Part 6 (1/2)
Where Christianity entered as a factor, as in the history of Western Europe and in the results of Christian missions in heathen lands, we can indeed observe a rise out of barbaric or savage conditions to refinement and culture. But only where the Christian gospel is preached, was the natural process of decay, of degeneration, interfered with. Elsewhere, that is to say, where purely natural forces were given free play, mankind has declined physically, mentally, spiritually. All civilizations ill.u.s.trate this law of decay. Wilhelm F. Griewe, in his _”Primitives Suedamerika”_ (Cincinnati, 1893), summarizes his observations on the South American continent as follows: ”The Malaysian aborigines of South America, in a period of 3,000 years, failed to advance in development. The j.a.panese discoverers of Peru testify that they found the natives in a condition of extreme decay; within a period of 1,500 years they had made no progress but had retrogressed. When the Spaniards came, they described the natives of Chile and Argentina in such a manner that it is quite evident how little these tribes had progressed in 3,000 years. The Araucanians of Chile have, even in historic times, greatly degenerated; they have lost the very meaning of many words; retaining the sh.e.l.l, they have lost the kernel. In Peru, the age of heroic deeds and wonderful architecture was followed by decay, --religious, moral, intellectual decay. The population was all but destroyed by vices and cruelty. Their neighbors, the Chibchas, likewise described an arc which ended in devil-wors.h.i.+p. Similarly, the history of the Botokudes is degeneration, vice, atrocities. The negro tribes in the north and east of South America record no progress, but, on the other hand, sank into abominations, slavery, cannibalism. Where, then, is there support for the evolutionary theory, with its a.s.sumption of an upward trend from a brute condition to civilized and cultured life?
Everywhere in primitive South America we see before our very eyes the process of decline and decay. Also the religious idea became obscured.
Some of these tribes had an original monotheism. They recognized a supreme creator of all things and gave him various names. But the spiritual character of their knowledge of G.o.d was gradually obscured, G.o.d was dragged into the sphere of sense and lower divinities were a.s.sociated with Him,--a downward development which absolutely contradicts the Darwinian hypothesis. From an original, pure, spiritual wors.h.i.+p to gross idolatry,--that is the religious decay which in the world outside the Bible meets us everywhere, also among the original races of South America.”
Thus in the history of human society, we observe, unless the divine power of the gospel supplies the sole preserving and regenerating element, a universal law of decay in human affairs. Innumerable times, and at the most crucial moments of human history, not the fittest but the unfittest survived. Dr. A. L. Graebner said: ”The principle of the 'survival of the fittest' is so far from accounting for the phenomena of history, that the principle itself is flatly contradicted and utterly exploded by a sober investigation of historical facts. That there are in nature numerous instances of a survival of the _un_fittest, is not only conceded by our evolutionists, but has been deliberately forged into an argument against teleology (divine purpose) and divine providence! And, we ask, was it by the survival of the fittest that Julius Ceasar, [tr. note: sic] one of the grandest rulers of all ages, should succ.u.mb under the daggers of Brutus and Ca.s.sius: that Paul and Seneca should die by authority of their inferior, Nero; that Popery, rotten to the core and represented by men who would have brought on the ignominous [tr. note: sic] collapse or extinction of every other dynasty in the days of the Roman p.o.r.nocracy, should survive, while the ill.u.s.trious house of Henry I. sank away to ruin in the third and fourth generation; that John Hus should die at the stake and Jean Charlier de Gerson in timid monastic retirement, while Balthasar Cossa, by far their inferior in talents and learning, and every inch an infamous scoundrel, having for a time disgraced even the Roman see as John XXIII, ended his days as a Cardinal and Bishop of Tusculum and Dean of the Sacred College; that Girolamo Savonarola, one of the most remarkable and pure-minded leaders of his day and of all times, should be fought down and crushed in a struggle with men not one of whom was worthy of unloosing his shoe's latchet, among them Alexander VI, one of the most scandalous wretches of all history? Survival of the fittest!”
