Evolution: Unscientific and Unscriptural

An appeal

At the outset we appeal for a careful reading of the following pages. The issue is more serious than can be realized. The choice is between receiving an unproved theory, which is destructive of belief in the Bible, or accepting the Bible record and refusing evolution. There is no middle ground.

In the first place we are able to prove that the theory is unscientific. If the theory were correct all nature would confirm it; the proofs would be million-mouthed. But if the theory be a false one, then the very admissions of its chief advocates are its destruction. It is slain by a sword proceeding out of the mouths of its own adherents.

In the second place we show how utterly opposed the theory is to the Scriptures, and how the acceptance of it completely shatters belief in the Bible, in Christ, in redemption, in heaven. The reader will not at first realize the importance of all this. Every issue is not vital. For instance, we personally believe that the earth is round. There are intelligent people in the world who contend that it is flat. But the belief one way or the other does not matter a great deal. But in our present enquiry it is vital, and our eternal future may hang upon our view of it. We appeal then, for a careful reading of this pamphlet.

What is meant by Evolution?

By evolution we mean the theory first made popular by the late Charles Darwin, and since elaborated by others, in which it is sought to be demonstrated that man evolved from the anthropoid ape; the ape in turn evolved through many stages from a living primordial cell, which either found its way, so it is stated, to this earth from other planets or worlds, or came into existence by spontaneous generation; this process of man’s evolution, demanding millions of years for its accomplishment.

Herbert Spencer’s definition of evolution is as follows:

When a scientific man speaks it generally impresses the lay mind considerably. But Herbert Spencer’s definition is unproved. It is a hypothesis, a guess. It is unscientific, for it is not founded on facts, and science can only build on facts The definition is as sensible as imagining that particles of lead should work themselves out of the mine, assemble themselves, form themselves into printer’s type, and then by “a fortuitous concourse of atoms” resolve themselves into Milton’s “Paradise Lost.” If theologians presented such fairy tales they would be laughed at for their pains.

A Yale Professor explained the origin of man as follows:

It must have been a colossal accident indeed! I have heard of colossal accidents before. But they always worked in a different direction. The accident destroyed and did not build up. That magnificent Sévres vase was dropped and broken into a thousand pieces. We can understand that. But take the thousand pieces and fling them upon the ground and lo! a perfect unbroken vase appears. Perfect nonsense! And yet this would be a slight miracle compared to the wild guess of this Yale Professor.

Why should the South American monkeys after having successfully evolved from a living primordial cell cease to evolve at that stage, and old world monkeys leave their South American cousins behind and evolve into man? It is not kind to South America. The assertion is made, but no proof is furnished, because—there is NONE.

Evolution is not a Modern Idea

The late Dr. A. C. Dixon (formerly of the Metropolitan Tabernacle, London) tells how he came near to losing faith in the Bible through the onslaught of evolution. But when he found out that it was not an up-to-date scientific discovery, but based upon hypotheses and guesses, unproved, and unprovable, and that Darwin’s theory was no better than those of the ancient philosophers he ceased to be troubled by it.

  THALES, the old Greek philosopher (636 B.C.) believed that water was the primordial germ.
  HERACLITUS believed that fire was the primordial germ.
  PYTHAGORAS (circa~ 500/600 B.C.) believed that “number” was the primordial germ.
  ANAXIMANDER, the old Greek philosopher (610 B.C.), believed that animals were evolved from the earth by heat and moisture.
  EMPEDOCLES believed various parts of men and animals existed separately—arms, legs, eyes, ears, etc.—and that these combined, and became able to reproduce themselves.
  ANAXAGORAS (500 B.C.) believed animals and plants were the products of germs carried in the air, which gave fecundity to the earth.
  St. Augustine, Goethe, Kant, etc., have all advocated theories quite in keeping with the recent theories of evolution.

Darwin’s admissions as to his own theory

In The Origin of Species (sixth edition, 1876) chap. 6, p. 222, Darwin says:

To the last he admitted that this thought gave him “a cold shiver,” and well it might, for natural selection is the very foundation of his system.

Again in Darwin’s Life and Letters, Vol. 3, p. 25, he says:

What confusion of thought we have here. Darwin first tells us that there is no proof of a single species having undergone change. Then he goes on to write of “supposed changes,” and that these are the ground work of his theory. Fancy a theory resting on guesswork! Finally he calmly writes of some species having changed, when he has just told us there is no proof. No wonder he finds it difficult to understand the difference between no change and “supposed change.” The quotation is marked by complete confusion of thought.

No wonder Mr. Darwin could write:

What surprises the writer is that Darwin should have clung to the idea of mutability, that is the evolution of one species into another, when he had not one scrap of evidence in proof.

Dr. Etheridge of the British Museum says:

The following admissions are extracted from Mr. Darwin’s “Origin of Species” (popular shilling edition).

Many more such quotations could be given, but space forbids. “We may well suppose” and similar phrases occur hundreds of times in Darwin’s Origin of Species. How much shrift would be given to the Bible, if it said only once, “We may well suppose”?

If only scientists instead of using the Greek-derived word hypothesis, would use the old Anglo-Saxon word, guess, Darwinism would not have got the foothold it has. A standard dictionary says:

It would be well if a hypothesis were always assumed for what are believed to be facts, but in our enquiry we shall see how many hypotheses are assumed for fancies, and not facts at all.

Darwin’s Deism

By Deism is meant belief in the existence of a Creator—a great First Cause—unknown and unknowable, coupled with the refusal to admit that God has made any revelation outside of nature in Creation; that is to say, the deist, whilst believing in God as Creator, refuses the Bible as God’s revelation and rejects Christ as a Saviour. Darwin was a deist, and he refused the Bible and took the ground of being an agnostic. The closing words of the “Origin of Species” are:

Energy and matter not accounted for

Evolutionists have not yet accounted for energy and matter. They take these for granted. Everything lies in energy and matter. Whilst many deny the glory of the creation to the Creator, they cannot and do not attempt to tell us the origin of life.

Darwin acknowledged a Creator

However, Darwin acknowledged a Creator and from his standpoint this is scientific. We acknowledge a Creator, not One who created a primordial germ and then retired, but One who created all things in nature as we see them, upholding and sustaining His creation by the word of His power, and we consider this view is scientific and that the testimony of zoology, of the rocks, of skeleton remains, of archaeology, all go to prove it, which cannot by any stretch of imagination be claimed for evolution. Darwin’s admissions are deadly.

Is man descended from an ape?

Charles Darwin himself never had the audacity to say so. He wrote in “Descent of man,” 1871, Vol. 1. pp. 158,

Professor Osborn, an ardent evolutionist (Guide Leaflet, Series No. 52, p. 4), says:

The late Professor Virchow of Berlin, the highest German authority in physiology, and spoken of as “the foremost physician on the globe,” for thirty years president of the Berlin Anthropological Society, once a pronounced advocate of Darwin’s views, saw through the folly of them, and in his famous lecture on “Freedom of Science,” said:

Later at a convention of anthropologists in Vienna Virchow said:

Dr Trass, the Fossilist, or Palaeontologist, who devoted his long life to the study of fossil animals, is most emphatic:

The late Professor Haeckel of Jena, a thorough-going evolutionist, and a pronounced and fierce atheist, who gloried in saying that Darwin’s theory was “Anti-Genesis,” bewailed the fact that he was left almost alone in advocating evolution. He wrote:

Then he mentions the following men distinguished in various ways, whom he terms “bold and talented scientists” as having renounced evolution:
  Dr. E. Dennert, author of “At the Death-bed of Darwinism” (1903);
  Dr. Goette, a Strasburg Professor, whose articles appeared in the Umschau (1903);
  Professor Edward Hoppes, known as “The Hamburg Savant;”
  Professor Paulson, of Berlin, who declared that Haeckel’s theory “is a disgrace to the philosophy of Germany;”
  Professor Rutemeyer, geologist and fossilist of Basle, Switzerland, who charges evolutionists, especially of the Haeckel type, with “playing false with the public and with the natural sciences;”
  Professor Wilhelm Max Wundt of Leipsic, who wrote in support of evolution, but who has since described these writings as “the great crime of his youth that will take him all the rest of his time to expiate.”

Much more might be adduced on these lines; but space forbids.

Is the ape descended from man?

One would imagine such a question would not be asked.

