Chapter III
In the preceding chapters I have tried to avoid, as much as possible, my own opinions. If we arrive at conclusions after the employment of our own powers of Reason, the conviction is not only more permanent than when the opinions of others have been pressed upon us, but the result obtained is much more valuable. If I shall be able to stimulate in others an incentive to independent thought, I shall be a great deal better satisfied with my effort than if all my readers would accept my conclusions as sound as let it go at that. We are living in an age that impresses us with the importance of the unprejudiced application of all our faculties in an effort to approach the Truth. In the following pages, therefore, the publication of my own opinions and conclusions is intended merely to attract attention to certain ideas, and, possibly, assist someone else in arriving at his own conclusion.
Do the Bible and the Theory of Evolution agree or disagree? One critic says there is no disagreement because they are not dealing with the same subject. This might be passed by as ridiculous if it were not that so many people do not examine the Bible sufficiently to be conversant with what it does teach. We have become accustomed to getting our knowledge of the Bible from occasional sermons, on widely varying subjects, many of which barely touch any Bible teaching. For this criticism it looks like it ought to be sufficient to prove that they do deal with the same subject, to mention that both undertake to account for the creation of all things. The origin of all things is no trivial affair. Both also deal with the manner of creation and the time involved in the work. Both deal with the same objects of creation—the heavens and earth and everything contained in them. Both start with the same God, and reach down to the same man. If one says that “In six days God created the heavens and the earth”, and the other says it was probably billions of years, but at least that it was a number of long periods and ages, there is certainly such difference in the two witnesses that any jury of thoughtful men would be forced to either disregard the testimony of one of the witnesses or else have to report a “hung” jury. The Bible says that everything was created grown, the trees bearing fruit, the herbs bearing seeds, and a fully developed man was the first of the human race before there was any mother or any other progenitor. The Theory of Evolution says that everything developed during these long cycles of time from such simple beginnings as Amoebae or one-celled parents, and that new “kinds” or species developed from time to time from the parent stock, while the Bible says that the seeds contained in the things created perfect were to propagate the same kind. “Everything after its kind.”
Another critic says that we should not take the Bible literally—in common parlance, not take what it says but what it means--. It is a fact that there are statements in the Bible which, if separated from all the context, could easily be misunderstood. That is why we should try to comprehend the whole teaching on any subject before we reach a too rigid conclusion. There is not the faintest hint in the whole book that suggests that the first week of the Bible was any longer than any other week from that time until now. It is referred to directly and indirectly many times and good chances to explain that it may have been intended to mean seven ages or eons have been entirely over looked by all the writers. If it means anything else but an ordinary week, I contend that there is no rule or means by which we may determine what it means, and it is therefore of no possible value to us whom it was given for complete and perfect information. Paul is credited with the statement that “All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness: that the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished unto all good works”. He most certainly refers, here, to the Old Testament only. The New Testament was not compiled for generation after his letter to Timothy, and but little of it had been written. Most of what had been written was only church letters written by Paul himself. To get around the above quotation critics undertake to hold that it is not a faithful translation, and that it should read: “All scripture given by inspiration, etc.” It may be a “bum” translation, but it, at least, makes sense, and if changed to suit the critics, it has no sense to it and is just that much rubbish. If Paul said, “All scripture, given by inspiration”, and intended to exclude so or most of scripture as not of God’s inspiration, then who is capable of informing us as to how much or what part is of God and what is of men—the latter part being, obviously, of no good to us, since we, in this age, know just as much about God and his interest in us as any of the Old Testament writers if they were but stating their own information. “All scripture given by inspiration” might include half the book, only one chapter, or mere part of parts of chapters. Then how illogical is Paul when he bases on this flimsy foundation his conclusion of perfect instruction in everything worth while. “All good works” includes everything necessary for our activities, mental or physical. Furthermore, if he did intend to limit the inspiration of “all scripture”, it would seem that he would be forced to O.K. the account of creation as inspired, since it was many centuries before the record was made, and there was no possible chance for anyone to know anything about the facts that are given in the first part of Genesis. I am, therefore, bound to hold that the Bible teaches that the account of creation given in Genesis is a part of the “profitable instruction in righteousness”, and our “thorough furnishing for everything we can do or think that is good.” And I also contend that it accounts for every animal, every plant, every creeping thing; and that they were created adults and did not hatch from eggs, were not born of ancestors, nor developed from other lower forms. That the sun, moon, and stars were created after the earth was already adorned with grass and herbs yielding seed and fruit trees bearing fruit. These celestial lights were created for earth’s benefit—to divide the light from the darkness and thereby to rule the day and the night, and to serve for signs and for seasons, and for days and years. Unless they have materially changed their habits, the same kind of days and years are still marking our chronology.
