[ p. 107 ]
Toward the close of my freshman year in college I woke up to the fact that I believed in evolution. After the manner of young collegians, I was greatly impressed with myself on this account and prepared a letter which should drop the bomb of my momentous disdtouire into the peaceful circle of my family. With intei«st and some anxiety I awaited the reverberation. What I actually received from my father was as follows: “Dear Harry: I believed in evolution before you were born.”
To any one brought up in a Christian home where a generation ago evolution was neither a stranger nor an enemy, it is almost increditte that to-day so great an uproar should be iWatsed over the conflict between evolution religion. When my father began believing the new hypothesis there were still respectable scientific authorities that could be quoted against it. In this country Louis Agassiz was a name to conjure with and the [ p. 108 ] weight of his very considerable opinion was against evolution. But now tlie last serious scientific opposition to evolution has disappeared. The hypothesis that separate species came into existence by descent, branching oflf from older and simpler forms so that all life, like a tree, goes back to some uniceUular beginning, is as much taken for granted among scientists as is the new astronomy or the lawabiding nature of the universe. Speaking of evolution. Professor J. Arthur Thomson says: “It is the only known scientific way of answering the question; How has the present-day system of Animate Nature come into being?”
The fact that evolution is takaa for granted in all serious scientific circles is often obscured by the confusion of evolution with Darwinism. The two terms rightly used do not mean the same thing. Evolution had been suggested long before Darwin. Just as centuries before Copernicus and Galileo, Greek seers had guessed that the sun, moon and stars did not encircle the earth but that the earth wheeled about a central fire, so in Aristotle, Lucretius, Augustine and other ancients are foregleams of the evolutionary explanation of living [ p. 109 ] forms. With Lamarck’s conviction in 1801, based upon the work of great predecessore, that “all species, not excepting man, were descended from other species,” a definite doctrine of evolution at last emerged. It converted Charles Darwin’s grandfather, and on the explanation of it many minds were at work when, in 1859, The Origin of Species appeared with its brilliant contribution.
Darwinism, therefore, is not synonymous with evolution. Darwinism is a particular theory of the factors that have been at work in the process of evolution. Darwin tried to explain how evolution came to pass, and his explanation can be tersely put in three brief propositions: First, he noted that however much offspring may resemble their parent forms, they always vary in detail and that some of these variations mean advantage and others mean handicap. Second, he noted that more pffspring are produced than can survive without overpopulating the earth, so that in the struggle for life the forms with advantageous variations tend to win and the rest to perish or stagnate, Third, he noted that, provided novel peculiarities can be inherited, those variations [ p. 110 ] which help srvival will tend to perpetuate themselves in descendants differing from their ancestral forms. This, in briefest outline, is Darwinism.
How, Darwinism as an adequate description of evolution is not believed in by all competent biologists. Darwin himself proposed his description tentatively, and like a true scientist hoped for corrections and additkins. They both have come. Some biologists to-day are orthodox Darwinians; others are outright antiDarwinians; most are on middle ground; hut, whatever their attitude toward Darwinism, all biologists are evolutionists.
This distinction between the major proposition on the one hand that our varied species of vegetable and animal life have into existence by gradual descent and not by separate creation, and on the other hand particular explanations as to how this happened and what factors were dominant in the process, is necessary to any intelligent dealing with the problem.
Darwinism could be utterly given up wijthout out affecting the standing of evolution. Indeed, it is fair to say that at das preseaat time [ p. 111 ] there never was such unanimous agreement amimg competent judges as to the truth of evolution, and never such diversity of scientific opinion as to its explanation.
This paper does not concern Darwinism, which is a highly technical subject. It concerns evolution, and the first step in understanding that is to face the problem which evolutionists are trying to solve. Some people. Some people to suppose that evolutionists are such out of sheer perversity. They have been described by one excited clergyman as “under the frenzied inspiration of the inhaler of mephitic gas”; their opinions have been pictured as “a jungle of fanciful assumption”; and as for motives, one defender of the faith has assailed them as “that infidel clique whose well-known object is to do away with all idea of a God.”