Clearly if the ape were descended from man, instead of its being evolution, that is, the process of development, it would be contrariwise, a process of degeneration. And yet this is what Professor F. Wood-Jones, Professor of Anatomy at the University of London, believes. He is a thorough-going devolutionist. He says of Huxley’s belief that man, the anthropoid apes, the monkeys, the lemurs, and the pronograde quadrupedal mammals, represented a true evolutionary series:

But he goes further than throwing Huxley’s belief overboard. He says:

Again the same writer says:

Professor Wood-Jones quotes Professor Boule of Paris, Professor A. W. Hubrecht and Professor Klaatsch in support of his views.

Dr. James G. Walsh, professor of psychology at Cathedral College, New York, while addressing the City Club, Boston, in 1916, said:

Nor is this theory a modern one. Dr. A. C. Dixon in “The Origin of Life” says:

Imagine going to the Zoo with two scientists. You are a poor layman, so ignorant that the word hypothesis or theory vastly impresses you, and you feel like a worm in the presence of men who claim to be scientific. One scientist points with solemnity at an anthropoid ape, and says in an awe-struck whisper, “Behold your ancestor!” With what reverence your eyes rest upon the creature to whom you are beholden for your very being. But the other scientist says, “See that frisky mischievous ape,” pointing to the same animal, “that is your descendant. You are responsible for its being.”

You cannot believe both these scientists. One must be wrong—both may be wrong, and in our judgment are. You may well wonder whether they have any claim to be called scientists. Science does not build on hypotheses nor theories, but on facts.

Are men and apes descended from a common ancestor?

Some writers—such as Max Weber Cope, Adloeff, Klaatsch—reject the theory that man is descended from the ape, but contend that man, instead of descending from the ape, branched off from a common ancestor further back. The late Wm. Jennings Bryan says of this theory:

So we have three theories—that man is descended from the ape, that the ape is descended from man, that man and the ape are descended from a common ancestor—theories mutually destructive of each other, and each told us by scientific men. We are reminded of Shakespeare’s sarcastic refrain in “Julius Caesar” when he says, “And Brutus is an honourable man.” We feel inclined to parody this and say, “And Professor Blank is a scientific man.” Brutus was a villain who slew his friend; alas! these scientific men are slaying the faith of our young men and young women in the schools and universities. They destroy, but cannot construct. And yet Professor Blank is a scientific man!

Two of these three theories must be wrong. And yet all three are brought forward by scientific men. Oh! what folly is perpetrated in the name of science. In truth we have guesses called hypotheses delivered with pontifical solemnity.

The ‘Tarsius” Theory

Professor Wood-Jones comes forward with yet another theory. He believes that the human race is descended from a weird little animal, smaller than a squirrel, called Tarsius or Tarsier, an inhabitant of the Malayan Peninsula. It is a nocturnal creature, lives in trees and moves by hopping, has enormous eyes, large ears and a long thin tail, tufted at the end. Shall we pin our faith to Darwin or Haeckel or Wood-Jones or the Bible? Surely it is a choice between “chaos or Christ.” Professor Wood-Jones outdoes all, he points to the Tarsius as our ancestor and the ape as our descendant. And yet Professor Wood-Jones is a scientific man!

Skeletons and Skulls

A short examination of the most famous skeletons on which evolutionists rely for support of evolution will only emphasize how hard up they are for proof.

Pithecanthropos Erectus (meaning ape-man standing erect) or Trinil ape-man, is one of the most famous “missing links” that evolutionists have heralded forth.

This title was given by Haeckel, who gave the name on pure assumption, a notable example of begging the question.

The remains were discovered by Dubois, a Dutch physician, on the island of Java. They consisted of:
  (1) A tooth found several feet below the surface of the earth (September 1891).
  (2) Roof of skull, three feet from where he found the tooth (October 1891).
  (3) A thigh-bone, forty-five feet further away (August 1892).
  (4) A tooth.

A year or two after, the world’s famous zoologists met at Leyden, and, among other things, examined and discussed these remains.

  Ten concluded they were the remains of an ape.
  Seven concluded they were the remains of a man.
  Seven concluded they were the remains of the missing link.

How much reliable opinion can be formed on such divergence, when seventeen out of twenty-four scientists refused the “missing link” opinion, we leave the reader to judge.

Professor D. C. Cunningham (Dublin), a high authority on questions of comparative anatomy concluded the remains did not belong to the same animal, but that some belonged to a monkey or a baboon and the rest were human, whilst Lord Avebury believed the bones belonged either to a very large Gibbon monkey, or to a very small man.

The Piltdown Skull, or Eoanthropus (meaning age-dawn man), was discovered on Piltdown Common, near Uckfield, Sussex. It was recovered in several fragments, some in the autumn of 1911, and the rest with the jaw six months later.

Professor Smith-Woodward and Dr. Chas. Dawson reconstructed this man and built up something essentially ape-like with receding forehead, projecting brows and a gorilla-like lower jaw. Sir Arthur Keith, the celebrated professor of anatomy, curator of the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons, London, uses very strong words concerning the reconstruction of Drs. Smith-Woodward and Dawson:

Professor W. K. Gregory and Professor G. S. Miller pointed out that a further modification was necessary in the reconstruction, inasmuch as the tooth, described as the right lower canine, was in reality a left upper tooth, and further, Miller contended that the jaw and tooth belonged to a fossil chimpanzee, and not to the owner of the skull at all.

Professor G. Schwalbe, the great German anatomist, says:

The Neanderthal Skull, in reality a fragment, was found in 1856 by two labourers, who were digging in a small cave at the entrance of the Neanderthal Gorge, Westphalia, Germany. The following were found in the same cave, a human thigh bone well preserved, several human arm bones, not so well preserved, some fragments of human elbow bones (forearm), a fragment of a human pelvic bone, a fragment of a human right shoulder blade, a small piece of a human right collar bone, and five broken pieces of human rib.

Of course attention was fixed mostly on the skull. Was it the missing link? Professor Schaffhausen said it had a cubic capacity of 1033. Professor Huxley corrected this and gave the cubic capacity of 1230, the cranial capacity of the modern school teacher. Remember, the highest cubic capacity of the ape does not exceed 600 cc. Where then is the missing link in this?

Professor Wassemann says:

The Engis Skull, was found near Liege, Belgium in 1833 by Dr. Schmerling. Professor Huxley says:

The great Virchow says:

Let the reader weigh over these words carefully. The evidence is that man is degenerating, that instead of rising higher and higher, the reverse is the truth.

Quite within recent years, so lately as 1913, a complete skeleton was found in the Oldoway gully in what was German East Africa by an expedition of the Geological Institute of the University of Berlin. Why has this not been heralded forth? Here we have a complete skeleton, needing no guess-work to complete it.

Professor Th. Graebner says:

Fossil Apes

Fossil apes have been found and these remains give no indication of the truth of the evolutionary theory. Professor Wassmann says:

A hypothesis ceases to exist when a fact exploding it comes along. So far we have had a bountiful harvest of hypotheses; of facts which can prove the evolutionary theory we have had none.

Of hypotheses, guesses, suppositions, we have had plenty. They at best build up a frail house of cards, which at the breath of one single opposing fact collapses.

Professor Joseph McCabe says that one of Haeckel’s distinctive services in regard to man’s evolution has been the construction of a complete ancestral tree, though even he admits some of the ideas in it are “PURELY CONJECTURAL and not final.” If he had stated that the whole idea of it was conjectural he would have been nearer the mark.

M. de Quatrefages, the French scientist, referring to it, says:

Dr. Arnold Brass accused Haeckel of taking the drawings of other biologists and altering them, taking away fifteen or sixteen vertebrae from one monkey-embryo and altering the name, and adding tail-vertebra to another. He also added to a human embryo eleven vertebra not in the original drawing.

Haeckel replied to this most serious charge:

We can understand if a human skeleton were found with one hand, it would not be doctoring to draw a skeleton with two hands, but to do what Haeckel is accused of doing is really fraudulent, and the man who does fraudulent things is a fraud. A little Christian character, which he affected to despise, would have saved him from such a state of things. Infidelity is at best negative and destructive, and is no safeguard against fraud and immorality.

Not only is Haeckel obliged to make a damaging admission, but he drags in “hundreds of the best observers and most reputable biologists” as being guilty with himself. What are we to make of such an admission? Does it not show that such are out to twist facts, to bolster up false theories which exist only in their imagination?

Is there any measure of Evolution in nature?

We answer decidedly in the negative, if we think of evolution in the Darwinian meaning. Of course, there is the development of the flower from the bud, the butterfly from the caterpillar, the chick from the egg, the man from the infant, but there is no instance of one species evolving from another species, and on this vital point the doctrine of evolution utterly fails.