The time, or chronology, of man on earth is stated in the Bible so definitely, and it varies so widely from the contentions of modern investigators, that all I shall do now is simply call attention [to] it, and mark it as another affirmative argument that the Bible differs materially and substantially from those who advocate the teachings of science and the Theory of Evolution. The exactness of the Bible chronology is such that we, even now, date many documents from its schedule, No one would fail to understand me if I should date this manuscript A.L. 5934 (Anno Lucius—the year of light). The year that God said, “Let there be light”, and there was light.
But the most material difference, and the one disagreement that is too serious for intelligent people to wink at is that insurmountable, irreconcilable disparity surrounding the fall of man from his perfect plastic creation. If man evolved from the microbe which developed in Mother Nature’s primitive incubator through all the stages from the process of fission of the Amoebae to birth from a human mother, he has not yet reached perfection. He, then, has not fallen and been separated from his God so completely that he must be brought back by the only possible means—an at-one-ment wrought by the cruel death of his Creator. There is no ground for God to express his great sorrow for having made man. The promise to Abraham is a myth, with no reason for its promulgation. The ark of the covenant was only a toy play-thing with no significance. The costly temple of Solomon with its sanctum, Sanctorum providing a place on which to offer the blood of animals for a sweet smelling savor to temporarily appease the wrath of the offended God, in order that He would allow their sins to speed one more year toward the time when pardon might be purchased by the sacrifice of God, himself, was nothing but a national shrine maintained to stimulate submission to the commands of self-exalted priests and kings claiming to be “God’s anointed” rulers of an ignorant and superstitious populace. There is no demand for God to be born of a human virgin, grow to manhood under direct hardships, carefully avoiding the heavy hand of jealous contemporaries, and finally being forced by puny subordinates to die in the public view, condemned as a felon. It was not necessary—if man did not fall—for the creating God to go alone, forsaken even by the Father, into hell for man’s recovery, if man was not so lost. The great effort to trace the lineage of Jesus to Abraham, to show the fulfillment of His promise was but a waste of effort, and the New Testament should have been kept off the press, if there was no necessity, in fact, for the atonement. No fall, no separation. No separation, no atonement. No atonement, no dead God. It is but a new mythology with one more dying god. The Bible is an empty tale except for the dim light it throws upon the struggles of man in the continuation of his evolution. It should be clear, even to the illiterate, that all the agitation about man’s redemption which, as it were, shook all heaven and earth, and forced the Creator to come to earth and experience in his own person all the temptations and discomforts that his creature, by virtue of the frailties from his fall, had to withstand, is much ado about nothing if man was not created perfect, and if he did not fall from his perfection as it is stated in the genesis story which is the basis for all the rest.
It is no part of sound argument to contend that the life and work of Jesus of Nazareth was necessary to man’s uplift and righteousness—to his salvation from multitudinous transgressions—in an effort to make the Bible and Evolution harmonize. The Bible states what his mission was, and, again, I say that if it does not mean what it says in this manner which runs from Genesis to Revelations without the shadow of a conflicting statement in all the sixty-six books, that there is no man or woman on this earth to-day smart enough to tell us what it does mean. His mission was contemplated from the foundation of the earth, and that mission was the Atonement. When he had accomplished his mission, he “sat down on the right hand of the father, from henceforth expecting till his enemies be made his footstool”. “As in the first Adam we all die, so also in the second Adam we are all made alive.”
