The Claim of the Bible By Philip Mauro.
winian theory of the Origin of Speeies. Even doetors of theology and the oc- cupants of Christian pulpits embraced it with real or feigned enthusiasm; and many of these went so far as to declare that it exalted the Creator and incul- . cated greater reverence of His meth- ods in creation! So enamoured of this new teaching were these sworn guardians of the " f a i t h once delivered unto the saints" that they readily surrendered all parts of the Bible which seemed in any way in conflict with it. To accommodate this surrender to their consciences, these compromisers invented the doc- trine that " t h e Bible was not intended to teach science," but was to be ac- cepted and believed only in so far as it related to spiritual and heavenly things; forgetting the words of Christ: " I f I have told you earthly things and ye believe not, how shall ye believe if I tell you of heavenly things?" (John 3:12). That this surrender to the immature and erroneous teachings put forth in the name of scienee should have had the effect of destroying the faith of many in the whole Scriptures was in- evitable. If men be taught that they cannot believe what the Bible says re- garding earthly things, how can it be expected that they will believe what it says about heavenly things? Only a few years have passed the time when, for a man to question the foundations of this doctrine of the Origin of Spe- cies was to avow himself a hopeless ignoramus touching the "settled re- suits of science"; and yet today the philosophy of Materialism is fast be- coming (if it be not so already) a mere historical phase of philosophic thought, to be classified and labelled and put on the shelf, soon to be con- templated merely as a thing which men used to believe. In the face of this fact it cannot be reasonably supposed that any discov- eries which science can make, or any doctrines which philosophy ean deduce therefrom, will ever contradict the declaration of Scriptures concerning the creation of the universe by God, the disobedience of the first Adam and the consequent loss of eternal life by
It has seemed to the writer, after pondering sympathetically the Spen- cerian explanation of the universe, and after being constrained to recognize its inadequacy, that the Rationalistic method of testing a theory might be applied with helpful results to the Biblical explanation of phenomena. Within recent times the Biblical expla- nation of the creation of the universe, particularly of the earth and its inhab- itants, as given in the first three ehep- ters of Genesis, was rejected by nearly all men who made the slightest pre- tence to learning, upon the ground that it was in conflict with the supposed facts of natural science. We do not propose to speak here of tue profound change more recently wrought in the attitude of scienee, in consequence of the latest discoveries of geology and palaeontology. It can now be asserted, upon the authority of the most eminent men of science, that not a single fact stands in contradiction to the Creation story of Genesis.* But the question which more nearly con- cerns us, and which we propose here to consider, is the great question which the philosophy grounded upon Material- ism failed utterly to answer, mainly: "How did man and the world come to be what they a r e ?" We are concerned, therefore, not so much with Evolution in its comprehensive sense, as with the specific theory of the origin of the speeies of living creatures, including man, by a process of "natural selec- t i o n" in the "struggle for existence." The time is opportune for such a dis- cussion, because one of the events which is transpiring in our day in the collapse of the Darwinian theory of the Origin of Species. Let us dwell for a moment upon this most impressive fact, and learn from it at least the utter in- stability of any system of philosophy which has its basis in human wisdom. *For a concise and authoritative statement of the attitude of science to- day towards the Creation story, we re- fer to that valuable booklet, "Roger's Reasons," by Rev. John Urquhart. (Marshall Bros.) Never in the entire history of phil- osophy was a doctrine more widely ac- cepted among the learned than the Dar-
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