The greatest examples of evolution in this limited sense are seen in the inventions of man. The evolution of the locomotive, the steamship, the aeroplane are examples. But that is not in nature. Locomotives do not breed and hand on improvements to their posterity.

But it may be urged,—Is there not the evolution of the pouter pigeon from the common rock pigeon, the Gloire de Dijon rose from the dog rose, the Cox’s Orange Pippin from the crab apple stock? It is impossible to use the word evolution here, for never, left to nature, did the pouter spring from the rock pigeon, nor the Gloire de Dijon rose from the dog rose, nor the cultivated apple from the paradise stock. All this comes about by man’s efforts, NOT BY NATURAL SELECTION, and when man ceases his efforts these intensive products revert back to their original condition.

Professor Huxley says:

He then points out that as soon as you permit pigeons of different varieties to mate promiscuously—no matter how different the varieties may have been—you will find in a few generations of pigeons all the varieties have vanished, and the pigeons have reverted to type, viz., the blue rock pigeon with the black bars across the wings. “This,” Huxley says, “is certainly a very remarkable circumstance.”

But it is just this that proclaims the fixity of species, which truth is fatal to the theory of evolution. Mr. Sutton, the well-known horticulturist, writing to The Record, says that in order to raise successfully new seed or preserve it true to type when it has been raised, man’s assistance is ALWAYS required. Speaking especially of the beetroot he says:

All the improvements in nature, brought about by man’s fostering care and ingenuity, are only the bringing forth of what is latent in the plant or animal. Once the fostering hand of man is removed the improved plant or animal reverts to type. This cannot be called evolution in the Darwinian sense, where the improvements are claimed to become permanent, or else lead to still greater improvement.

Embryology

One of the strongest arguments of the evolutionist is that certain changes take place in the pre-natal history of the human embryo which answer to the supposed descent of man from the bit of protoplasm, via, fishes, reptiles, and mammals to man.

Robert Chambers in his well known book, “Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation,” 1844, traces the brain of the human embryo as first similar in development to that of a fish’s, then of a reptile’s, then of a bird’s, then of a mammal’s, and finally it attains to the brain of a man. He traces the same with the human foetal heart. First, he says, it is like the heart of an insect, then divided into ventricle and auricle it becomes similar to that of a fish, then a sub-division of the auricle, making a triple-chambered form, it becomes like a reptile’s, and lastly the ventricle being sub-divided, taking on a quadruple-chambered form it becomes a full mammal heart.

Granted that this is so, it only shows how all creation physically is related. But changes which take place out of sight during a short nine months do not prove that evolution, demanding according to the scientists millions of years, is a true theory. The out-of-sight evidence should surely have evidence within sight to answer to and confirm it. In other words, if the theory as to pre-natal changes is to be effective, it must be accompanied by post-natal corroboration, and this is QUITE LACKING. The foetus of a fish always produces a fish; of a reptile, a reptile; of a mammal, a mammal; of man, a man. After all, the vast difference in the finished product, say the difference between a worm and a man, between an insect and an elephant, between a spider and an eagle, shows that there must be an essential difference in the embryo, even in its first stage.

Mongrel or Hybrid

The foregoing enquiry brings us to the consideration of mongrel or hybrid. The mongrel is the crossing of different varieties of the same species and is FERTILE. The hybrid is the crossing of two different species, and is STERILE. The common barn fowl is the most familiar example of the former; the mule, of the latter. The barn fowl breeds freely; the mule is sterile.

The instinct of the animal is to keep the race pure. No one has ever seen a creature half cat and half dog, or half horse and half cow. Why this instinct? Simply that God made the animal “after his kind,” of which more when we come to the Bible condemnation of evolution. The only hybrids known generally, whether animal or vegetable, are those brought about by man’s arrangement, as, for instance, the mule, offspring of jackass and mare. Left to nature we get no such hybrid, and when it is obtained, it is sterile.

If we quote Huxley on this subject it will be fair, for he was in great sympathy with Darwin’s views. The capitals are ours.

There is a greater likeness, structurally and in every detail, between an horse and an ass, than between a man and an anthropoid ape. Yet nature tells you each is “after his kind,” and will not allow a cross. Thousands of years ago there were horses and asses, in shape and character the same as today. The Bible mentions horses and asses in Egypt in the time of Joseph. Why then, following up a similar line of thought, should an anthropoid ape develop into a man? The horse and ass are alike in having four feet and a tail. The man has two feet and two hands and no tail. The ape has four hands and a tail. The horse and ass walk on all fours. The man alone in God’s creation walks erect on two feet. The bird is the nearest to this, but man’s method of locomotion is quite unique. The ape is at home in the trees, and is awkward and defenceless on the ground. His forehands are made for arboreal locomotion, man’s are not made for locomotion, but for higher uses.

We conclude that if two species so close in construction and appearance as the horse and ass do not and cannot blend, two species so far apart as the man and the ape cannot blend. And there is not one fact in nature, nor one scrap of evidence in geology or palaeontology to prove otherwise.

The Upright Gait and Structural Similarity

Who has not seen the travelling Italian with his tame bear? How it stands upright at the bidding of his master. In this attitude it stands decidedly more erect than an anthropoid ape when forced into the erect attitude. Why do evolutionists lay no stress on this fact? The natural walking position of the gorilla is on all four hands, resting on the callosities of the knuckles of the forehand. Once up a tree all four hands are used in grasping its trunk and boughs.

If you took the skeleton of a horse and propped it up in an upright position, and placed the skeleton of a man alongside, you would find just as much structural resemblance as between a man and an ape. If you place alongside of each other skeletons of a bear, a lion and an ape, you will find the resemblance nearer than between man and ape. And yet evolutionists lay no stress on this. We object to their building up a theory on a resemblance that is no greater than with others of the animal world, and in none of which is there any support for this fantastic theory.

Blood Affinity

A great deal of capital has been made of the “blood relationship” between man and the anthropoid ape. We quote Professor Sir Arthur Keith:

Capitals in foregoing extracts are ours. We shall see whether Sir Arthur Keith’s statement that man and the anthropoids stand “very close together” is correct. Seeing the test in the case of the anthropoid does not give a plentiful reaction, whereas in the case of human blood it gives a full precipitate, at the very least the claim to affinity should be more modest. “Very close together” goes too far, even from Sir A. Keith’s showing.

Professor Nuttall in his book, “Blood Immunity and Relationship,” devotes twelve pages to explain that different circumstances may in many cases render inconclusive the results of such experiments.

If the anthropoid were the only animal in which this “blood relationship” occurred it would certainly be an arresting fact, but when it is known that the blood serum of the sheep, goat and horse, inoculated into man, is followed by a similar result to that obtained from the blood serum of the anthropoid, it robs it of the significance Sir A. Keith would give to it.

Professor Elie Metchnikoff, a director of the famous Pasteur Institute, wrote:

We could as logically say that we must be descended from the sheep, the goat and the horse, as from the anthropoid.

Professor Brumpt discovered that animals, inoculated with the blood of men suffering from sleeping sickness, fell victims to the disease, EXCEPT a few apes and pigs. We might conclude from this that all animals are nearer in relationship to man than apes and pigs. What becomes of Sir A. Keith’s “very close together”?

B. Cosgrave, B.A., and A. Rendle Short, M.B., B.S., B.SC., F.R.C.S., write:

There are four distinct types of blood—that of man, beast, bird, fish—each having an average of heat peculiar to itself. For instance, a bird’s blood is ten degrees higher than human blood, wherever found, in the torrid zone or the Arctic regions. Further, it is said that the shape of the blood corpuscles differ, preventing the blood of one species from passing through the arteries of the heart of another species, thus rendering it impossible to successfully transfuse the blood of a bird into a beast, or the blood of a beast into a human body. Death in each case would ensue.

Here is another proof of the impossibility of evolution—of impassable barriers erected in the wisdom of the Divine Creator—a “thus far and no further,” which not all the attempts of man can overcome.

Spontaneous Generation

For Evolution to be logical spontaneous generation is a necessity, that is the production of the organic from the inorganic—of life from dead matter. This is no new theory, for Aristotle believed that lower organisms could arise from the dead remains of higher organisms, as, for instance, fleas from manure, lice from morbid pustules in the skin, moths from old furs, and mussels from slime in the water.

It is true that plants extract matter from the inorganic world. They assimilate minerals and chemicals and turn them into living tissue, but animal life cannot assimilate from the inorganic.