The Bible teaching that Adam’s fall was the beginning of all his troubles is at variance with the Theory of Evolution. If man came up through all the lower stages of life, he, in veritable reality, came up through great tribulations. He had experienced all the grief that can possible be imagined. He had survived by one continuous succession of dangerous encounters throughout countless centuries. The Bible teaches, by strong inference that man had never had to toil until after his fall. He had been in a perfect paradise, with nothing to disturb his rest, and the earth knew nothing but perfect peace. All the animals that after the fall played such havoc with his descendents were harmless to Adam. His God had them all pass about Adam, as He created them, not only to see what names Adam would call them, but also in search of a wife for the man. Not being willing to take any of the animals for a wife, God anesthetized Adam, took a rib from his side, and the bone became a woman—the first woman on earth—and she became Adam’s wife and help-meet. If Evolution is accepted, we must know that male and female had struggled side by side, through all the generations of all the species, and that the female was not taken from the side of the male after they had reached the age of man.
Even if we should agree that the seven days of Creation in the Bible story should be understood to mean seven ages or periods, which idea, however, we may be sure never entered the mind of the writers, the translators, nor any student of the subject from reading the Bible, there is still much disagreement in meaning that we are bound by ordinary honesty to, at least, question the good sense of trying to so twist the established meaning of our language as to even try to make them harmonize.
While scientific scholars have said a great deal about dietetics and the special food value of certain fruits and vegetables, and while some enthusiasts have enumerated certain elements in our food as brain stimulants, particularly, I am certain that there has never been any well informed Evolutionist who would agree that the eating of one apple, or for that matter, a full meal of any fruits, would so raise the mental standard as to make a man or woman who never knew it before understand as the gods did, the line between good and evil. Cause them to see immediately that they were not properly clothed, when they had never known it before. A matter of such great import that the Creator had to resume His labors so as to provide the nude creatures with decent apparel. All the hardships the poor experience in supplying a wardrobe, and all the embarrassment that has ever disturbed human society in the selection, preparation, and maintenance of these suitable clothes, as well as all the scandal emphasized by the patriarchs of every generation, and preached from high places, has been a direct result of Adam’s fall from his Eden of Paradise, the penalty for eating the wrong fruit, according to Bible record.
There is no need to apologize for the preceding paragraph, for discussions on that subject based on the Bible for authority have consumed as much time, and caused the expenditure of as much energy as any other subject which has agitated the minds of men. It has served for many as a text to prove that education is evil and originated from crime. God said “who told thee that thou was naked?” God himself had no idea that the simple-minded inhabitants of Eden had eaten the terrible fruit until Adam from his hiding place had announced that he was not fit to appear in public since he had nothing to wear. Evolutionists who hunger for knowledge and who have spent many weary years in pursuit of it, will not, and can not, agree that knowledge is so easily obtained. If it were possible to provide so simple an article of food as a fruit growing on a tree, not in some remote part of the earth but in the midst of our own premises, it would certainly be most popular of all delicacies. Nothing but a corner on the entire production by some hoggish profiteer could prevent this old world from shining forth with an enormous stock of profound intelligence.
It is also here affirmed that all the numerous miracles of the Bible, both in the Old Testament and the New, are diametrically opposed to the teachings of Evolution. If the doctrine in the science in the Theory of Evolution is true, then everything—every condition of everything—is the result of inflexible laws which are applied alike, at all times, without favoritism. One man was not healed of intractable disease because he said “presto” or prayed to his deity to change the laws of health. And no dead body was made alive by some hocus pocus that would not as easily have re-animated all other putrefying animal cadavers. There would have been no reason for anybody to die, but by carelessness or thoughtlessness death should have overtaken one, unawares, there certainly could have been found some friend or noble-hearted person who would have seen to it that his dead body should be raised again to health. And, though one may have been torn to bits and eaten by some carnivorous monster, it would have required no greater miracle to have restored him to his family circle alive and well than if he had died from any other cause. There is no limit to the field or scope of miracles. They are not according to any system. They depend upon no law. They are not subject to classification as great and small, common or uncommon, regular or irregular. They depend on no condition or thing that preceded, and have no effect on anything to follow. They are just miracles. They have never happened except in the presence of superstition which is the legitimate progeny of ignorance. Science has never known one, and scientific human beings have never had an opportunity to observe and study one.
The Bible is full of miracles. It is strong for miracles. It claims that its own existence is due solely to a miracle—writers wrote as God directed the pen. If so, it required no thought from them. “God spoke, in times past, to the fathers, by the prophets, at sundry times and in divers manners.”
