George McCready Price

“ If there has actually been this succession of life on the globe, then some form of genetic connection between these successive types is the intuitive conclusion of every thinking mind. But if there is no positive evidence that certain types are essentially older than others, if this succession of life is not an actual scientific fact, then Darwinism or any other form of evolution has no more scientific value than the vagaries of the old Greeks—in short, from the standpoint of true inductive science it is a most gigantic hoax, historically scarce second to the Ptolemaic astronomy. ”

“ We are so prone to think that if only our microscopes were a little stronger, if only we could devise more effective methods of staining or of chemical analysis or chemical synthesis, we might really find out what life is, or what matter itself is; in short, that we might be able to solve in a scientific way the old, old riddle of existence. But already we have about reached the limits of the powers of the microscope; and even if we could devise a way of seeing the ultimate structures of which protoplasm is composed, how would we be any better off? ”

“ Inductive Geology can never prove creation. It may remove obstructions which have hitherto obscured this idea, but this is the utmost limit of any true science. Inductive Geology removes forever the succession-of-life idea, and thus may suggest the only seeming alternative, viz., Creation as the definite act of the Infinite God. Before this awful yet sublime fact, with all the fogs of evolution and metaphysical subtleties cleared away, the human mind stands to-day as never before within historic times. ”

“ If each of these opposed schools of scientists are right in what they deny, the whole theoretical foundation for the origin of new kinds of animals and plants is swept away,--absolutely gone. For if an individual really cannot transmit what he has acquired in his lifetime, how can he transmit what he has not got himself, and what none of his ancestors ever had? And if natural selection cannot start a single organ of a single type, what is the use of discussing its supposed ability to improve them after the machinery is all built? ”

“ The venerable scheme of a life succession becomes only the taxonomic or classification series of the world that existed before this disaster, and it becomes the business of our science to find out how many and what deposits were due to this event, and what were accumulated during the unknown period of previous existence. Those of us who wish to speculate can then let our imaginations have free play as to the uncounted ages before that event; but the "phylogenic series" as a rational scientific theory is in limbo forever. ”

“ Even His universe partakes so much of His prerogative of infinity that it is utterly beyond the compass of our finite minds. Indeed, if either the Bible or the book of nature contained nothing beyond what we could easily comprehend, would it not diminish our reverence and awe for the One behind them, Whom we now regard as infinite in power and in wisdom?
True, the natural human heart cannot bear this thought of the direct acting throughout nature of the infinite Creator. It brings us too close beneath His gaze in our sinful shortcoming and nakedness. ”

“ Now, if no one can deny this sudden change of climate over half the world or so at least, is it not extremely unscientific to deny that this same cause, whatever it may have been, was quite competent to bring about a good many other changes, and the extinction of numerous other species which we are so often reminded must imply the lapse of untold ages of time? ”

“ But if this tireless ministry reminds man of his own spiritual nakedness and insular selfishness, it serves also to remind him that it is only the free gift of a righteousness not his own that can clothe the ashamed soul cowering beneath the eye of infinite Purity and unselfish Love.
In our natural state we are like the dead, inorganic matter. Only by a new life that must be imparted to us from above, a real, individual, new creation, can we become alive spiritually. ”

“ What then can we take as the general lesson to be learned from the stubborn way in which, for over a hundred years, the world has followed this hypnotic suggestion of folly, that we might explain our genesis and being from the scientific standpoint? One of the lessons—there may be others—is that science knows nothing about origins, and that, in speculating along these lines, the cosmological taint will always vitiate the accuracy of our conclusions and debauch the true spirit of induction. ”

“ On the contrary, its sole function is to prevent evolution. In its action it is destructive merely,--not constructive,--causing death and extinction, not life and progression. Death cannot produce life; and though natural selection may produce the death of the unfit, it cannot produce the fit, far less evolve the fittest. It may permit the fit to survive by not killing them off, if they are already in existence ”