H. A. Nicholson writes:

… On the other hand no known animal possesses the power of converting inorganic compounds into organic matter, but all, mediately or immediately, are dependent in this aspect upon plants. All animals, as far as is certainly known, require ready-made proteinacenus matter for the maintenance of existence, and this they can only obtain in the first instance from plants… Plants, therefore, are the great manufacturers in nature, animals are the great consumers.”

But this is very far from spontaneous generation, and quite in keeping with facts which can be observed by all of us. The fact is that frantic efforts have been made to prove spontaneous generation, but those who would have hailed the discovery with delirious delight, have been obliged to own there is no proof whatever.

Darwin himself declared that spontaneous generation was “absolutely inconceivable.”

His co-discoverer, or rather co-inventor of an unproved and improvable theory, Alfred Russell Wallace said:

Again he writes in one of his last essays:

Years have rolled by and spite of the strides made in inventions and knowledge these words remain true.

Alfred Watterson McCann writes:

Again:

Pasteur made “rigorous experiments” as to spontaneous generation. Even Haeckel, not scrupulous in his statements, has to admit:

To this Professor Huxley gives his support. He writes:

Lord Kelvin is still more positive. He wrote:

The Origin of Life

Creation demands a Creator. Let the evolutionist put creation back to a single bit of protoplasm, a unique primordial germ, the question arises where did the bit of protoplasm come from, whence did the primordial germ originate? Some scientists (?) can suggest solemnly that this bit of protoplasm came floating through space from another world and started the whole series of life we see around. But even then where did it come from? How did it originate? It is all very well for the scientist to say this is a question for the philosopher and not for the scientist. That is a mean get-out, a scientific way of saying that he has come to the limits of his powers of explanation, that he has come to a blank wall, and cannot see over it.

Suppose a bit of protoplasm were at some remote period, millions and millions of years ago, in existence, with the tremendous potentialities of evolution, so that from that speck is evolved the worm, the butterfly, the whale, the minnow, the salmon, the herring, the elephant, the midge, the giraffe, the mouse, nay, the ten thousands of species of animals on land, in air and sea, the topstone of all being man with his wonderful moral and spiritual make up. Suppose such a bit of protoplasm were in existence with these marvellous potentialities, I ask, where did it come from? Either matter is eternal, which is unthinkable, or else there is a Creator, which reason demands. If a Creator, why does not every scientist bend the knee in adoring worship at such power and wisdom, infinitely beyond the power of man to understand, save very feebly.

We can understand the feelings of Linnaeus, the great Swedish naturalist. On seeing in England for the first time a mountainside covered with gorse in full bloom in a blaze of golden splendour, he fell down on his knees and worshipped the Creator.

It will be admitted that this speck of original protoplasm, the pure guess of the scientist, if it existed, must have been immature and embryonic. It is well known that the immature and embryonic, in many cases, will die unless cared for by the adult of its kind. Even if it manages to exist, the immature and embryonic is never reproductive; it is always the mature organism that reproduces.

It is the old question, Where did the first egg come from? You answer, From the hen. But where did the first hen come from? You answer, From the egg. But an egg without a hen to sit upon it (I presume even the scientists would not be so absolutely wanting in common sense as to suggest an incubator) would perish. Shut out the Creator, and you argue round in a circle in an absolutely illogical way. Bring in the Creator, and all is simple. There was a first hen, which laid a first egg. Creation demands a Creator.

Where did language come from?

Human speech is imitative. Hatch some eggs with an incubator. The chicks come out. They immediately begin to chirp, indeed they chirp before ever they break the shell. The mother does not chirp, she clucks. There is no imitation here. It is instinct. So with all the lower animal creation. Left to itself the roar of the lion, the trill of the nightingale, the squeak of the mouse, in short, all the noises of the lower animal creation are instinctive, not imitative.

But take a human baby, isolate it from human society, and it has no speech. Human speech is imitative, not instinctive. An English baby in English surroundings never learns the French language. Whence then did human speech originate? Apes have no speech to this day.

Take the English language. We are familiar with the origin of the words comprising it—the roots of our words come from Anglo-Saxon, Norman, Latin, Greek, French, Dutch, German, Scandinavian, etc., etc. But where did language originate from? We cannot tell. Who taught the first man to speak? If the beast could not give him even the crudest beginnings of speech, not even the anthropoid ape, where did the first man get his language? To deny an all-wise Creator, who gave man language, is to impale yourself on the horns of a dilemma without the hope of escape.

If the anthropoid ape could be taught to imitate human speech, even to the small extent a parrot can be taught, how jubilant would the evolutionists be! The parrot’s acquirements are purely imitative, but they carry no real thought, nor does the parrot transmit its acquirements to its offspring. Apart from man’s training the parrot would be limited to its scream. Let man cease his training and not a parrot will speak.

Language is a truly wonderful thing. Compare a parrot’s scream or an anthropoid ape’s grunt with the glowing periods of a Demosthenes, a Cicero, a Gladstone, a Spurgeon, and you will find a gulf between the two which cannot be bridged.

Man’s mentality

The evolutionist attempts to prove the physical descent of man from the lower creation. With absolutely nothing to support this, so-called scientists conjure with theories and hypotheses and build up their houses of cards. But the real difficulty they have to face is to account for man’s mental, moral and spiritual nature. Here it is where the great gulf between the brute and man above all is seen.

Take song. Birds sing, but not quadrupeds. Birds sing, but their song is confined to certain notes and trills, which never vary from one generation to another.

And they never sing words, as man does. Compare these with the magnificent melodies of a Beethoven, a Mendelssohn, a Haydn, the massive and multitudinous harmonies of an oratorio. Birds never sing in parts, nor use words. Man has tenor, baritone and bass voices; woman, contralto and soprano. Evolution cannot account for this.

Take writing. Between writing and the efforts of the beasts in communicating thought to each other there is absolutely no comparison. You may compare a nightingale’s song with Beethoven’s melodies, but in connection with writing there is no comparison. It absolutely does not exist among beasts. What has evolution to say to this?

Take reading. The same may be said of reading as of writing. We need not repeat.

Take calculation. The three R’s—the attainment of the ploughboy and the seamstress—are really wonderful, and mark man off from the lower creation in a very distinct way. What does a wise dog know of logarithms, or a goose of algebra, or even an anthropoid ape of quadratic equations?

Take invention. Look at the powerful locomotive, or a microscope with all its fine adjustments, or a motor, or a common garden spade, or a carpenter’s saw, etc., etc., too numerous to mention, and again there is no comparison with the lower creation. Invention belongs to man and only to man.

The following table does not look much like evolution. The proportion of brain to spinal cord is as follows:
  Fish       - 2 to l
  Reptile  - 2½ to 1
  Bird       - 3 to l
  Mammal - 4 to 1
  Man       - 33 to 1

Notice the immense jump between mammal and man.

Man’s moral nature

This may be described as an inherent sense of right and wrong. Hence man’s judgment will praise honesty and condemn theft, praise virtue and condemn vice, admire and desire to practice truth, morality, kindness, etc. We know the fall of man is a terrible reality and brings in much that is contrary to this but man’s judgment is ready to praise that which is good and virtuous and honest. Where is there a counterpart to this in the lower creation? Do these things ever cross the brain of an anthropoid ape?

Man’s spiritual nature

Man has truly been called a religious animal. He is the only part of God’s creation that has a sense of God. That sense may be perverted. Man may not like to retain God in his knowledge, but on refusing the true God he must invent a false god for he cannot get on without a god. See the old Egyptians as they worshipped the bull, the cat, the ibis, the beetle. How true it is “they … changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and four-footed beasts, and creeping things.” Look at the heathen idols in India, more in number today than the dense millions who inhabit that peninsula; look at China with its heathen temples, at Japan, Africa, the Islands of the sea. Recall how in this country we once worshipped Woden and Thor and many another false god, to which our very names for the days of the week bear witness.

There is not a trace of this spiritual nature in the lower creation. Put a prayer book in the hand of an anthropoid ape. Give him a hymn book and a Bible. What could he do with them? However degraded and perverted the spiritual nature may be in man, it is entirely wanting in the lower creation.