As a matter of fact, evolutionists have been endeavoring through long and patient study to understand some obvious phenomena which face us on every side and which clearly need an explanation. Where did all these manifold [ p. 112 ] species of plants and animals come from? What are the causal factors in their infinite diversity? There are two hundred thousand named species of insects, one hundred thousand named species of dicotyledonous flowering plants, twenty-five thousand names species of vertebrates and ten times as many invertebrates. How did these diverse species originate?
It is easy to see that only two answers are possible. One is the theory of the special creationist. Perhaps each one of these species was separately produced. Perhaps the Creator originally made two hundred and fifty thousand species of invertebrates. That idea was unconsciously involved in the view of our fore-fathers. Every kind of living creature now on earth was represented in the origin creation, so they thought, by parents from whom in a successkm of unchanging forms offspring had descended until now. But if they held this view, easily picturing Adam as giving names to all the animals and Noab as welcoming two each of all tite Ark, it surely was before they knew there were two hundred thousand species of insects and [ p. 113 ] two hundreds and fifty species of invertebrates.
On die island of St. Helena there are one hundred and twenty-nine species of beetles. Of these, one hundred and twenty-eight, peculiar to St. Helena, are found nowhere else. Can the believer in special creation be right ? Did God originally make one hundred and twenty-eight species of beetles particularly designed to live on St. Helena alone ?
If, however, this hypothesis of special creation is given up, one straightway becomes an evolutionist. He may try to protect himself from going tWe whole way, he may endeavor to draw a circle around man and keep the idea of special creation for him alone, but either he must be a special creationist or else in some degree he must be an evolutionist. For if separate creation of each species is not true, then it is true that diverse species come into existence by variation in descent from earlier parent forms. And if, on the basis of the evidence, one finds it impossible to draw artificial lines shutting out protected areas from the operation of so universal a process, then the story of existence on this planet starts with [ p. 114 ] some simple protoplasmic substance and rerords a great adrenture of developing life, swimming in the sea, crawling on the land, flying in the air, standing upright, growing nervous systems, and blossoming out at last into mental and spiritual life.
If scientists to-day are universally agreed in accepting such a picture of evolution, it is because all the evidence they can get their hands on points that way. A leading opponent of evolution, who has been trying to secure legislative enactments forbidding the teaching of it in schools and colleges, says that evolution is a guess. A more serious misstatement of plain facts it would be difficult to imagine. Whatever else the evolutionists have been doing, they have been laboriously trying not to guess, but to collect all facts in every realm where pertinent facts could possibly be found, and on the basis of them to discern the truth. Especially they have wanted facts that would discredit evolution. The reputation of a scientist would be secure forever if now he could overthrow [ p. 115 ] throw evolution and substitute a new hypothesis. He would rise to the rank of Copernicus and GalOeo; he would become a super-IJarwin. Darwin himself was voracious of facts that might throw doubt on evolution. In the short autobiography he wrote for his children, we read: “I had, also, during many years, followed a golden rule, namely, whenever a published fact, a new observation or thought came across me, which was opposed to my general results, to make a memorandum of it without fail and at once; for I had found by experience that such facts and thoughts were far more apt to escape from the memory than favourable ones.” Surely, that kind of long-sustained and patient investigation is not guessing.
Consider briefly the various realms that been ransacked for facts in which all the known evidence bears testimony for and not against the hypothesis of evolution.
Paleontology is the study of the remains of extinct life. We are used to thinking of fossils as the relics of old vegetable and animal forms that exist no more, but so to think is a modern achievement. The ancients supposed fossils [ p. 116 ] were the remains of sea animals who died when the flood was on and whose descendants still exist in the depths of the sea, or they said that the fossils were models which the Almighty used, like a sculptor, when he made living creatures at the first, or they said that God deliberately put fossils in the crust of the earth to try the faith of his children. Now, however, the geological strata in their chronological arrangement are well known, and through the fossilated remains we can confidently trace the gradual ascent of life from simple to more implicated forms. The evolutionary development of horse, camel, elephant, crocodile, and cuttlefish is remarkably clear. The development of careatures like birds and more difficult to trace. The fossilated history of man is between the two, with gaps still waiting to be filled. But, as new facts in this realm are discovered, they are all like with evolution the key that fits every one.
