is a monument of a ruined world and a warning against sin. A cartoon appeared recently, in one of the popular magazines, of a large pole supporting a wrecked automobile by a railway crossing. Such an exhibit would be a striking monument to warn all automobile drivers to beware of trains at crossings. So in every rock which contains fossils there is a reminder of the destruction of the inhabitants of the earth by a great deluge, and a warning against the results of sin.
If, in making excavations, men should dig up an old battlefield and find bones broken, punctured with holes, arms gone, legs missing, and skulls shattered, they would naturally exclaim, “Oh, the awful results of war!” When men see rocks that are filled with fossils and think of the antedeluvian world, of its wickedness and of its judgment, they should exclaim, “Oh, the awful results of sin!”
The rocks tell a story which, when placed side by side with the record of Genesis, is so plain that we wonder that it has been so often misread. They tell a story of a world that has been inhabited by great animals and large men. They tell of great fishes of the sea, huge mammals of the land, and great birds of the air which were larger and more powerful than any of which we know to-day. They tell us of vast areas once teeming with highly developed plants and animals, which are now bleak seas of ice or barren desert. They tell of wombats as large as an ox, or turtles nine feet in length, of elephants twenty feet long, of dinosaurs eighty-seven feet in length, of bears, lions, deer, rhinoceroses, hippopotamuses, and of practically all other animals which were larger than their now living representatives. In addition to this, they tell us of giant races, such as the Cro-magnon men, larger than the average man of the present day. No wonder that Sir J. W. Dawson said when comparing the past with the modern world: “We may almost say that all things left to themselves tend to degenerate, and only a new breathing of the Almighty Spirit can start them on the path of advancement.”
Why, then, is there a difference of interpretation of these facts? Why do so many men think that they are proofs of evolution, or a steady march of all things upward? Principally because of their misinterpretation of the phenomena of geology. We have seen that the biologist, the psychologist, the anthropologist, and other evolutionists all go back to the mysterious abyss of ancient time, and invoke the fossil world to confirm themselves in their theories, and that their evolution theories are based upon an artificial and unsubstantiated conception of geology. Moreover, evolutionists have not taken into account, in a proper manner, the results of domestic care and training. Almost all kinds of plants and animals and fowl have been developed under the care of man. Thus man, under God, has been able to bring about a partial recovery of domestic creatures from their degenerate state. This has not resulted in producing new species, or changing them permanently, for if left to themselves they would revert rapidly to their original type. God’s original production was better than man’s reconstruction can ever be.
Evidence of this fact is registered in the rocks all over the world.
Why should men desire to inject millions of years into any place in the Divine Record? Men used to think that they had to insert millions of years into the second sentence of the Bible in order to account for the origin and orderly arrangement of matter. They were then influenced by skeptics who had advanced the Nebular Hypothesis in order to account for the formation of the earth without God. Even devout theologians accepted it. But now scientists upon purely physical grounds have been forced to abandon this theory. Still, men think that they have to extend the record of creation for millions of years in order to account for the varied forms of life which now exist in the world. Skeptics cannot accept God and special creation, so they have supposed that somehow nature could perform the work of creating species if allowed millions of years in which to do it. But while Darwin was theorizing with the idea that nature knew nothing but a hit-and-miss method of ordering new generations, Mendel was proving that nature works on a mathematical plan in her rules of heredity, and that this extends through all the higher forms of plant and animal life, so that there is no crossing over from one type to another. And now William Bateson comes forward and confirms Mendel’s findings by saying: “That particular and essential bit of the theory of evolution which is concerned with the origin and nature of species remains utterly mysterious. . . . Variations of many kinds, often considerable, we daily witness, but no origin of species. . . . We no longer feel as we used to do, that the process of variation, now contemporaneously accruing, is the beginning of a work which needs merely the element of time for its completion; for even time cannot complete that which has not begun.”^1 Millions of years, therefore, are of no avail in producing new phyla, genera, or even species. There is no need for, and no adequate scientific reason why we need to insert millions of years anywhere in the record of creation.
As the noted geologist, Sir J. W. Dawson, stands looking at the gorge of Niagara, that great geological time-gauge, he concludes that the time since man and the higher mammals appeared upon earth has been about seven thousand years.^2 And as Prof. G. M. Price stands upon a mountain top and surveys all the phenomena of geological formations, he concludes that the world is not older than the few thousand years indicated by Moses in the inspired record. Dawson says: “Even evolutionists, when sufficiently candid, admit their case not proven by geological evidence, and fall back on periods of rapid paroxysmal evolution, or ‘metamorphosis,’ as it has been called, scarcely differing from the idea of creation under law, or mediate creation.”* Why, then, shall we, in order to satisfy the imaginings of men who wish to eliminate all miracles and unusual phenomena, inject millions of years into the divine record?
^1 “Science,” January 1922.