The article from which we have quoted points out the relevancy, to the question at issue, of the principle of degeneration and gradual decay in historical organisms or inst.i.tutions. ”Our scientists who bother themselves and others about the descent of man have favored with a keen interest the Bushmen of Australia and other types of savage humanity, with receding skulls, flat noses, thin legs, little or no clothing, and not much of morals or religion. The lower in the scale and the farther remote from the civilized Caucasian a newly discovered or investigated tribe or specimen, living or dead, would appear to be, the greater was the value set on the discovery, because the nearer science was supposed to have come to the missing link, the transition from brute to man. Of course, the missing link will never be discovered, because it never existed. There is no transition from brute to man, and never was. But if there were a species of beings which might be cla.s.sed either with man or with brutes, a transitional species, even that would not necessarily represent a transition in the direction from brute to man. We do not say that a transition from man to brute is possible; for it is not; but we do say that the evolutionist who sees in Bushmen and other savages specimens of humanity representing the earlier stages of development, through which the more highly developed species had long since pa.s.sed on the way from the primitive state of man to their present state, makes a great, fundamental mistake, the same mistake which one would make in supposing that the pale and decrepit inmates of a city hospital or a country poorhouse represented the lower stage of development from which the strong and healthy men and women in the surrounding country had been evolved. Our evolutionists are in very much the same plight with Mark Twain and his friend, who, having slept all day, rushed from the hotel in scanty clothing, climbed the observatory and to the amus.e.m.e.nt of the guests loudly admired what they took to be the famous Rigi sunrise, while in fact they were vociferating and gesticulating at the setting sun. But while our tourists had soon found out their mistake, our evolutionists have not; which does not make it any less a mistake. St.
Paul has drawn a vivid picture of the degenerating influence of sin upon the nations under the righteous wrath of G.o.d,* [[* Rom. 1, 18-32.]] and the course which the Greek nation and the Roman would have run from their pristine vigor exhibited in the days of Thermopylae and Cannae down to the state of _marasmus senilis_ pictured by Juvenal, a state of rottenness which even the transfusion of German blood into the putrid veins of that degenerate and decaying race could not remedy, is a fearful corroboration of the apostle's testimony.”
We cannot leave this subject without briefly adverting to a great historic fact, indeed, the most ma.s.sive and significant fact in all history, which, in its remoter bearings, not only strikes at the very heart of the evolutionistic philosophy, but at the same time wounds it mortally in all its parts. I refer to the Resurrection of our Lord. The resurrection of Jesus Christ is the central fact of our Christian belief and it is, rightly understood, the all-sufficient answer to the theory of evolution. Christ's resurrection is an historical fact fully as much as the defeat of Xerxes at Salamis in 480 B. C., the discovery of America by Columbus in 1492, and the peace of Versailles of 1919 are historical facts, proven by the word and record of contemporary witnesses. But if Christ was raised then we have proof for the following tenets, all contradicting evolutionary speculation at so many vital points: 1) The existence of a personal G.o.d who is concerned with human affairs; 2) The reality of miraculous interference with natural forces; 3) The truth of atonement and the redemption, and 4) The inspiration of the Old Testament Scriptures (hence also of the creation account in Genesis). The details of the argument are beyond the scope of this paper, but a little patient study will bring to light the fact that each of these four basic ideas is dove-tailed, mortised and anch.o.r.ed so firmly in the fact of Christ's resurrection, that you can get rid of them all only by denying that fact. Hence it is, aside from any investigation of proofs of evolutionism, clear to the Christian student that there must be some fault either in reason or in observation that vitiates the whole theory. The resurrection of Christ is a fact, a fact to which the entire history of Christianity testifies, the most tremendous fact in the history of the world. And it stands fore-square against a theory which says that there is no personal G.o.d, that there is no sin, no redemption; that there are no miracles, no revelation, no inspiration; that there is no absolute religion nor an absolute standard of right and wrong.
CHAPTER ELEVEN.
Evidence of Design.