Embryology is the study of each individual’s evolution from his first beginning in a single cell. Whatever may be true about the race, evolution is clearly true of the individual. Each one of us starts with the unicellular form, [ p. 117 ] which the evolutionist presupposes, and comes through slow development to his maturity. How, in this individual evolution, traces are left of the racial history which lies behind. As experts study the prenatal development, they see in a telescoped, truncated form a partial recapitulation of the race’s story. This must not be overstated. An embryo has more important business than retaining a record of racial evolution. But it is true that as a psychologist discerns in a growing boy a rough of racial history, so that one can detect in the individual the savage stage gradually becoming half-civilized, which once took place in the race, so the biologist sees in the embryo an abbreviated racial history. And in some cases — as with the antlers of the red deer, where we have the story from fossils and discern in the embryological development of the red deer to-day an unmistakable correspondence is impossible to explain away.
Comparative Anatomy is the study of the similarities differences between structures of living creatures. The results have been extraordinary. Bone for bone, muscle for [ p. 118 ] muscle, organ for organ, scientists find unmistakable correspondence between the different species, until they can be arranged in series and made to display with what slight modifications they might have passed from one to the other. “The paddle of a turtle, the wing of a bird, the flipper of a whale, the foreleg of a horse, and the arm of a man” reveal the same essential bones and muscles merely adjusted to different environments and tasks. This witness of comparative anatomy to the kinship of all living creatures is emphasized when man’s body is scrutinized. We are full of structures that we do not use and whose only reasonable explanation is that they are earlier estate when they were useful. A rudimentary tail with a set of caudal muscles, a cartilaginous remnant of a pointed ear which almost every man can distinguish even with his finger, useless muscles employed by other animals in moving ears or erecting hair, miniature third eyelids essential in reptiles and birds but useless in man— so the list runs until Wiedersheim says that there are no less than one hundred and eighty vestigial structures in the human body. Of such things Darwin was [ p. 119 ] thinking when he wrote, “We must, however, acknowledge, as it seems to me, that Man with all his noble qualities, with sympathy which feels for the most debased, with benevolence which extends not only to other men but to the humblest living creature, with his god-like intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system — with all these exalted powers— Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.”
Contemporary evolution is another field of evidence. There is no use saying that new species cannot develop, since we can make them develop. Luther Burbank could condense, abbreviate, control evolution and make new of flowers and trees. The most valuable spring wheat to-day, they say, is Marquis wheat — three hundred million bushels of it raised in North America in 1918. Twenty-three years ago there was only one known kernel of MArquis wheat in existence. Men, by controlling and shortening evolutionary processes, had made a new variety. Evolution is not simply historical; it is contemporary and, within restricted limits imposed by brevity of [ p. 120 ] time and by the necessity of crossing existent species, can be observed and directed.
There are other areas of evidence, such as blood-teste, which remarkably confirm the relative kinship of living creatures indicated by comparative anatomy. No brief outline such as this can possibly do justice to the immense range of investigation, the detailed scrutiny of facte, the overwhelming conclusiwness of confirmatory testimony which has convinced scientists of evolution’s truth. To-day the upset of the Copernican hypothesis is just about as probable as the upset of evolution. As Professor Edwin Grant Conklin, of Princeton, has said : “There is probably not a single biological investigator in the world to-day who is not convinced of the truth of evolution.”