“ As Rama looks across the ocean of the universe, and sees its surface blend in the distant horizon with the dipping sky, and as he considers if indeed a path might be built far out into the almost immeasurable space, so we gaze over the ocean of the ages, but no sign of a shore shows itself to our view. ”

“ Lions and monkeys, hippopotami and crocodiles, with elephants, hyenas, and rhinoceroses, now live beneath the palms, mimosas, acacias, and other tropical plants represented in the Eocene and Miocene beds. What is there to hinder us from believing that they all lived there together in that olden time? Surely it would be the very irony of scientific fate if forms now so closely connected in life should in death be so divided. ”

“ Let us place vividly in our imagination the picture of the two great kingdoms of nature,--the inorganic and the organic,--as these now stand in the light of the Law of Biogenesis. What essentially is involved in saying that there is no spontaneous generation of life? ”

“ Abandoned forever are all those futile attempts at compromise, in a vain and painful endeavor to translate the record of Creation into the language of a pseudo-science now rapidly being outgrown, and to adapt the plan of salvation to the false standards of an artificial age that seems to be rapidly disintegrating before the Church's very eyes. She now realizes that her Bible is more accurate than the world's science, her simple gospel wiser than its philosophy. ”

“ Do we understand all natural processes? At some time life was not in existence on our globe. All agree that it had a beginning. Even if created by the great Creator, the living was at some time formed from the not-living or the not-material. It does not take even Huxley's famous 'act of philosophic faith' to believe that. So that, in spite of all the haze that has been thrown about this question, the Biblical creation of the organic from the inorganic is no more contrary to, or even outside of, natural law than is evolution.... ”

“ Must we not say that every possible form of the development theory is hereby ruled out of court? There can be no thought of the gradual development of organic nature by every-day processes in a world where such facts prevail. Rather must we say, with the force of the accumulated momentum of all that has been won by modern science, that, instead of the animals and plants on our world having arisen by a long-drawn-out process of change and development of one kind into another, there must have been just such a literal Creation at the beginning as the Bible describes. ”

“ The abnormal character of most of the fossiliferous deposits, the sudden world-wide change of climate they record, the marked degeneration in all organic forms in passing from the older to the modern world, together with the great outstanding fact that human beings, with thousands of other living species of animals and plants have at this great world-crisis left their fossils in the rocks all over the world, prove beyond a possible doubt that our once magnificently stocked world met with a tremendous catastrophe some thousands of years ago, before the dawn of history. ”

“ True, the energy we are constantly employing seems to come to us from the sun; but we must remember that the sun and its family of the solar system, including the earth, were all made at the same time, that they are bound together as parts of an indissoluble whole. Accordingly, no one can say that the total amount of energy called into existence at the creation of our solar system is being added to at the present time. At any rate, so far as modern science can judge of the matter, the total amount of energy available for our world is a fixed quantity ”

“ The food for a developing embryo might, for aught that we know, be conveyed to it direct from the ultimate laboratories of nature, and it thus be built up by protoplasm in the usual way, without the medium of a parent form—other than the great Father of all. Or would it be any less according to natural law to believe that a bird passed through all the usual stages of embryonic development from the not-living up to the full-fledged songster of the skies in one day—the fifth day of creation? ”

“ It is degeneration and not upward evolution that is now opened up before our astonished eyes by this peep into the ultimate laboratories of nature; and he is surely a blind observer who cannot read in these facts the grand truth that all this substance called matter with which science deals in her manifold studies must at some time in the past, I care not when, have been called into existence in some manner no longer operative. ”

“ And my Fact Number Four, which will complete this line of argument in illustrating the antagonism between the facts of the rocks and the theory of life succession, is that the rivers of the world, which of course are the agents to which I have referred, in traveling across the country, act precisely as if they knew nothing of the varying ages of the rocks, but on the contrary treat them all alike as if they were of the same age, and as if they began sawing at them all at the same time. ”