Compare all that has been said by scientists themselves about the evolutionary theory, and what remains? This, only, that some how, we do not know when, life arose, and some how, we do not know by what laws, one form evolved from another, until we and the world about us have become what we are now. Now, the fact that no _laws_ have so far been discovered by scientists to account for this presumed development of all things by inherent forces, is very significant and the conclusions which logically follow from it deserve our attention. Since Darwin's solution, Natural Selection, was discarded, twenty or thirty years ago, many other solutions have been propounded, but none has received the a.s.sent of even a respectable group of scientists, let alone by all. These solutions, --such as the theories of de Vries and Mendel, are frankly no more than guesses based on certain observation in plant life and insect life and their originators by no means a.s.sert that they have found a law by which the universe can be accounted for. But if there is no universal law, there is only _chance_. Hence it is clear that what we are asked to believe is that ancient Greek speculation was after all not far from the truth, that through a fortuitous (accidental) concourse of atoms the world came into being, and that by chance combinations of elements the great variety of living things arose.
Such is the condition of evolutionistic thought to-day. That there is no _direct_ evidence for organic evolution is generally admitted. That geology cannot be quoted for it is also quite generally conceded, since the sudden rise of perfect (not half-developed) insects, of perfect fish, of perfect mammals, is clear even to the man who merely turns the leaves of Geikie's, Le Conte's, and Dana's text books, or visits Field's Museum. Yet _some-how_ things must have gotten to be what they are by development from earlier forms,--this about sums up what is really contained in the concept of evolution as it appears in most recent scientific literature, so far as scientists at all touch upon the subject. However, they by no means urge the evolutionary principle as they used to do. Bacteriologists especially, so I am informed by a chemist of international repute, Dr. P. A. Kober, of New York, as a cla.s.s are inclined to give up the theory as a ”bad guess.” Why, they find in fossil fish diseased portions which bear unmistakable traces of the action of bacteria which live to-day, in other words, which in ”countless millions of years” have not progressed enough to show any change recognizable under the most powerful miscroscope! [tr. note: sic]
Anthropologists shake their head when they are told by evolutionists that the animal which shows clearest ”resemblance” in a structural way, to certain points in human anatomy, is a small fossil ape, about the size of a house cat, with a skull one inch in diameter! There remains no proof, direct or indirect, of any _principle_ working the changes which are believed to have occurred. All things have evolved, if they have evolved at all, _by chance_.
Now, over against this doctrine of chance there stands the monumental fact that throughout nature, living and non-living, there runs a principle of _design_. The minerals, the plants, the animals, all exhibit, as even the superficial observer knows or might know, a plan.
There is design in the crystals in which elements exist when they pa.s.s from a liquid into a solid state; there is design in the leaf and flower of every plant; there is plan, design, in the structure and physiology of animals. We would add, there is an evident plan in the history of the Chosen Race, the Jews, as we possess it in the Old and New Testaments; there is a plan in the moral sphere, laws producing unvaried results; there is an ordered scheme even in the life of the individual. But let us limit our investigation to the domain of nature. Let us note how little necessity there is for a.s.suming that by mere chance things have come to be what they are.
As a rule each chemical substance has an individual crystal by which it can be distinguished. It is possible to cla.s.sify the thousands of different crystals, since all belong to one of six cla.s.ses, according as their surfaces are grouped symmetrically around the axes of the crystal.
The salt crystal has one form, the topaz another, quartz and beryl another, borax another, and these forms are absolutely unvaried wherever these substances are found in nature or in the chemist's retort. It is not here our intention to point out how impossible it is to a.s.sume that there has been an evoluton [tr. note: sic] of one of these forms out of another. The point is that there is not chance, but orderly arrangement, symmetrical shape, in a word, most evident design.
Turning to plant life, even the amateur student cannot fail to observe that the entire world of plants is built on a beautiful system which argues most powerfully not for accidental arrangement but for plan. The place of every leaf on every plant is fixed beforehand by unerring mathematical rule. As the stems grow on, leaf after leaf appears exactly in its predestined place, producing a perfect symmetry;--a symnetry [tr.
note: sic] which manifests itself not in one single monotonous pattern for all plants, but in a definite number of forms exhibited by different species, and arithmetically expressed by the series of fractions, 1/2, 1/3, 2/5, 3/8, 5/13, 8/21, etc., according as the formative energy in its spiral course up the developing stem lays down at corresponding intervals 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, or 21 ranks of alternative leaves.