If, now, it be true, as so many are, saying, that this acceptance of evolution is fatal to religion, then the situation is serioua indeed. But is it true? What is there in evolution for Christians to fear? For one thing, some people in deep anxiety say that evolution is not the [ p. 121 ] Bible. Of course it is not in the Bible. Neither is radio, nor the aeroplane, the Copernican astronomy, Newtonian gravitation, nor EKinstein’s relativity. Who in his right senses turns to the Bible as a text-book in modern science? The great’ poem on creation with which the Bible opens is a magnificent expression of faith in one supreme God and in this universe as his handiwork, but it is not modern science. If one is going to insist on the Bible as an infallible guide in science, he must goa long way back before any of our modern views of the world were even dreamed of. He must believe that the earth is flat with “fountains of the great deep” underneath; that it is stationary, “established that it cannot be moved”’; that the sky is a solid firmament, “strong as a molten mirror,” and beyond it “the waters that are above the heavens’’; that the rain comes from the supercelestial sea, let down through “the windows of heaven”; and that the sun, moon, and stars move across the stationary firmament to illumine man. There is no possibility of identifying this ancient outlook on the universe, its flat earth so cozily tucked beneath the coverlet of heaven, with modern science. We [ p. 122 ] are doing the faith of our generation an incalculable injury when we try thus to use the Bible for purposes that it never was meant to serve, like the foolish servant who employed her master’s flute to beat the rugs with. What gain is there in trying to make scientific fact out of the creation of light on this earth three days before there was a sun; or trying to identify seven days, each with an evening and a morning, with geologic ages never dreamed of until a few years ago?
One pleads thus, not to discredit the Book, but to save it for its rightful service to the lives of men. The distinctive glory of the Bible has never been that it taught science. The wonder is that the Bible has survived that ruinous employment of it. The abiding usefulness of the Book lies in its appeal to the unchanging spiritual needs and experiences of men. ‘The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want”—that does not change with changing sciences. “God was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself”’—that does not alter with altering biologies. “Let all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamor, and railing, be put away from you, with all malice; and be ye kind one to [ p. 123 ] another, tender hearted, forgiving each other, even as God also in Christ forgave you” —that does not shift with shifting philosophies.
When, therefore, a man says that evolution is not in the Bible, the answer seems plain: Of course evolution is not in the Bible any more than modern chemistry and physics are there; what difference does that make? Every step of development in science has been bitterly fought by literalists quoting texts from Scripture. That procedure in every case has proved not a defense of the faith, but a destruction of faith in the minds of multitudes. Let us not repeat that old and stupid misuse of Scripture. Let us use the Bible for what it is, the supreme Book of spiritual life, and not an infallible text-book on the physical sciences.
‘A far more serious difficulty with evolution is found in those who insist that evolution crowds out God. That has a strangely familiar sound. Men said that when the new astronomy, came in. The Church promoted Father Caccini for preaching a sermon which, punning [ p. 124 ] ou Galileo’s name, had for its text, ““Ye men of Galilee, why stand ye looking into heaven?” and which, before it was through, had called all geometry “of the devil” and had said that “mathematicians should be banished as the authors of all heresies.” Men despaired of God also when Newton announced his law of gravitation. They said he “took from God that direct action on his works so constantly ascribed to him in Scripture and transferred it to material mechanism,” and “substituted gravitation for Providence.” "We need not be surprised, therefore, to hear a clergyman say that evolution is “an attempt to dethrone God.”
As a maiter of fact, God is not so easily disposed of as these faint-hearts of little faith seem to think.
Of course, a childish picture of God as an individual off somewhere, inhabiting a local heaven, tending to his favorites with affectionate indulgence, and thought of in man-size terms, is made impossible, not by evolution only, but by the whole modern outlook on the universe. But whether evolutionists or not, we still face the eternal Creative Power from whose boundless resources this cosmos and all [ p. 125 ] things in it have come and are coming, and still we face thc problem of that Power’s character. Is dynamic dirt going it blind a sufficient description? Has the aecidental concourse of physical atoms produced all that is, from the ordered stars to “Plato’s brain” and “Lord Christ’s heart”? Or at the creative center of the universe are there other forces akin to those which arise in us as intelligence, purposefulness, and good-will? Which is the more reasonable explanation—God or no-God? No scientific evolutionist supposes that by his evolutionary doctrine he has touched that question. It has been said so often that it ought to begin to seep in by this time that evolution deals with the methods of creation, not with its ultimate Creator.
