By an Occupant of the Pew.
(From “Herald and Presbyter,” November 22, 1911, Cincinnati, Ohio. - We reprint this excellent paper as the remarkable utterance of a Christian layman on a most important subject. - Ed.)
Perhaps the most remarkable movement in philosophic thought that has occurred in any age was the rise and general acceptance by scientific circles of the evolutionary theory as propounded by Darwin, Huxley and Spencer. It was remarkable that men of science, whose peculiar boast it is that they deal only with established facts, should have so readily departed from this rule and accepted a system based upon hypothesis only, and which was, and is still after the lapse of forty years, without a single known fact to support it. Even when allowance is made for the well-known eagerness of many scientists to do away with all dualism, which was Mr. Darwin’s aim, it was still remarkable that men of trained intellect should have so promptly accepted at face value his two principal works, in which the expression, “we may well suppose,” occurs over eight hundred times, as a basis for the argument. Pure supposition may answer as a foundation for fanciful sketches like those of Jules Verne’s; but as ground upon which to base a sober scientific argument it appears to the average man as little less than farcical. Why it did not so appear to the scientific mind, the scientific mind may perhaps be able to explain. We frankly confess our inability to do so.
Still more remarkable was the fact that so many theologians and Christian ministers adopted the new philosophy and were so ready to give up large portions of Holy Scripture because they could not be reconciled with it; inventing, as a salve to conscience the doctrine that “the Bible was not intended to teach science”, one of those half-truths that are more misleading than a downright untruth.
In this way the story of creation as given in Genesis was set aside, and the whole book discredited. As Christ could not by any logical possibility be made a product of evolution without an absolute denial of His supernatural birth and His Divine claims, and the new birth, or creation, for man in Him was open to the same objection, these truths were either obscured, minimized, or totally neglected and even denied. To such lengths were some of the sworn “defenders of the faith once delivered to the saints” ready to go in order to avoid being considered as hopelessly “unscientific” and “behind the times in scholarship.” That was twenty years ago or more.
But strangest of all is the fact that a few of these ministers are still clinging to the “gospel of dirt,” as Carlyle aptly styled it, and are referring to it in a way that indicates a belief on their part that such reference is still evidence of Up-to-date scholarship.
As early as 1889 Professor Virchow, of Berlin, admittedly the ablest anthropologist of modern times, when summing up the results of investigations of this subject by himself and other leading scientists, covering a period of twenty years, declared: “In vain have the links which should bind man to the monkey been sought; not a single one is there to show. The so-called proanthropos, who should exhibit this link, has not been found. No really learned man asserts that he has seen him. … Perhaps someone may have seen him in a dream, but when awake he will never be able to say that he has approached him. Even the hope of soon discovering him has departed: it is hardly spoken of.” Shortly before his death, some ten years later, in an address before the International Medical Society, he spoke to the same effect, and with even a greater degree of positiveness, asserting that “the attempts to find the transition from animal to man have ended in total failure. The middle link has not been found and never will be.”
That the Darwinian theory of descent has in the realms of nature not a single fact to confirm it is the unequivocal testimony of men as distinguished in their respective departments of scientific research, as Dr. N. S. Shaler of Harvard University; Dr. Etheridge, fossiologist of the British Museum; Prof. L. S. Beale, of King’s College, London; Prof. Fleischmann, of Erlangen, and others.
Says Dr. Etheridge: “Nine-tenths of the talk of evolutionists is sheer nonsense, not founded on observation and wholly unsupported by fact. This museum is full of proofs, of the utter falsity of their views.” Professor Beale asserts: “There is no evidence that man has descended from, or is, or was, in any way specially related to, any other organism in nature through evolution or by any other process. In support of all naturalistic conjectures concerning man’s origin, there is not at this time a shadow of scientific evidence.”
Professor Fleischmann sums up his estimate of the Darwinian theory of the descent of man by affirming that “it has in the realms of nature not a single fact to confirm it. It is not the result of scientific research, but purely the product of the imagination.”