The position of each blossom is determined beforehand by that of the leaves; so that the shape of every flower-cl.u.s.ter in a boquet [tr. note: sic] is given by the same simple mathematical law which arranges the foliage. Every flower has a ”Numerical Plan.” Although not easy to make out in all cases, yet generally it is plain to see that each blossom is based upon a particular number, which runs through all or most of its parts. And a princ.i.p.al thing which a botanist notices when examining a flower is its numerical plan. It is upon this that the symmetry of the blossom depends. Thus the stonecrop and the flax are based upon the number five, which is exhibited in all their parts. Some flowers of this same stonecrop have their parts in fours, and then that number runs throughout; namely, there are four sepals, four petals, eight stamens (two sets), and four pistils.
Next let us touch upon the plan which connects the plant with the animal world. The wonderful adaptations of many flowers and insects to each other, as to the fertilization of the former, and as to the life of the individual insect and the propagation of its kind, are evidence of design. For example, there are certain species of plants that are dependent for their fertilization on certain species of moths which live in the flowers, and the moths, in turn, are dependent on the plants. They deposit their eggs in the ovaries of the flowers where the young are hatched and nourished. The moths in some cases carry the pollen and place it on the stigmas of the flowers, as if guided by intelligence. So marvellous are the provisions which are made to ensure the fertilization of plants that the dean of Amercan [tr. note: sic]
botanists, Professor Asa Gray, exclaims: ”If these structures and their operations do not argue intention, what stronger evidence of intention in nature can there possibly be? If they do, such evidences are countless, and almost every blossom brings distinct testimony to the existence and providence of a Designer and Ordainer, without whom, we may well believe, not merely a sparrow, not even a grain of pollen, may fall.” (On this entire subject read Selina Gaye's _”The Great World's Farm,”_ published by the MacMillan Co., New York.)
We can only lightly touch on the wonders of design in the structure and functions of animals. Here is a feather, any feather, say, the feather of an eagle. We quote the following on ”One of Nature's Wonders--the Feather'' from an article in a popular magazine:
”To most people a feather is just a feather, either pretty or plain according to how the coloring strikes their individual fancy. Yet when a feather is examined critically, it becomes a wonder and yet more wonderful--it is amazing when its details are understood. Never was there a thing better planned and builded for the uses intended.
”Take, for instance, a plain feather--say the tail feather of an eagle.
The long quill is made of feather-bone, that wonderfully light, yet strong material that forms the rigid part of all feathers, so tough that it is almost impossible to break it, yet so flexible it will bend into a circle and then spring back like a bit of whalebone! Nothing that man has ever been able to make can equal it.
”There is no blood, no nerves, no circulation and apparently no life in a full grown feather, yet it does not decompose; indeed, it is one of the hardest things in the world to destroy by any process of decomposition. It retains its resiliency and all its flexibility for years--all that is necessary is to keep it dry. It is finished all along the rib (or quill) with a hard, glossy enamel on the outside and this enamel keeps its polish as long as the feather lasts.
”From [tr. note: sic on punctuation] an engineering standpoint, or the standpoint of the mechanic or artisan, there is absolutely no suggestion of betterment to be made, for the feather is an exact, perfectly finished product. Its long central quill tapers from base to point with geometric precision, thereby giving perfect resistance to bending force, and this is one of the combination of secrets that enables the bird to fly as easily as man can walk. Also this long quill is hollow, thereby all extra weight is done away with and added strength gained because of the tube contraction; and to make it perfect from a mechanical standpoint, the under side of the quill is reinforced by a doublerolled thickening of the sh.e.l.l of the quill itself so that strains are equalized.
”This long quill is also curved slightly, to meet air resistance again and overcome it when the whole tail is spread, fan-like, to suddenly alter a direction or check speed in flight.
”The long, soft side ma.s.ses are formed of a mult.i.tude of tiny feathers, each one perfectly equipped, perfectly made, mechanically and geometrically without fault. Each of these tiny side feathers has its own midrib that tapers from base to tip, and each of these midribs carries its own equipment of side 'hairs' so beautifully constructed that it locks automatically into the one on each side of it in such a way that it makes a solid yet flexible ma.s.s of the whole surface, against which the air flows as the bird flies.
”If these side feathers be split apart they will come back into place so exactly that the split cannot be detected. Nothing else in nature repairs itself with such precision. Many things, for instance the claw leg of the crawfish, will replace itself exactly when destroyed, but the feather alone _repairs_ its own breaks precisely and automatically.