On the one side is the special creationist’s view of God making this world by fiat at a definite time in the past. While most of this school would not be so specific as Dr. John Lightfoot who in 1642 dated the creation of the physical universe as Sunday, October 23, 4004 B. C., and the creation of man the following Friday, “at about the third hour, or nine of the clock in the morning,” the special creationist’s [ p. 126 ] view, when it is made explicit, always involves some such idea that the universe was suddenly created on a definite date and that upon this earth each species was separately produced, and man, in particular, leaped, as it were, fullstatured into being, like Minerva from the head of Jove. On the other side stands the theistic evolutionist’s view of an indwelling, purposeful Power, the Creative Spirit of the Living God unfolding, by slow gradation across measureless ages in a process where literally a thousand years are as one day, this immense developing cosmos and on the earth slowly bringing forth life crowned in the possibilities of man. That latter view seems to me far and away the sublimest outlook on the creative activity of the Eternal that man has ever had. At any rate, there is no real excuse for a man to give up God simply because he gives up the special creationist’s view of him. There is no logical sequence in saying that if God did not make the world in that old way he therefore did not make the world.
In the city of New York are homes where women and children late into the night manufacture [ p. 127 ] paper flowers. However one may deplore the pathetic necessity that drives them, one does admire the marvelous dexterity with which they work—a few swift strokes of the fingers and the flower is made. But in our gardens flowers are being made in another way altogether by a process so different that one would almost think that they were making themselves. An ugly bulb in which no one with superficial sight could perceive a latent flower is planted and not swiftly, but gradually, not by fiat, but by growth, flowers are made. Which is the more wonderful way of making them?
When I, for one, look back to the picture that in childhood I had of God’s creative activity and now think of this strange, terrific, adventurous universe in which I live, where from unpromising beginnings in which human eye, could it have been there, would have seen no spiritual potency, has come this amazing development crowned in aspiring character and hopes of a kingdom of righteousness on earth, not for the sake of science only, but for the sake of religion and the enlarged view of God, I would not for the world go back.
[ p. 128 ]
A more considerable difficulty for many people is the effect of evolution on their estimate of man. If man has descended, or ascended, from monkeys, that degrading faith, they think, puts an end to all high appraisals of man’s origin, worth, meaning, and destiny. To be sure, science does not say that man descended from monkeys, but that man and monkeys alike descended on different lines of development from some parent form. But that accurate statement of what biologists teach, while it spoils many jests about monkey ancestors and outlaws such silly slogans as “God or Gorilla,” does not solve the deeper problem. However it may be phrased, evolution to many people seems to degrade man. He used to be a son of God; now he seems to be a developed animal.
If evolution does thus brutalize man’s conception of his own nature, it is a public enemy. We have a hard enough problem, as it is, dealing with the animalism of human nature. When Tennyson wrote,
[ p. 128 ]
Move upward, working out the beast,
And let the ape and tiger die,
he was describing one of man’s innermost problems, but Tennyson printed that nine years before Darwin published The Origin of Species. The poet was not dealing primarily with evolution, but with ordinary human experience. We may not wish to claim blood relationship with the tiger, but, if ever some wanton insult has let loose in us the storm of an ungovernable temper, we must confess to a moral kinship with the tiger deeper than any blood-tests can reveal. We may not like to acknowledge relationship with the monkeys, but we are extraordinarily fortunate if more than once in sheer wantonness and folly we have not playe? the monkey in ways that make us hate ourselves on every remembrance of it. The plain fact is that, whether evolutionists or not, we are dealing with the problem of animalism and brutality in man.
If, now, evolution sanctions the acceptance of man’s animalism as normal, regnant and ineradicable, that helps immeasurably to defeat man’s better self. If sensuality can say to man, You are only an animal by origin and [ p. 130 ] nature; science says so; why try to be anything else?—that helps the beast. If greed, cruelty, chicanery, militarism can say, Being by origin an animal you inevitably plunge into a selfish fight where the strong win and the weak are crowded to the wall; why contend against it?— that helps the beast. Evolution obviously can be used to support animalism, and nobody should take that so seriously to heart as the man who thinks evolution true.