^2 “Modern Science in Bible Lands,” p. 173
Skepticism has always rebelled against the miraculous in history. The Sadducees, who were the skeptics of their day among the Hebrews, rejected the idea of the miraculous. They deliberately rejected the evidence, and persistently refused to accept the fact of the resurrection of Christ. As they were in power, the subject of the resurrection became the centre of conflict in the early apostolic Church. They tried by ridicule and brutality to silence the teachings of the resurrection. The skeptical philosophers among the Greeks also rejected the miraculous. When Paul, in Athens, preached the resurrection to the Epicureans and Stoics, some sneered, some mocked, and some politely dismissed themselves from his audience. The rejection of the miraculous in the Creation or in the Deluge is simply another manifestation of skepticism in the present age. We do not affirm that all men who believe in a measure of evolution are skeptics, but the theory comes from a skeptical philosophy of the world, and Christians should guard themselves against being influenced by it. The Christian can be certain that spontaneous generation and perpetual motion will never be discovered, because both the origin of life and the source of everlasting power are from God.
When Dr Len G. Broughton was a medical student, he could not accept the supernatural generation of Christ. He went to a doctor of divinity, who reasoned with him and left him in greater perplexity than ever. When he had completed his medical education, he went to a backwoods community to begin his practice. He tells us that a backwoods preacher, in a morning sermon, knocked out more skepticism in half-an-hour than he had gotten in three years. The preacher said:— “If there is anybody here troubled about the mystery of God becoming man, I want to take you back to the first chapter of Genesis and the first verse—’In the beginning God.’ My brother, let me ask you this: Do you believe God was in the beginning? That is to say, that before the beginning began, God was?” Dr Broughton said to himself: “Yes, I believe that.” “Now,” continued the preacher, “if you believe that God was ahead of the beginning, you believe the only mysterious thing of this universe. If I believed that, God knows I could believe anything else in the world.” After relating this, Dr Broughton adds—”I had gone to college and travelled through the mysteries of the theory of reproduction and cell formation, and had come to realise that I was just a common fool: that if God was in the beginning, that was the one supreme mystery of all mysteries of this mysterious universe of God.”
The ancients were not materialists. The savages were not materialists. Materialism is the product of modern agnostic philosophy. Sir Arthur Keith says of “the Neanderthal man,” that “he burned his dead and had certain beliefs regarding death.”* The ancient Egyptians were not materialists. In a book, entitled “The Religion of the Primitives,” Mr Le Roy, the author, tells us that he was a missionary for many years among the so-called primitives of Africa. When he began his work there he held the usual evolutionary idea that these black people were fetishists, without religion or morality, with no family life, stupidly adoring animals, trees, and stones. After spending more than forty years among these “primitives,” he says—”These primitives or savages that your theories require do not exist anywhere, and perhaps have never existed; at any rate, it is impossible to discover them either in the present world or the past.” He shows that the representations concerning them, in the effort to point out that they have no religion, are incorrect and largely imaginary.
The philosophical scientist cannot prove our ancestors or our contemporaries among the savages to be materialists. He will have to take the blame for the promulgation of that idea to himself. But what has the avowed materialist gained? He has gained nothing and lost much. Darwin, who at one time studied to be a leader in the Church, drifted so far that even in some of his correspondence he became profane. He lost interest in the arts and literature. “He mourned because his mind was weak and dizzy; and he became morbidly apprehensive lest his children were, by heredity, doomed to the same fate. He gradually lost pleasure in most phases, even, of his work.”* John Stuart Mill was an evolutionist. He thought he had found a moral code to benefit mankind, but directed his friends to write on his tombstone the words, “Most Unhappy.” That is the natural end of the man who eliminates God from his thought and life.
The Psalmist said—”The fool hath said in his heart, there is no God.” He is just as much of a fool who denies God in his heart as he who boasts of his infidelity. The scientist who deliberately rules God out of all consideration, and presumes that he can find the origin of life or the evolution of all life without God, rather than being one of the wisest men of the earth, is properly characterised by the Psalmist. Sir Isaac Newton, in his early life, was an outspoken infidel, but later, after examining the evidences of Christianity, he changed his opinion. When Dr Halley was arguing in favour of infidelity before Newton, the latter said—”Dr Halley, I am always glad to hear you when you speak about astronomy or any other parts of mathematics, because that is a subject you have studied and well understand; but you should not talk of Christianity, for you have not studied it. I have, and am certain you know nothing about the matter.
You cannot put one little star in motion,
You cannot shape one single forest leaf,
Nor fling a mountain up, nor sink an ocean,
Presumptuous pigmy, large with unbelief –
You cannot bring one dawn of regal splendour,
Nor bid the day to shadowy twilight fall,
Nor send the pale moon forth with radiance tender :
And dare you doubt the One who has done it all ?
(To be continued.)
PREACHING BY CONDUCT.
That man is a bad preacher in the pulpit who is not a good preacher out of it; and no man in the world has a right to stand up for God if God has not adorned him with personal holiness. We should preach by what we are, as well as by what we say.—Rowland Hill.