Alfred Russell Wallace writes thus:

This admission is begging the question—a get-out, in homely language. When and how, and why, and at what stage did the Creator instil these intellectual moral and spiritual qualities in man? Was it that God took some ugly repulsive ape-like man, his mind and qualities only that of a super-ape, and begot these marvellously superior powers in him? Did they arrive in small quantities and gradually increase in number and volume, or did this ape-like man one day act like a superior ape and the next day like an inferior man? It is a hard nut for the evolutionist to crack, and his heaviest scientific hammer cannot do it. Perhaps an examination of Professor Haeckel’s genealogical tree will help us.

Haeckel’s genealogical tree

In his Evolution of Man he gives us his “hypothetical sketch of man’s ancestry” in thirty stages. He gives us:
  5 Protist Ancestors;
  6 Invertebrate Metazoa Ancestors;
  4 Monorhina Ancestors (oldest vertebrate without jaws or pairs of limbs);
  15 Later Ancestors with fossil evidence.

That he is not on the safe ground of fact, but building on hypothesis is clear. Capitals in following quotations from chapter 19 of Evolution of Man are ours.

And these are the admissions of a man not too particular in presenting what is mere guess as ascertained fact. Fancy an advocate in the law courts admitting that his
  (1) Evidence as a whole is imperfect; his
  (2) First source of evidence “exceedingly incomplete;” his
  (3) Second source of evidence “not less incomplete;” his
  (4) Third and MOST VALUABLE source of evidence “very imperfect,”
and having the brazen-faced impudence to ask for a verdict, and being surprised if he fails to get it.

Or imagine a religious teacher coming with such a story, how would he be treated? With chilling neglect, if not with hot indignation.

For such a man to call himself scientific is a travesty of the truth. In the writings of Darwin, Huxley and Haeckel, hypotheses are as plentiful as blackberries in September. Oh, this “sacred” word, hypothesis! It is a magician’s wand, a witch’s incantation, the garment of ignorance or worse.

When these gentlemen start an hypothesis and then cannot make it work, finding the keys of their guesses do not fit into the lock of facts, why do they not give it up? At first it is an assumption; after that it is imposture.

It makes one indignant to see children of tender years reading the wild guesses of the scientist. We took up a children’s newspaper recently, and found an article by a learned man (save the mark), telling the youngsters that all the flowers were evolved from the common groundsel or chickweed. The graceful lily, beautiful tulip, modest violet, sweet scented rose—all came, he told the children, from the common groundsel. Really if the thing were not more serious, one would laugh at such nonsense. All this was given in a tone of lofty knowledge, which no mere layman should dare to question, and that without one attempt to prove his statements. The poor children had to believe it because the writer said it. Another article in the same children’s newspaper explained how one particular kind of deer had no antlers because their ancestral males had failed to fight for their mates. Again, not a shred of evidence was brought forward. When our readers have read the second part of this pamphlet as to how all this leads to the undermining of faith in the Bible, they will not wonder that our righteous anger was stirred against this tampering with the innocent minds of the children.

Haeckel criticised by scientists

This genealogical tree is a great favourite with certain evolutionists. Why so many plants and animals suddenly ceased to evolve, and why certain plants and animals should go on evolving till man was produced, and why man should cease to evolve, and not go on to be an angel, or at least a super-man, we are left to guess. The very numerous, nay, innumerable missing links, are no setback to the airy assumptions of these men of science.

We append a few quotations of well-known scientists re Haeckel’s views. The capitals in the following quotations are ours.

Dr. Alfred Russell Wallace writes:

This is pretty strong language. Haeckel was an ardent infidel, and his writings, attacking Christianity, were translated into English, and circulated in a cheap form among the working classes very largely. At any rate the Bible he attacked would have kept him honest, if he had been guided by it.

M. de Quatrefages is still more explicit and damaging in his remarks:

Let the reader note the dishonesty of all this, to invent, to fill up species and groups for which there is NO evidence, and to ignore MUCH evidence which clearly points against the evolutionary theory. Judge how far the working man can follow Haeckel when he takes upon himself to give advice in religious matters.

Professors Dewar and Finn write:

Professor Sir J. W. Dawson writes:

Lastly Dr. Russell Wallace writes:

The antiquity of man and the Glacial Period

At least a million years is demanded by the evolutionist in which to evolve man from the germ-cell which they claim was the starting point of man. Haeckel with his usual boldness claimed a thousand million. Professor Hunt asked for nine million years.

Of course, Genesis 1 sets no claim for the age of the world. It may be many millions of years ago since the earth was created, so far as the Scripture narrative is concerned. Set these two Scriptures side by side and the truth of what we say will be evident. “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth Was WITHOUT FORM (Hebrew tohu a ruin, vacancy)” (Gen. 1:1-2).

Here we get two distinct statements—Isaiah 45:18, saying that God did not create the earth in vain (tohu), and Genesis 1:2 telling us the earth was without form (tohu). Evidently some great catastrophe must have taken place between the first and second verses of Genesis 1, and we are not told how exactly it occurred.

But if the Bible does not furnish a date for the creation of the world, it does furnish an approximate date for the creation of man, which occurred on the sixth day of reconstruction as given to us in Genesis 1.

Archbishop Ussher, using the record in the Bible of the ages of the patriarchs and its subsequent history, has made a chronology, which fixes the creation of man at about 4004 B.C. But this chronology was not inspired. Ussher generally treated each son in the genealogy as the eldest, whereas this was not necessarily the case, as witness Seth, who was Adam’s third son, and Solomon, who was far from being David’s eldest son. It is thus possible that Ussher’s chronology is within the mark.

But the wild and immoderate guesses of the older scientists in which they juggled with millions, as easily as the schoolboy plays with his marbles, have been of late discredited. Wherever fuller light is thrown upon matters where so-called science and the Bible are at variance, it is invariably found that science has to modify its guesses and come into line with the Bible. It is thus with the Glacial Period, which has cooled the heads of younger scientists, and we have now much more modest calculations, leaving us pretty much in accord with where the Bible puts us.

Of course there are evolutionists who claim very high antiquity for man. Their theory demands it. The biologist demands 1,000,000 years for the wonderful evolution they allege began with a primordial germ-cell ending via the anthropoid ape in MAN. The reckless Haeckel estimated 1,000,000,000 years.

Professor Sir Arthur Keith claims for man an antiquity antecedent to the Glacial period. Commenting on the Anglia skeleton he says:

But Sir Arthur cannot have it all ways. If “England was covered with a great thickness of ice,” then every living creature in England perished, and the pre-glacial period man could have left NO DESCENDANTS. So the Anglia skeleton cannot prove in any wise the antiquity of man, as he appears on the earth today. Moreover, the skeleton in question was that of an ordinary man, with no traces of simian origin, thus lending no countenance to the evolutionary theory, even from Sir Arthur’s point of view.

Seeing then that all life was destroyed by the Glacial Period, scientists must begin the process of evolution after the Glacial Period. We shall thus see what comes of the claim of evolutionists to 1,000,000 years as necessary for the evolution of man, or even 200,000 as computed by Sir Chas. Lyell.

Professor Winchell says:

Sufficiently uncomfortable as the above extract is in upsetting these wild guesses as to the antiquity of man, Professor H. W. Morris is still more precise.

So now we have the antiquity of man reduced to something short of 10,000 years, for the period between one Ice Age and the next Ice Age—be it 10,000 years or thereabouts—must run its full course to cover the full time between the two. It is very obvious that we are in that period, and if the Biblical record is correct, which we believe it is, we have run about 6 to 7,000 years since man was created.

But then the Bible tells us this earth will be destroyed by fire not by frost. Frost can destroy all life, but it cannot destroy, though it may alter, the inorganic. The mighty force of ice may carve out channels for rivers and alter the face of the earth, but it cannot do more. Fire can and will destroy the whole earth according to the Bible. If such be the case this earth will never again see an Ice Age, and it looks as if preceding Ice Ages have been used of God for the preparation of this earth for the habitation of man, and in these few thousand years the whole scheme of God as to man will be carried out.

That destruction of life by frost and destruction of the earth by fire are possible is borne out by the statements of scientists apart from the Bible, and yet the Bible is in accord with these statements. Where did the Bible get such knowledge? You cannot find it in any other ancient book.

We have given testimony as to the Ice Age, corroborated by the destruction of life, as seen in the mammoth creatures, whose existence is known by their fossil remains, and who have left no descendants. We will now give testimony as to the possibility of the earth being destroyed by fire; but which the Bible states will take place. If this is so, it must be before the time for the return of the Glacial Period. The internal condition of our planet warrants the belief, even apart from the Bible, that it may be destroyed by fire. The following striking quotation is worth reading.