There was no doubt that it was God speaking if the prophet said so. The people did not talk back like the scientist does in these latter days. So the miracles are in the Bible as a part, and a large part, of God’s Word. The book would be a wreck if all the miracles were deleted from its pages. There is little in the Bible that would not directly or indirectly reflect discredit on any scientific arrangement of the laws of cause and effect. It rained because God made a special order for rain for this occasion. He withheld rain, or caused extra amounts of rainfall according to the behavior of the people. If the drought became too burdensome, the people could have the much needed precipitation by congregating themselves and praying long enough and fervently enough—sometimes they could not obtain the desired attention of the Rain-maker until they had torn their clothing pretty well off and rolled themselves in an ash-pile. Then they received the answer to their prayer.
Wealth was accumulated in proportion to the pleasure one’s business conduct gave the financier of heaven, but scientists don’t agree with that kind of success in our day of “frenzied finance” and are slow to allow that such was ever the law of obtaining wealth. The sun and moon could stand still a whole day, and by their inactivity the day on earth was correspondingly lengthened. A child could slay a giant or a lion, or a bear, as easily as one of our four-year old boys can tell of his own adventures. Donkeys could use good Hebrew grammar when too strenuously urged into the danger zone. Dreams—oh yes, dreams, the Bible is rich in dreams—were not difficult to interpret, provided the gods would take a proper interesting the parties to the dream. I use a little “g” to spell gods for dreams, for the reason that the agent for all the gods had pretty fair success with dreams, and it was not common for one so engaged to fail in business. The Bible teaches, and vouches for, the approval of Jehovah on the dream business. The most important event of all the two testaments, the most wonderful of all the miracles, the one feature of all the record, without which we would be as well off with but an almanac for our spiritual guidance was ushered in upon an unsuspecting prospective proud father by a series of dreams. No Evolutionist would yield to the impressions of similar dreams like poor old Joseph did. Of course, Joseph demurred a little, too, but when he had a dream “so real”, he acquiesced.
By an appeal to the opinions of the multitude we have the basis for one more affirmation that science and the theory of Evolution disagree with the Bible. Part of the more recent agitation of the debate between fundamentalists and modernists, or between those who are permanently wedded to the Bible, and those who would like to accept science, has arisen over the miracles of the Bible including the virgin birth. I am wholly unable to see how it is possible for anyone who is capable of comprehending the meaning of simple diction in his own vernacular to fail to get the idea that the New Testament affirms and avows that Jesus of Nazareth was born of a virgin. Again I ask who is wise enough to interpret the many statements proclaiming the virgin birth and make them mean anything else? Why would it be any worse to confess that we cannot believe the statements in the Bible than it would be to so twist and pervert the text that it means nothing at all? What sense was there in making any publication of the birth of Mary’s baby at all if Joseph or any other man was his father? There is nothing more emphatically proclaimed in all the book than the virgin birth. Without it, Jesus was but an ordinary boy, no angels should have awakened the country-side at the time of his arrival any more than at the advent of any other bouncing baby. There was no occasion for the princely gifts, making international felicity, from the Magi from the far East. The agitation in the mind of Herod was without foundation, and the precipitate flight into Egypt was wholly a useless exposure of the mother and tender baby to the hardships of a long journey on a donkey at a time when science would contend they should have rest and quiet. The virgin birth cannot be set aside by anyone without mortal injury to the faith of the conscientious reader and believer in the Bible as God’s word. If we disclaim the truth of this most important part of the record by Matthew and Luke, we must hold no ill feeling toward those who disbelieve it all. It is certainly more consistent with honest conviction to say that it is all fiction, pure and simple, than to continue to preach certain texts with great religious fervor (those that suit our taste), and try to set aside parts of such weighty import as the virgin birth. The Bible centers around this event. It is no harder to believe than any other miracle in the book. If the churches crave any advice from me, I would suggest that the only consistent action they can take with priest or preacher who teaches disbelief in this fundamental doctrine of the Bible should be excommunication without mercy. He is doing more injury to them than a thousand outsiders who laugh at the unreasonableness of the story.
