Turning the Tables

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Apr 9, 1872

Turning the Tables.

In an address before the Sunday-school Teacher’s Institute lately held at Plainfield, N. J., the Rev. Dr. John Hall spoke to the question of alleged scientific objections to the truth of the Bible:

When I speak in the tone necessary and proper for me to speak to you now and here, there are some who may be liable to the impression that we, who love and stand up for the Bible, have some kind of hostility to science—that we dislike it. I testify for myself, and for a great mass of intelligent people that love the Bible and teach it, that we have no hostility to science. On the contrary, we are very thankful for it; we are glad for the information it furnishes; and we do not hesitate to remind scientific men that the sciences that they and we love, have always flourished most where the Bible has had most sway. It is to the quickening of the intellect by revelation that scientific inquiry owes its most splendid progress and most magnificent triumphs. We are not to be interpreted, then, as being unfriendly to scientific inquiry and research.

But I make a distinction. Humboldt, Agassiz, Franklin, Lyell, Darwin, Huxley, Tyndall, Faraday, and many other highly thoughtful men, have the opportunity given to them that is not given to me, of observing, describing, and circulating, the knowledge of facts. I am very grateful to them for the facts. I should not know about them but for their researches. But when they come to reason upon these facts, they use just the same kind of mind that God has given me; and I endeavor to use my mind upon these facts aright, just as truly as they claim to use their minds upon the facts. Hence, while I am grateful for the facts, when they have been put down upon the table before me, and I look at them and they look at them, I claim the right to reason upon them just as truly as they can claim it; and I do not think the less of myself if in many instances I draw conclusions from the facts that have thus become common property, that are not the conclusions that they venture to draw!

Sometimes these good friends are apparently exceedingly indignant when we, who are ministers, venture into the domain of science. They think it a kind of impertinence! I have just as good a right to count it impertinent on their part to enter into the domain of theology. Nay, more, I venture to say that many of us who are ministers, know more about science than they do about theology. I remember saying in the midst of a crowded meeting of very highly educated men in the city of New York—of whom I am afraid a goodly number were not very warm believers—that I should like to have the chance of examining a class selected from among them upon the evidences of the Christian religion! And I say that I have just as much right to criticise Huxley and Darwin, when they travel out of the scientific into the religious and theological, as they do when I travel into the domain of their science.

Making this explanation, I turn now to the statement, from which this is a diversion, namely, that Sir Charles Lyell has made many contributions to our knowledge of geological facts. I do not mean to say that he has always been precise and accurate in his statement of facts. He has taken a good deal on trust, and his facts, as well as his conclusions, have to be sifted. But he has told us a good many facts, and suggested a good many, to the effect that we can no more stand up for the historic truth of the Bible as to creation.

Here is one of his arguments, for example. The banks of the Mississippi are a rich alluvial soil, supposed to have been deposited by successive overflowings of the stream in pre-historic ages. There was a bone of a man found—one bone—near Natchez, in Mississippi. That one bone of a man has achieved rather more celebrity, I think, than almost any living man in the State. It has been a more famous bone, I presume, than ever the owner of it expected himself to be.

That bone was found under such circumstances that by a very convenient law of generalizing, Sir Charles Lyell concluded that it must have been deposited at a certain depth beneath the surface. Now he had a calculation. He held the uniformitarian theory, and labored to establish it with success for a while. He had the theory that when the Mississippi deposited one-fiftieth part of an inch of soil this year, it deposited one-fiftieth part of an inch last year, and one-fiftieth part the year before, and so on; so that in fifty years it deposited one inch of soil. Very well. You can then calculate how long it would take to deposit a foot, and ten feet, and twenty feet, and two hundred feet; and then, if you should find a human bone at the depth of two hundred feet, what follows? Why, that when those two hundred feet began to be deposited, there were human beings on the soil. If, mind you—a big IF—this conclusion is just, then it follows clearly that America has been peopled by a human race one hundred thousand years before the beginning of our Mosaic Creation! That was the argument.

Well, but wiser men than Sir Charles Lyell doubted. They said, Let us see. Will this uniformitarian theory stand? Can it be proved that just as every leaf of this book is equally thick, so every year deposited an equally thick stratum? Can it be proved, Sir Charles? No, it cannot be proved. A rainy year will make a thicker deposit than a dry one; some years there would be no deposit at all, and other years it would be heavier and thicker. There is no such thing as uniformity in it. . . . The officers of the United States Survey having occasion to examine with the utmost care and scientific research the whole of that deposit about the mouths of the Mississippi, have come to the conclusion, and established it upon scientific ground, that the whole of that deposit is less than five thousand years old! Thus not only completely upsetting, in that department, Sir Charles’ uniformitarian theory, but so far as they have contributed anything to the subject, it has been completely corroborative of the Mosaic account of creation and of the early history of our race.

No. There are things that are obsolete. There are old objections to the Bible that are obsolete. There are scientific theories opposed to it that are obsolete. There are charges against it that are obsolete. There are educated men who have called it “obsolete,” but they have only in every case confirmed the old aphorism of Lord Bacon, “that a little learning has led many men away from Revelation, but more has served to bring them back to it!”—Sel.