We will now proceed to quote the conclusions scientists have come to as to the antiquity of man, and we shall see that with the fullest knowledge of the present time they approximate to what the Bible sets forth as to the antiquity of man.

  Professor G. Frederick Wright, one of the ablest glacialogists in America, reaches the conclusion that the Ice Age ended not earlier than from 7,000 to 10,000 years ago.
  Professor Joseph Prestwick placed it within the limit of 12,000 years.
  M. Adhemar and Dr. James Croll stand for 11,000 years.
  Professor P. D. Salisbury and Dr. Warren Uphans, among the most recent of American geologists, come to the conclusion that from 7,000 to 10,000 years is a fair calculation.

It is curious how the calculations of the ancients as to the creation of the world coincide very much with those of the scientists just quoted. The following list is interesting.

  Indian Chronology, B.C. 6,204
  Arab Chronology B.C. 6,174
  Babylonian Chronology B.C. 6,158
  Chinese Chronology B.C. 6,157
  Egyptian Chronology B.C. 6,081
  Septuagint Chronology B.C. 5,586
  Josephus Chronology B.C. 5,555
  Alexandrine Chronology B.C. 5,508
  Persian Chronology B.C. 5,507
  Abyssinian Chronology B.C. 5,500
  Talmudists Chronology B.C. 5,344
  Samaritan Chronology B.C. 4,427
  Hebrew Chronology B.C. 4,161
  English Bible (Ussher) B.C. 4,004

The years of our present epoch must be added to these figures. It will thus be seen that something less than 6,000 years is the lowest and something over 8,000 years the highest figure suggested by these chronologies for the antiquity of man. These calculations are extracted from Young’s Analytical Concordance, page 210.

Objections considered

Whichever way you turn, evolution is met with insurmountable difficulties, and faced with facts, which are absolutely destructive of the theory. Transmutation is necessary for the theory, yet there is not one single bit of proof that such ever took place. If the theory is true, then transmutation must have occurred millions of times, and yet no fossil remains, no skeleton remains, nothing living on this earth bears evidence to it. It were impossible to have fossils and skeletons of the different species, and yet have none of the far more numerous intermediate forms demanded by evolutionists, which must according to their theory have needed millions of years and numberless generations for their evolution.

Then again, many of the developments demanded would be a hindrance rather than a help. For instance, take the wing of a bird as example. If the bird were created a bird with fully developed wings, one can understand the wings would be highly useful and necessary. But if the wing evolved from small beginnings, in all its intermediate stages it would be a hindrance and a danger rather than a help. And seeing natural selection is claimed to produce only that which is useful and necessary, natural selection would refuse an immature wing as a useless and dangerous appendage. The theory is self-destructive. Furthermore, the sterility of hybrids is another death blow to the theory.

Again the Glacial Period reducing the antiquity of man to Scripture limits is another heavy blow to the theory, for it is impossible for man to have evolved from a primordial germ-cell in such a short space of time as less than 10,000 years, especially when that period is further reduced by the fact that we can trace man as having arrived at a high state of civilization as far back as 4,000 years ago.

The mummies of Egypt, 3,500 years old, show us man as developed as the man of today. There is no trace of the simian about them. So the margin left for the evolutionist becomes uncomfortably small. Haeckel’s 1,000,000,000 years is reduced to 6,000 years and that giving a liberal margin.

We might go over a very large range of proofs to illustrate our point, viz., that man, as we know him today, was in existence thousands of years ago, but let us confine ourselves to Egypt.

Professor L. T. Townsend writes:

Contrast the mighty pyramids of the ancients with the mud hovels of the moderns in Egypt today; the power of the Egyptian monarchy of long ago with the baseness of the present kingdom and the condition of the degraded fellaheen today, and you can only come to the conclusion that man is not progressing but rather the reverse. The one exception to this is where the Christian religion has triumphed. There men progress. This is too patent to need any proof.

Evolution: unscientific. A final word

We have now finished the first part of our task. We have shown how the professors of evolution have dug with their own tongues and pens the grave of the very theory they maintain.

We have seen how leading professors contradict each other on every hand on matters that are vital to the theory. We shall now proceed to show that evolution is unscriptural.

PART II

EVOLUTION IS UNSCRIPTURAL

The issue is very plain. You cannot intelligently believe in the evolutionary theory and believe in the Bible. The evolutionary theory destroys belief in the Bible; the Bible annihilates belief in the evolutionary theory.

Rev. Henry Ward Beecher and the Bible

The issue is plainly stated. The Rev. Henry Ward Beecher writing on 23rd July, 1883 says:

Mr. Beecher had no right whatever to call himself a Christian evolutionist. He might call himself, as Darwin could and did, a deistic evolutionist, but a Christian evolutionist never. No evolutionist has the right to call himself Christian. Mr. Beecher denied the creation of man as given to us in Genesis 1, consequently denied the fall of man, and consequently refused the great truth of atonement. His statement amounts to this, he refused the Bible as inspired and treated it as a literary production in which he could admire what suited him, and draw moral lessons therefrom for his unitarian sermons.

Canon Barnes and the Bible

Take the case of the Rev. B. W. Barnes, D.Sc., P.B.S., Canon of Westminster.* At the Church Congress of 1920 he gave an address. Commenting on it The Daily Express (23rd October) said:

Was there ever a more significant sign of the apostasy of the present age? When a man, pledged by solemn oath to uphold the Bible, and drawing a large salary in virtue of his oath, publicly in the presence of the highest dignitaries of the Church repudiates the Bible narrative of the creation and all that that involves, we have truly a degrading spectacle. Where is common honesty in such proceedings? To utter these revolutionary ideas “without a sign of dissent,” but punctuated by applause from the assembled clergy, is indeed a sign of the times. No wonder the pulpit is losing power over the pew.

Canon Barnes says:

Again preaching in Westminster Abbey (Jan. 1921) he said, speaking of evolution:

What a pitiable misstatement of facts! “All the evidence that biologists discover” does NOT confirm the idea. We have seen how in the light of further evidence leading biologists have had to surrender the evolutionary theory as not supported by facts. Indeed in the light of further knowledge if is seen that science points in the opposite direction to evolution. It is pitiable to see the Canon surrendering the Bible he has sworn to uphold at the bidding of men of science, of which he has evidently only a very partial and one-sided knowledge.

The issue could not be more serious. If the evolutionary idea is true God must be a terrible monster, for if there were no fall, if “men,” as Henry Ward Beecher wrote, “have not fallen as a race,” if “men have come up,” then man is as God made him; and therefore God made him with a sinful nature, that must express itself in sinful acts. Did not our Lord say:

Will anyone be so hardy as to say that is how God made man? The evolutionary theory makes God responsible for every sin committed in the world. The thought is abominable. It is too horrible to contemplate.

In sharp contrast to the mixture of poor science and still poorer theology which Canon Barnes has been dealing out to his hearers are the words of Professor George McCready Price. The Canon says, “We must accept the authority of men of science in their own domain.” Will the Canon accept the following words of Professor Price?

We would advise Canon Barnes to do some up-to-date reading, and save himself from the charge of second-hand and out-of-date science and the stultification of theology.

Evolution begins by a colossal assumption. It assumes the existence of the universe. It does not attempt to explain how force and matter came into existence. It then supposes that a speck of protoplasm with marvellous potentialities appeared; how is only wildly and vaguely guessed at. But how this bit of protoplasm received life they cannot tell.

Others shirk the question altogether. They began with an assumption, and go on with assumptions to the finish.

But this bit of protoplasm is wonderful. Professor Price says:

Words cannot exaggerate the marvellous character attributed by scientists to this bit of protoplasm. It cannot shut out a Creator. Its very myriad wonders demand with an insistence that cannot be gainsaid a Creator, and of necessity a Creator infinitely more wonderful than His creation.

If the evolutionist endows this bit of protoplasm with such powers, why cannot he allow that God created fish, bird, beast and man as narrated in Genesis 1?

Listen to the nonsense, delivered with the utmost gravity by Professor Drummond:
  “Oak and palm, worm and man, all start in life together. No matter what strangely different forms they may afterwards develop, no matter whether they are to live on sea or land, creep or fly, swim or walk, think or vegetate—in the embryo as it first meets the eye of Science, they are indistinguishable. The apple which fell in Newton’s garden, Newton’s dog, Diamond, and Newton himself, began life at the same point” (Natural Law in the Spiritual World, chap. 10).