There is one rather lengthy account in the book of Exodus that, while it is given as a series of miracles, might be accepted by scientists as more or less of natural sequence except the minor details. I refer to the ten plagues which Jehovah sent to afflict the Egyptians just before the Exodus of the Children of Israel. It will be noted in reference to the sequence of these terrible scourges that first—the water of all the rivers in the land was turned to blood. Second—the frogs covered the land so much that they were in the houses, even in the break-kneading troughs, everywhere there were frogs except in the water. (The frogs probably now would leave the rivers if they were turned to blood.) Third—the dust turned to lice (maggots), and fourth the awful plague of flies—what could be expected if dead frogs were raked into great heaps all over the land, in the land, in the fields and about the homes? Flies answer the inquiry. Fifth and sixth—the cattle all died of murrain and the people had boils—a regular epidemic of furunculosis. The seventh, eighth, and ninth were not consequent on any others, but the tenth—a dead human in every house would seem pretty reasonable after the first six. It would not necessarily be confined to the first born. It is a wonder that it did not wipe out the whole population, but we should have expected the youngest born to succumb first to such unsanitary conditions. There are some amusing details recounted in this record, and they would, doubtless, have to be rejected by scientific minds. The cattle were all killed by murrain. They were killed again by the hail, and then, when the first born were stricken, the first born of all the cattle died again (but the boy that killed the bear had to kill him four times). Another feature that provokes a smile is that after Moses and Aaron had turned all the waters in the land to blood, and there was not a drink of water in Egypt, the magicians did the same thing in order to show their prowess. I am unable to say how their ability could be judged when all the water was already blood. Again, when all the borders of Egypt were smitten with frogs so that they were in the houses and in the bed chambers, and in the kneading troughs, even in the ovens, the magicians performed the same miracle. It would be difficult in this case also to make any very accurate check on the success of the magicians. But the magicians could not follow with all the wondrous accomplishments—when it came to boils—the magicians themselves had so many and such terrible boils that they could not stand before Moses and Aaron in the test. But the most pathetic of everything connected with the Exodus is the work of Jehovah in not allowing Pharaoh to keep his promise. Pharaoh after each plague was willing to let the Israelites go, but Jehovah, in order to magnify His power and multiply his signs and wonders before His chosen people, so that the Egyptians might know that He was the Lord, and further, that the children of Israel might be brought out of the land by great judgments, hardened Pharaoh’s heart so that he could not keep his word. Jehovah told Moses that He had brought Pharaoh up for this very purpose. Pharaoh, then, must not be condemned since he was doing exactly what Jehovah God forced him to do. When Jehovah got through teasing Pharaoh and no longer required his influence as a tool, he drowned him in the Red Sea.
According to any known rule of science or any laws of health, the Israelites should have suffered just as much from all these plagues as did the Egyptians since even the innocent have to suffer if other people do not comply with the rules of sanitation in communities where all have to live together. So the record will have to be taken as a series of miracles directly supervised by Jehovah in person. He talked Hebrew to Moses regarding every step in this Egyptian ordeal.
All the fight that has been waged against the Theory of Evolution from its earliest publication, from the pulpit, and from the millions of enthusiastic advocates of the Bible through the last few decades, and which fight waxes hotter and hotter as education spreads, although recruits have come over very rapidly to the Evolution side during the last two decades, is an unanswerable argument in favor of the disagreement of the two systems. Many of the fundamentalists are just as capable of understanding the meaning of language as are any of the modernists. Furthermore they are not ignorant of the teachings of Evolution. We must agree that, at least some of, the great scholars who are persistent fundamentalists are honest, and there are too many of them who are offended by the Theory of Evolution not to raise the question and, at the same time, almost answer it, of fatal disagreement. Newspapers and magazines seldom publish an issue without something in their pages which widens the breach and justifies the conclusion that there is a patent difference. State legislatures have magnified the terrible result of broadcasting scientific findings and two of our sovereign states have made it unlawful to teach the fundamentals of Evolution. One has already convicted an Evolutionist for teaching his theory which was so calculated to turn the youthful mind from the Holy Word of God. But a few generations ago and his punishment would have been more definite—if less spectacular. Those people are apparently more brilliant, intellectually, than some of their critics, for they are able to see that there is a momentous disagreement between the Bible and Evolution.
I shall leave the decision to the good judgment of the reader, and offer no apology for the very strong conviction, for myself, that the Bible and Evolution are as far apart as were man and his God after the fall from Eden’s blissful Paradise. They deal with the same fundamental idea, and it is therefore beyond all human possibility to remain logical in the honest exercise of our faculty of Reason and accept them both as true.