p. 5 | EVOLUTION AND GEOLOGY by George McCready Price

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Mountain View, California · Nov 30, 1904

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 30, No. 47.

EVOLUTION AND GEOLOGY

By George McCready Price

BY GEO. MCREADY PRICE

PLAIN FACTS ABOUT EVOLUTION AND GEOLOGY.

I. Introduction.

“Some drill and bore The solid earth, and from the strata there Extract a register, by which we learn That He who made it, and revealed its date To Moses, was mistaken in its age.” Cowper, “The Task,” III.

On awakening to consciousness, man finds himself in a world of puzzles and inconsistencies—love and hatred, happiness and misery, life and death. Whence came this mass of contradictions? Did the world, the race, have a beginning? Whence is he himself? Whither is he bound? Does death end existence? If not, does character determine destiny? And is character the result of the will or of environment? Or does it involve relationship with the divine Author of the universe?

Down through all the centuries these questions have continued to force themselves on thoughtful minds; and on the answers to them have been built all the great systems of man-made religions, from those of Assyria and Chaldea down to the Theosophy and the so-called “New Thought” of our day. It is a mistake to think that the religions of Greece and Rome, of Egypt and Babylon, any more than those of modern India and China, consisted merely of forms and ceremonies and idol worship. This, both the ancient and modern systems may have been or may be to a large class of their unthinking devotees. But in their beginnings and to all their more intelligent followers, they were much more than this. Rather may we say that all of them were philosophical systems for explaining the phenomena of nature, the origin of things, and man's relation to the universe. The forms and ceremonies of worship came in only incidentally. Each of these systems of man-made religion took those degenerate relics of more ancient and purer forms of faith which were nearest at hand, and, after changing and adapting them to suit its theories of cosmogony and philosophy, incorporated and assimilated them, and they thus grew and developed into the systems of religion as we know them.

A Modern Religion.

During the last half century we moderns have seen the birth and marvelous development of another great system of religion,—I can call it nothing else,—that of Evolution. It is scarcely too much to say that its main ideas have become so much the very warp and woof of modern scholastic thought that many almost forget they were not always taught and believed. And, like the other systems of religious philosophy previously mentioned, it deals primarily with man's origin and his relationship to the universe. We may also add that, after standing aloof from one another for a generation, we have, during the last decade or so, witnessed the almost complete blending of Evolution as a philosophy, and orthodox Protestantism as a religion; resulting in the “Theistic Evolution,” “New Geology,” etc., now so universally taught in the universities, seminaries, and colleges, and from the pulpits of the land.

Most Important Questions.

Hence, I say that of more importance than any other question of Old or New Testament teaching that can be mentioned, are those questions of origins and relationships which lie back of them all, and upon which all others depend. What was man's origin? How did the universe originate, and what is man's relationship to the Unseen Power at its head? What, first of all, is to be our authority in deciding these momentous questions? Shall Christianity and the revelation it has inherited be our guide and be followed implicitly; or shall we depend upon what scientific philosophy is supposed to have discovered and reasoned out within the last fifty years? I do not hesitate to say that every Gospel worker should regard these as the first questions of the hour, the first to be settled for himself individually, and the very first to become thoroughly familiar with if he expects to teach others in any capacity whatever.

Perhaps the first thing to do in investigating these problems is to arrive at some knowledge of the history and teachings of Evolution. A more complete history of the doctrine and presentation of its teaching will be given in a subsequent paper, but here a brief outline seems to be necessary in order to understand its bearings upon religion.

Outline of the Evolution Theory.

Modern Evolution is older than Darwinism. It can easily be traced back to the eighteenth century, perhaps further; for, back of Darwin and his “natural selection,” lie Geology and the Nebular Hypothesis. With the latter we have nothing to do in this connection, tho we may remark that it is a crude and by no means universally-accepted theory of how the solar system condensed from a great mass of matter scattered through space—condensed into the sun and its planets, including the earth. But back of even this lies Geology, which, by such men as Leibnitz (1646–1716), Buffon (1707–1788), Cuvier (1769–1832), and William Smith (1769–1839), was gradually gaining the confidence of many educated men in asserting that the world had been peopled for untold ages by successive assemblages of plants and animals, until, at a comparatively “modern” date, man was created and placed upon it. The next stage in the development of the theory came when Lyell, about 1830, began teaching that all the successive geological changes could be explained as the result of causes now in existence and in every-day operation about us.

Here, then, was the whole skeleton or outline of the Evolution theory, needing only something to articulate together its several parts. This was supplied by the works of Charles Darwin, who published his “Origin of Species” in 1859. His theory was only an elaboration in more detail of the general thought that each successive stage of the geological series was not a new creation of plants and animals, but that each of these new sets, appearing so suddenly and mysteriously, probably grew naturally out of the preceding.

For scores of years those scientists who believed in these successive “ages” of geology had felt the necessity of some such explanation of this mysterious phenomenon, but had hitherto failed to find any plausible theory to explain it. But now, Darwin's theory of “natural selection” supplied the long-felt want; and, assisted by the brilliant pleading of such men as Huxley, Spencer, Haeckel, and Tyndall, the world declared the chain of evidence complete. The result has been this marvelous phenomenon of practically the whole educated class receiving this flimsy tissue of guesses as the proved facts of science; and either abandoning all their religious hopes and teachings, or else changing and adapting them in such a way as to harmonize with this idea.

Guesswork or the Bible.

This, then, is our problem. It will be an easy matter to show hereafter that this theory of evolution contradicts the most fundamental teachings of Christianity as taught by Moody, Wesley, Luther, Paul, or Christ Himself. Which are we to follow? Are these teachings of science sufficiently certain and reliable to risk our eternal destiny upon them? NO! a thousand times NO! These supposed teachings of science were never anything but a series of guesses, each depending for its value upon the supposed truth of the previous guesses. And, as we shall have occasion to show, the investigations of recent years have long since removed the very foundation stones of the system; so that, left without any actual support in real science, it only holds together because it has become incorporated into modern thought, and men are slow to give up their self-pleasing delusions.

Surely it is time that the message calling attention to the Creator be sounded through the length and breadth of our world, “Fear God, and give glory to Him; . . . and worship Him that made heaven, and earth, and the sea, and the fountains of waters.” Rev. 14:7.