Listen to what the Scripture says:

One verse of Scripture demolishes evolution

To those who bow to Scripture this one verse demolishes the evolutionary theory. It says distinctly the flesh of man is different from the flesh of the beast, and the anthropoid ape is a beast.

This is confirmed in Genesis 1 where the formula—“after his kind”—is repeated ten times. It is applied to the vegetable kingdom in verse 11, to the marine world in verse 21, and again to the winged fowl in the same verse, and finally to the beasts of the earth and cattle and everything that creeps upon the earth in verse 25. Why “after his kind”? That clearly leaves room for each species. The lion does not mate with the tigress. The eagle does not consort with the goose. The wasp does not breed with the bee. The only hybrids in creation are of man’s arrangement and they are sterile, and come to naught. “After his kind” is stamped upon creation. It shuts out the transmutation theory, it destroys evolution.

But when we come to the creation of man we do not read the words “after his kind.” Why? Because man is man and only man. In the animal creation we have the canine species, including the wolf, the fox, the jackal, the dog, etc., and the feline species, including the lion, the tiger, the panther, the cat, etc., etc., but man is man wherever he is found. He may be black or white, just as you may have a black horse and a white horse. His hair may be straight or woolly, just as you may have a dog with straight hair and another with woolly hair, but man is man wherever he is found. There is only one species of man, though several varieties, as whit; black, copper-coloured. How comes it that Moses made no mistake? We answer, Only by inspiration of God.

No human being witnessed creation, so an account of it, to be true, must be inspired of God. And it is reasonable to suppose that God who gave man language, and the power to read and write, communicated to man those things which were necessary to his understanding and happiness.

Man made in God’s image and likeness

Next we read what was never said of any creature of the lower creation:

We have been dwelling in the misty valley of man’s thoughts; we have been invited to look on the anthropoid ape as one of our recent grandfathers; but here we breathe the pure air of the mountaintop of God’s revelation. Man made in the image and likeness of God is very different from the ape-like man. Man is here placed at the head of creation, with dominion over the whole scene. There is a dignity, a God-likeness about the whole narrative of creation. As in God’s image man represents God in this lower creation; as in His likeness he has those moral and spiritual qualities of which the beast is wholly devoid. True, sin has come in, and effaced this likeness to a large extent. Man has degenerated through sin.

Nothing is said of male or female in Genesis 1 in connection with the lower creation, though, of course, we know that it was so, but it is said definitely of man,

The next chapter gives us details as to the creation of man,

It is not said of the beast that God breathed into his nostrils the breath of life. This is special to man, and whilst it is said of the beasts that they are soul and body—a living soul, and a physical body—yet this special and unique action of God in relation to man’s creation set him off as apart from the beast. As another has said, God gave man a soul of larger content. The soul of the beast perishes with his body and there is no resurrection for either. Scripture teaches that man’s body will be raised, whilst his soul is immortal. The actual word “immortal” is never used of the soul, but the fact that “this mortal shall put on immortality” is only said referring to the body points to the fact that the soul is immortal, since it does not need to put on immortality. For if the soul, which is more important than the body, were not immortal, we should have in resurrection an immortal body without a soul, which is absurd. The immortality of the soul is taken for granted as an unquestioned fact in Scripture, and woven into its very warp and woof.

Next we have the special and unique creation of woman. The beasts were not thrown into deep sleep, and ribs were not taken from their sides, and female beasts were not fashioned therefrom to be presented to their partners.

This was said of the progenitor of the human race alone, God thus showing the moral and spiritual affinity between man and woman. Nay, more, marriage was thus instituted for man. In the lower creation there is no marriage. The animals mate: man marries. We understand now why it is said, “Male and female created He them.”

Christ and the Church

Nay, further, and this is a reflection that the Christian alone can appreciate, Ephesians 5:31, quoting from Genesis 2:24, sets forth the beautiful marriage relationship as according to God, but takes occasion to point out that marriage is not accidentally an apt illustration of Christ and the Church, but that it is designedly so. We read:

In the light of this we can go back and read Genesis 2 with a wondrous beauty thrown upon it. Adam fell into a deep sleep—typical of the death of Christ. Eve was of Adam, the product in the hand of God, of the rib taken from his side; the Church is of Christ, the product of His death. Eve was presented to Adam to be his helpmeet; the Church will be presented to Christ. So in Ephesians 6 where the relationship and love between Christ and His Church are set forth as the model for marital happiness, we read:

Moreover, Paul in his epistle to the Romans writes:

The Testimony of Christ Himself

And further, Christ Himself puts His imprimatur on Genesis 1 and 2. How puny the denial of these chapters by Bishop Barnes and Rev. Henry Ward Beecher appears in the light of the statement by Christ Himself. We read:

Again we read a similar statement showing its importance:

Christ says that from the beginning God made them male and female. No, says the evolutionist, in the beginning was a speck of protoplasm. The infatuated Bishop of Birmingham says:

His ignorance of both science and the Bible is here displayed in all its crudity.

Shall we believe Bishop Barnes or the One whom he acknowledges as Master, but to whom he gives the lie direct? The fact is Bishop Barnes is not the evolution of fifty thousand generations of ape-like beings, but the degeneration of parents who sinned and fell. The tendency of the race has not been upward but downward, save where Christianity has operated, and raised man through the knowledge of God through Christ to purity of thought and word and deed, to love of God and one’s fellow-man. Put Bishop Barnes alongside the Apostle Paul. Paul’s writings do not show him to be lower in the human family, nor approximating nearer, even in the smallest degree, to those supposed ancestors of ape-like character, who began to develop a human brain.

Professors Patrick Geddes (St. Andrew’s University) and Sir J. Arthur Thompson (Aberdeen University) say, at the end of their joint book:

So evolution is still a secret. A secret is something unknown! What an admission! It is at least honest, and we can hope these professors may embrace the truth of God’s creation of man, as did Professor Romanes, who had to abandon evolutionary theories in his riper years for the solid truth of the Word of God.

They see, too, how these doctrines of “survival of the fittest”—these biological theories of evolutionists—run on parallel lines with the thoughts which led to the great war (1914-1918) with all its unspeakable brutality. They compare,
 

These professors were pretty far-seeing, for their book was printed in May, 1912.

General Friedrich von Bernhardi writing in the same year, clearly shows that he considered that evolutionary ideas were on the side of brutality and ruthlessness. He wrote:

Professor Lasson (Berlin University) says:

Again:

Again:

We get here with a vengeance the “survival of the fittest”—fittest only by reason of brute strength and ferocity, as a lion or tiger would survive an unarmed man.

A tree is known by its fruits. If evolutionary axioms translated into politics led to the awful and blighting war of 1914-1918, with all its brutality and wholesale destruction of life and its aftermath of collapse of civilization and terrible incubus of debt, and translated into religion leads to the destruction of faith in the Bible, in Christ and His atoning work, then the less we have of evolution the better. Compare von Bernhardi’s teaching and the sermon on the Mount, and we can see at a glance where evolution and where the teaching of Christ lead us.

We have seen from the Bible that:
  (1) God created man and woman.
  (2) He created man in a special way.
  (3) He created him in His image, after His likeness.
  (4) He created woman in a special way.
  (5) He set man and woman in dominion over the lower creation.
  (6) He instituted marriage.
  (7) He instituted marriage designedly to illustrate deeper and spiritual things.

To refuse all this is to refuse the whole Bible. Bishop Barnes and all likeminded are as sensible as a man who, standing under an arch, with his pick loosens and dislodges the central stone. They do it to their own destruction.

All this is further emphasized in the New Testament. We get the genealogy of the Lord Jesus Christ in Luke 3. His descent is there traced from David and Abraham, and finally we read:

Adam was thus the son of God, and by direct creation is the assertion of Scripture, which we implicitly believe. We are therefore not surprised when all the proved facts of science (not hypotheses) confirm this belief. The Scriptures say that Adam was the son of God. The evolutionist says he was the son of the ape-like man, who in turn was the son of the man-like ape, and in turn descended from lower forms, until we get to the bit of protoplasm, the origin of which is entirely unaccounted for—the whole made up of guesses and unproved theories.

Adam, “the figure of Him that was to come.”

Again, we read in Romans 5:14,

We can understand unfallen man, fresh from the hand of a Creator-God being the figure of Christ. Our whole soul revolts from the degrading theories of evolution when we see how they utterly degrade, if they do not altogether deny, the very existence of the Saviour of mankind.

