Creation Story Not a Myth
By L. A. S.
AFTER all that has been said and written by men of worldly wisdom to establish the assumption that the Bible narrative of Adam and Eve is a fable, and that the human family represents not a special act of creation, but a slow process of evolution, it is interesting to note that strong evidence to the contrary is coming to light from sources such as “the latest investigations in the fields of science, philosophy, and criticism.” These evidences are set forth by Prof. Luther T. Townsend, of Boston University, in a recent book entitled “Adam and Eve.” The author makes this reference to the pretensions of the higher critics:— The readjustments of astronomical and geological theories during the last quarter of a century, which in every instance have been making for, rather than against, the beliefs of the primitive Christian church, and the remarkable discoveries in archeology which are affording the strongest possible defense for the credibility of the Bible, together with the fact that many of the ablest scholars are taking issue with much that is called higher criticism, ought to suggest that modesty, rather than egotism and dogmatism, is peculiarly becoming in those who are posing as leaders of modern thought and reformers in the theological world. Professor Townsend believes that “a passage of Scripture is to be interpreted as literal unless a figurative meaning is clearly intended by the inspired writer.” Regarding the evidence that no supposition of a figurative meaning in the narrative of the creation of man is necessary or even permissible, he says:— It can no longer be rationally questioned that the sciences of anatomy, of geology, of archeology, of philology, of ethics, and of theology unite in demolishing all theories of naturalism as to the character and condition of the earliest inhabitant of the earth of whom there is any record. And the evolutionary hypothesis that the human race began in a savage state, and slowly worked up to its present condition, consuming in this development a hundred thousand years, more or fewer, is, in the presence of established facts, an assumption as groundless as anything one can imagine. On the other hand, a sudden emergence from the savage state to one represented by the ancient civilizations of Assyria, Babylon, Egypt, and that of many other countries is not an emergence of which history shows any evidence. Hence the theory that the human family began high up in civilized and social life, but afterward suffered a decadence, has probabilities in its favor that amount well nigh to an absolute certainty. What may be insisted upon, therefore, is this: There is no evidence of any kind that Adam, who throughout the Bible is spoken of as an authentic person, was not the first man. There is no evidence that he did not have a perfect body and fully endowed intellect; there is no evidence that he could not give appropriate names to the animals brought before him; there is no evidence that his son Cain did not build a city; there is no evidence that his grandson Jubal did not handle the harp and organ, and there is no evidence that Jubal’s brother, Tubal-cain, and grandson of Adam, was not a worker in brass and iron. But there is no need of stating these matters in negative terms, for all discoveries in the last twenty-five years or more are in harmony with the Bible record that the first beings on earth that wore the human form had a body just as perfect, and a brain or an intellect just as capable of working, and a language just as complete in expressing thought as those of any man now living. These are not philosophical nor theological speculations, but conclusions based upon established facts, and reached by approved scientific methods. The days of creation week, also, he believes, were not long geological periods, but literal days. On this point he offers the following testimony:— That the writer of the book of Genesis had in mind days of ordinary length, rather than the geological periods that had preceded and that evidently were prophetic of the six Bible days, can not be reasonably questioned. The Hebrew word yom—limited by a-rav, evening, and ba-kar, morning—is never used in the Hebrew tongue to denote any period other than an ordinary day. This is the opinion of such well-known and distinguished Hebraists as Baumgarten, Culwer, Davidson, Hagenbach, Hedge, Keil, Kalish, Murphy, Rosenmuller, and Dr. S. H. Turner in his “Commentary on Genesis.” Regarding the idea of creation by “spontaneous generation” and evolution, he declares that such a theory is “confronted with insurmountable difficulties;” but that “such a creation at the hands of Christ as the Bible describes is antagonized by nothing that is established in the realms of approved science and philosophy.” There is nothing in this, of course, to strengthen the faith of the Christian in the credibility of the Word of God. His faith does not rest upon such evidences, but upon those which Christianity itself furnishes to the believer through the knowledge of God and communion with him. An intelligent belief in the gospel plan of salvation requires the acceptance of the narrative of man’s creation and the fall in Eden as a literal narrative, aside from any corroborative evidence from scientific sources. But it is interesting to observe that the present-day deductions of real science do corroborate the statements of revelation, and that the testimony of science is not necessarily against the teachings of Christianity, as many who reject it would have us believe.