Serious consideration, however, ought to reveal the fact that estimating the nature and worth of anything in terms of its beginnings is a perilous practice. If, listening to the ecstatic music of some symphony, we should be told that such music is not really beautiful, but that, capable of being traced back through a long story of development to tom-toms and beaten sticks, it is revealed by these origins to be a crude and savage thing, we surely should not be impressed. In a world where everything can be traced back to primitive origins, one must agree to sink all life to a dead level of futility and worthlessness, if he once undertakes to judge value on the basis of beginnings. St. Peter’s dome can be traced back to the first [ p. 131 ] mud hut; the Sistine Madonna can be traced back to the caveman’s scratches on the rocks; fine family life can be followed to the beginning of its trail in some man of the old stone age pursuing a woman; Shakespere’s sublimities can be reduced to crude origins in the first grunts of prehistoric men; and in general all things wise, good and beautiful in life can be discredited by being ascribed to low beginnings.
From which consideration a clear truth arises: you cannot estimate the worth, meaning, or nature of anything by its early stages. You do not judge the oak by the acorn, but the acorn by the oak. You do not estimate the man by the embryo, but the embryo by the man. Everything is worth, not what it starts with, but what it grows to be.
Everything is to be judged by what it has capacity to become.
Nothing whatever, therefore, is decided about man’s value or destiny by changing our statement of the route by which he came. As ’ @ man may arrive in New York City by ship, train, automobile, or aeroplane, but in any case is what he is regardless of the method by which he journeyed, so man is made no whit different [ p. 132 ] in nature or worth when special creation gives place to evolution in the description of his arrival.
A violin in the hands of a great performer playing the Fifth Symphony is a marvelous instrument. If, now, for the first time one learned that violins are composed of wood and catgut, would he say that the violin is something other than it was before? Obviously there are two approaches to understanding the violin. From the standpoint of origins, it is. made of lowly materials; from the standpoint of value, it is an instrument made for high purposes on which the master compositions of the ages can be played. So man, in point of his beginnings, comes from a lowly start. The book of Genesis says that God made him out of the dust of the earth. There is no lower point to start with than that.
What difference does it make to religion whether God out of the dust of the earth made man by fiat or out of the dust of the earth made him by gradual processes? No matter by what route he came, man is what he is, with his intelligence, his moral life, his spiritual possibilities, his capacity for fellowship with God.
[ p. 133 ]
To many minds the central problem in this realm concerns man’s soul—his invisible personality, with intelligence, purposefulness, good-will centered in an abiding self-consciousness. Where in the course of evolution, they ask, did this selfhood get into man? When did his soul begin? To which one may well reply by asking another question: In the course of each individual’s evolution from conception to maturity, where did his selfhood begin and his soul come upon the scene? The problem is no different for the race than it is for the individual. We each began with a physical basis in which a human eye could see no promise of spiritual result, and we each emerged at last to be, not a body, but a soul built in a body like a temple in a scaffolding, and believing in the perpetuity of the inner structure when the outer framework has been taken down. If that be true of us one by one, why may it not be true of the race?
The idea, therefore, that evolution degrades ’ man is pointless. Suppose that one of us by some lapse of memory believed that he had been made mature, like Adam and Eve, in our father’s faith, created adult, with no history [ p. 134 ] behind. And suppose then he should learn the truth about his lowly beginning and the strange history through which from his conception he had passed. Would he say, That degrades me; I could have been a son of God upon the other hypothesis, but not now? There is no sense in such argument at all. He is the same man he was before—a spiritual being in whom God can dwell with transforming power.
Let the scientists, therefore, work out the physical route by which man came. They might change the description of it every year and not affect vital religion. Still our problem is the same. Still we are spiritual beings who can fall from our high estate into brutality, or we can claim our heritage as “children of God; and if children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint heirs with Christ.”