The Confessions of an Evolutionist

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Jul 6, 1911

The Confessions of an Evolutionist

We admire frankness—mental honesty—in any man; and it is especially refreshing to read after a writer who openly acknowledges his own difficulties with the theory which he holds. We feel at once that he is not blindly following authority, and our respect for him increases, even though we do not view his theory with any greater favor.

A good example of this plain speaking is found in an article by the eminent naturalist, John Burroughs, in the Outlook of Feb. 25, 1911. The title is “Scientific Faith,” but it seems to us that it would be more appropriate to call it “The Confession of an Evolutionist.” Mr. Burroughs does not repudiate the idea of evolution, but he confesses his mental struggles with it in a way which ought to shake his own confidence in the

credibility of the doctrine. From the first part of this article we take this extract:—

I find myself accepting certain things on the authority of science which so far transcend my experience, and the experience of the race, and all the knowledge of the world; in fact, which come so near being unthinkable, that I call my acceptance of them an act of scientific faith. One’s reason may be convinced and yet the heart refuse to believe. It is not so much a question of evidence as a question of capacity to receive evidence of an unusual kind.

One of the conclusions of science which I feel forced to accept, and yet which I find very hard work in believing, is that of the animal origin of man. I suppose my logical faculties are convinced; but what is that in me that is baffled, and that hesitates and demurs? . . .

I confess that I receive evolution only at arm’s length, as it were. I can not get on intimate terms with it, familiarize my mind with it, and make it thinkable. The gulf that separates man from the orders below him is so impassable, his intelligence is so radically different from theirs, and his progress so enormous, while they have stood still, that believing it is like believing a miracle.

That the apparently blind groping and experimentation which mark the course of evolution as revealed by paleontology—the waste, the delay, the vicissitudes, the hit-and-miss method—should have finally resulted in this supreme animal, man, is certainly a hard proposition.

We recoil from the horrible vista which evolution opens up in the past; that long line of low, groveling, almost brainless forms, leading down and down from one bestial creature to another still lower, from mammal to reptile, from reptile to amphibian, from amphibian to fish, from fish to worm or mollusk, and the like, makes one shudder. We smell the slime and carnage. How the halo with which we have surrounded our origin vanishes!

Man has from the earliest period believed himself of divine origin, and by the divine he has meant something far removed from this earth and all its laws and processes, something quite transcending the mundane forces. He has invented or dreamed myths and legends to throw the halo of the exceptional, the far removed, the mystical, or the divine around his origin. He has spurned the clod with his foot; he has denied all kinship with bird and beast around him, and looked to the heavens above for the sources of his life. And then unpitying science comes along, and tells him that he is under the same law as the life he treads underfoot, and that that law is adequate to transform the worm into the man; that he, too, had groveled in the dust, or wallowed in the slime, or fought and reveled, a reptile among reptiles; that the heavens above him, to which he turns with such awe and reverence, or such dread and foreboding, are the source of his life and hope in no other sense than they are the source of the life and hope of all other creatures.

Revelation exalts man by making God his father, in whose image he was created; evolution degrades man by linking him to the lowest forms of life, and robbing him of a personal God. Revelation furnishes the only reliable information concerning the origin of man; evolution leaves him in doubt and supreme uncertainty, asking him to accept things which are not merely almost but altogether “unthinkable.”

How much better is the sure Word of God than the uncertainties of merely human science!