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The Fundamentals That among those who mourn the passing of evolution there are some naturalists and others who cling to it, as said by Dr. Goette, the eminent Strasburg zoologist, “simply be cause it seems to furnish a much-desired mechanical explana tion of purposive adaptations,” is not surprising, since it leaves them nothing but the hated alternative of accepting Genesis with its personal God and creative acts. But when we consider that the evolutionary theory was conceived in agnosticism, and born and nurtured in infidelity; that it is the backbone of the destructive higher criticism which has so viciously assailed both the integrity and authority of the Scriptures; that it utterly fails in explaining—what Genesis makes so clear—those tremendous facts in human history and human nature, the presence of evil and its attend ant suffering; that it offers nothing but a negative reply to that supreme question of the ages, “If a man die, shall he live again?” that it, in fact, substitutes for a personal God “an infinite and eternal Energy” which is without moral qual ities or positive attributes, is not wise, or good, or merciful or just; cannot love or hate, reward or punish; that it denies the personality of God and man, and presents them, together with nature, as under a process of evolution which has neither beginning nor end; and regards man as being simply a passing form of this universal Energy, and thus without free will, moral responsibility, or immortality, it becomes evident to every intelligent layman that such a system can have no pos sible points of contact with Christianity. He may well be pardoned if he views with astonishment ministers of the Gospel still clinging to it, and harbors a doubt of either their sincerity or sanity. If it be said that most ministers who accept evolution do so only in its milder form, the supernaturalistic which permits of belief in a personal God, but claims that evolution is His method of working, man and nature being products of it, it may be said in reply that this view, quite as much as the
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