Further Scriptural Testimony

The Apostle Paul writes:

Here we find death coming in, with Adam on the earth as we know it. Paul speaks of him as the progenitor of the human race, and also speaks of his transgression as recorded in Genesis 3. If the evolutionist is right, Paul is utterly wrong. If one part of God’s word is wrong what reliance can be placed on the Word of God as a whole? Absolutely none.

Again Paul tells us:

All this is untrue if evolution is true. Our plain choice is between God’s revelation and fallen man’s guesses and unproved hypotheses setting it aside. It is, guerre à outrance. The issue is plain and clear and vital.

Of course, if Adam did not exist neither did Seth nor a long list of names given us in the genealogy of our Lord. That the genealogy is correct, say from Abraham downwards, we suppose even the evolutionists would allow. Allow the evolutionists, for one moment, to be correct, where does, in the genealogy of our Lord, fable cease arid reality begin? We prefer the dignity of the Bible narrative. No other book of similar antiquity in the world has anything approaching the dignity and correctness of the Bible in the creation story. The happenings in the six days of Genesis 1 answer to the evidence of the rocks in palaeontology. Indeed in every case where fresh light has been flung upon any discrepancy between the Bible and science, the Bible has been without one exception always right. This being so how easy is it to understand that it is correct as to the genealogy of man.

The Fall of Man

As we have seen already, this is denied in toto by evolutionists. Man has not fallen, they say, but risen; sin (as we call it), they affirm, is only a going back to the crudities of a former existence. But man’s history proclaims the fall. Instead of man ascending, he is degenerating. If sin is a reality we should expect this. Take cases patent before our very eyes, for instance, that of a drunkard. Do his children rise, or is the tendency to degeneration? Assuredly to the latter. Remember that the savage is not the condition of primitive man, but the savage is the degeneration of primitive man. We have this argued out in Romans 1. The garbled accounts which are found in all ancient countries of the creation, the fall, the flood—all speak of the knowledge of these things, as presented to us in the Bible, being general, but the truth and light has been given up, and man has descended in the scale of civilization, save where Christianity has come in and uplifted him. We read:

Take religion, which is the highest expression of man’s spirit. We give a few brief extracts, italics and capitals are ours. In Max Mueller’s “Lecture on the Vedas” (the ancient hymns of India), he says:

Le Page Renouf writes in “Religion of ancient Egypt”:

Professor Th. Graebner writes:

Carl Boettcher writes:

We could give much more evidence on this line, but space forbids. We can confidently affirm that man and man’s religion have degenerated, and the only recovery has been where the light of Scripture has been received. Under our very eyes we can see this today for ourselves. Look at the prosperity of countries where the light of the Bible is allowed as compared with countries where it is withheld. Look at Protestant countries with their unforbidden Bible as compared with Roman Catholic lands, where it is denied to the common people.

Compare Protestant England with Roman Catholic Ireland; let decadent Spain and immoral infidel South America point the tale. It is said that observant travellers can tell which of the cantons of Switzerland are Protestant and which are Roman Catholic by the evidence of prosperity and cleanliness or the reverse. These are facts which cannot be gainsaid, and prove the power of God’s great revelation to man—the Bible.

The greatest Example of all

And above all, take the greatest example of religion on record—even the life of the Lord Jesus Christ. He stands alone, absolutely incomparable. If evolution were true He would have been the product of evolution, and we should find not one character like His, but multitudes. But He stands absolutely alone among men, even as the Bible stands alone among books.

There is an affinity between Christ and the Bible, so that the influence of Christ is the influence of the Bible, and the influence of the Bible is the influence of Christ. Destroy the authority of the Bible and you destroy the authority of Christ. Destroy the authority of Christ and you destroy the authority of the Bible.

You may say, what has Genesis 1 and 2 to do with Christ? We answer, everything. If Genesis 1 and 2 are untrue, then there is no fall of man, as recorded in the Scriptures, and if no fall of man the whole testimony of Scripture is false, for its testimony is at least twofold:
  (1) Adam’s sin and its consequences,
  (2) Christ’s atoning death on the cross to meet Adam’s sin and its consequences.

If Genesis 1 and 2 are not true then every claim of Christ was false, and His death as an atoning death was unnecessary, and worse than a blunder. His very names would be false. He is called the Son of God and the angels of God are bidden to worship Him as God (Heb. 1:6); He is called the Word, and equal with God, yet in substance God. This is the claim that is made for Him (John 1:1); He is declared to be the Creator of all things, visible and invisible (Col. 1:16); He is declared to be “the Lamb of God, which takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:29), a title which fulfils many an Old Testament type and shadow; He has the wonderful title of Saviour.” The Father sent the Son to he the Saviour of the world” (1 John 4:14).

All this is a mass of foolish lies, if evolution is true. “By their fruits ye shall know them” (Matt. 7:20), is a very fair test. What are the fruits of Christianity? Look at the lives of multitudes of humble believers, if you would see its direct fruits. Look at the missions of the world, the hospitals, the orphanages, the philanthropic schemes, if you would see the indirect fruits. The origin of these is found in Christian teaching.

What of evolution? We find that General von Bernhardt claims its doctrines as supporting Germany in the initiation and conduct of the great war. “The survival of the fittest,” was practically Germany’s war slogan. We can in contrast point to definite tangible efforts made by Christians for the happiness and blessing of the human race; evolution is condemned because of the lack of anything definite and tangible produced for the happiness of mankind.

Instead, it blots a God of love and grace and tenderness and pity out of the human sky, it strikes a fatal blow against Christ and the Bible, and the faith once delivered to the saints, and the saints who have believed it from Paul’s day to ours. Were the theory of evolution received absolutely, on every hand Christianity would be completely wiped out and savagery would set in without redress.

No wonder one writer says the choice is between Christ and chaos. Here without doubt is the alternative. For our part we have no hesitancy as to our choice. We welcome the bright light of Christ, and we refuse the fearful darkness of evolution. Our ancestry is not to be found behind the bars of a cage in a zoological garden, but through Adam and the creative act of God.

There are many questions that men will never be able to answer, whether it be as to the origin of life, or the origin of evil, or why God does this or does that, but we can testify that the knowledge of Christ as a personal Saviour satisfies the deepest aspirations of the heart, and renders the soul content and more than content with God’s revelation—the Bible.

To the careful and reverent student it is hall-marked with divine inspiration. It presents to us a perfect Christ, who has done a perfect work on the cross, and who has procured for the humblest believer in Him a perfect salvation.

We look not back to a bestial ancestry, but onwards and upwards to a glorious future, gained for us by Him, who became Man, through “God over all, blessed for ever,” who died on the cross to perform the mighty work of salvation, and who is soon coming for all who put their trust in Him, and when He comes “we [believers] shall be like Him; for we shall see Him as He is” (1 John 3:2).

Reader, is this prospect yours? Do not rest satisfied till it is.

Evolution leads its adherents to a very unsatisfactory blind alley. Man with all his powers lives for a few brief years and then dies. The most that evolution can do is to exhort its adherents to make the most of this life, for it holds out no prospect for the next.

How different is the ennobling thought that God has made us for Himself, and that the soul of man can only be satisfied in the knowledge of God. But let us ever remember that we come to God through Christ, who said:

In conclusion, we ask the reason why men cling so desperately to the evolutionary theory, spite of its being unproved and based on unscientific guesses?

Charles Robin (Dictionaire encyciopedique des sciences medicales), who, as an infidel, could not be accused of having any theological bias in the matter, says:

The same can be said with equal appropriateness of the whole field of evolution. Why then does it hold the ground to the extent that it does? The answer is twofold:
  (1) Because it flatters the pride of man in denying the fall, and refuses consequently man’s accountability to God.
  (2) Because if evolution is not true, then creation holds the field, which means that man is accountable to God, and being fallen needs a Saviour.

So we find scientific men attempting to bolster up a discredited theory, and unconverted theologians, wishing to be considered abreast of the times, preaching it from their pulpits and in their Sunday schools, whilst too many professors in the universities carry on the evil work of undermining the authority of Scripture in the minds of the students. Well might the Apostle Paul write in his day, by inspiration of God, of “oppositions of science falsely so called” (1 Tim. 6:20).

Behind all this is the sinister power of the arch-enemy of God and of Christ, who is arraying all his subtle forces in the last great fight between good and evil. His first recorded question, “Yea, has God said?” (Gen. 3:1), is still used by him on every hand with terrible effect.

May God use this pamphlet for His own glory, the establishment of the truth in the minds of many who are perplexed, and the deliverance of many, who have been ensnared, for Christ’s name’s sake. Amen.