Evolution | Page 8

society and sympathy. And the yielding to the lower, however gratifying for the moment, would be followed by the feeling of regret that he had thus given way, and by resolve to act differently for the future. Thus at last man comes to feel, through acquired and perhaps inherited habit, that it is best for him to obey his more persistent impulses..... Morals are relative, not absolute; there is no fixed standard of right and wrong by which the actions of all men throughout all time are measured..... That which man calls sin is shown to be more often due to his imperfect sense of the true proportion of things, and to his lack of imagination, than to his willfulness." Clodd adds that if conduct has been made to rest on "supposed divine commands (!) as to what man shall and shall not do," that is an assumption which at best serves to restrain the "brutal and ignorant."
J. B. Warren, of the University of California, has well stated the effects of the evolutionary theory on religion and morals:
"Its legitimate tendency is to degrade mankind from that mental and moral dignity that is always recognized as belonging to them, and to place them on an essential level with the brute creation--even with the lowest forms of vegetable and animal existence. According to that theory, man differs from the lower organisms not in kind so much as in the degree of development. Mr. Darwin himself was troubled about the value of his own convictions, on the ground that his mind was evolved from that of lower animals. That is to say, he reckoned his own mental actions as valueless and untrustworthy, because of the essential identity between his mind and that of the lowest creatures that live in the mud of our swamps. Thus we see the legitimate tendency of this theory to degrade the mental dignity of man. And it also degrades the moral nature and faculties of man, and undermines the very foundations of moral and religious principle, in that it teaches that man is only a better developed brute--the natural result being that man is no more under moral obligation than the brute, or has no different basis of moral obligation from the brute, but only a better idea of right and wrong, because on a higher plane in the process of evolution. It strikes at the root of the doctrine that men are, by their origin and nature, under peculiar and special obligations to God. In the words of the late Dr. Robert Patterson, such a theory tends to 'obliterate a belief in the divine origin and sanction of morality, and in the existence of a future life of rewards and punishments, and to promote the disorganization of society, and the degradation of man to the level of the brutes, living only under the laws of their brutal instincts.' Such a theory is dishonoring to man and offensive to God."
When these discrepancies between a world-view governed by the Christian's faith in Revelation and one governed by the theory of evolution are once clearly understood, there will be no need to inquire, why, on the one hand, enemies of the Bible in all ranks of life greeted with such joyous acclaim the principle announced by Darwin and, why, on the other hand, a chief purpose of Christian apologetics has become the demonstration that Christianity is justified even by reason in the world-view which it inculcates, and that, on the other hand, the evolutionary hypothesis is contradicted by the facts of religion, of history, and of natural science.
CHAPTER TWO.
Unexplained Origins.
The evolutionary scheme of development is, by its originators and defenders, accepted as a working hypothesis by which it is believed that the origin of all forms which matter has taken, and of the activities of living things, including man and human society, can be accounted for. It is an attempt to answer the old question, suggested to the thinking mind by a contemplation of nature: Whence these things? It it a theory of origins.
Now, a hypothesis, being "a theory, or supposition, provisionally employed as an explanation of phenomena," must be verified before it can be accepted as truth. Moreover, it can stand even as a hypothesis only if it meets the test of observation and experiment. It it can demonstrate its adaption to explain all the facts, it may, until another and better theory is propounded, be accepted as a theory. When it does not explain the facts, it must be modified or abandoned.
Since the evolutionary hypothesis is employed as an explanation of certain origins, a legitimate test of the theory is its adaptation to explain these origins. This test we now shall apply. We shall try to answer the question: Is the evolutionary theory entitled to the name of