George McCready Price

“ 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? ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is a very mysterious law which guards in this way the portals of the living world. And if there is one thing in nature more worth pondering for its strangeness, it is the spectacle of this vast helpless world of the dead cut off from the living by the Law of Biogenesis, and denied forever the possibility of resurrection within itself. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ Echoes of this old controversy between the two leading schools of biologists are occasionally heard; but the enthusiasm with which they set out a half century ago to solve the riddle of plant and animal life has largely given way to a purpose to discard speculation and patiently to observe and record actual facts. For with natural selection discredited in the house of its friends, and Lamarckianism under grave suspicion from want of a single well authenticated example, it is hard to see what there is left of the biological doctrine that has so dominated scientific thought for a half century. ”

“ 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. ”

“ At any rate, so far from revealing the origin of matter as a process now going on, these phenomena are an objective demonstration that all matter is more or less unstable and liable under some unknown but ever-acting force to lose some portion of that fund of energy with which it seems to have been primarily endowed. Not the evolution of matter but the degeneration of matter is the plain and unescapable lesson to be drawn from these facts. The varieties of matter may change greatly, and one variety or one chemical element may be transformed into another. ”

“ And the prophecies of the Bible have repeatedly pointed out a special message that the Church is to bear to the world in that darkest hour just before the breaking of eternal day,--a message that we now see is wonderfully adapted to this age of evolutionism in science and pantheism in philosophy. Looking down along the darkening vistas of the coming years, the great Jehovah saw how a vastly increased knowledge of His created works would be perverted into a burlesque of Creation, and how this would result in a wide-spread apostasy in which His written Word would be derided and scorned. ”

“ 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 ”

“ And by persistent use of such theories we hypnotize ourselves into the belief that we are truly scientific in method, and are dealing with objective realities, and that these learned theories are something more than pretentious masks to hide our ignorance of real nature; when in reality these theories seem to be only a material screen to shield us from an embarrassing near view of the immediate action of God in all the various phenomena of the world; for not many find it a comfortable thought thus to live continuously beneath the great Taskmaster's eye. ”

“ But further and more accurate experiments have set this matter at rest, as indeed might have been expected; for the law of gravitation itself is not more immovably established in the make-up of the universe than this magnificent law that energy cannot be created by any means which we call natural.
In all ages there have been men who have spent their lives in the vain effort to invent a machine out of which work could constantly be obtained without the expenditure upon it of an equal amount of work. ”

“ It is easy to explain any form of a push in a physical way; but gravity is not a push but a pull. And how are we to explain the method by which a body can act where it is not, how explain in detail the way by which it can reach out and pull in toward itself another separated body, and exert this pull across the immeasurably wide fields of space? ”

“ 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 ”

“ Selection cannot make a thing useful to start with, but only (possibly) make more useful what already exists. Until the newly formed buds of developing limbs or organs became decidedly "useful" to the individual or the species, would they not be in the way, merely so many hindrances, to be removed by natural selection instead of being preserved and improved? But, in this view of the matter, they argued, what single organ of any species would there be that must not thus have appeared long before it was wanted? ”

“ In how many ways do we by our theories dodge the crucial problem of how energy is really transmitted, that is, how matter can act on distant matter across seemingly vacant space. Gravity, and indeed all the forms of the attractive forces, come under this head. True, we observe certain regularities in the way in which these phenomena occur, and the phenomenon at one place seems to be somehow dependent on some exercise of force at another place. And so we invent an ingenious theory, and fortify it all around with ponderous algebraic artillery for defense against all attack. ”

“ 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. ”

“ How can we fail to see the bearings of these facts on the doctrine of the transformation of species among ordinary plants and animals, which are merely isolated and self-contained groups of cells? Do not these facts constitute strong presumptive evidence that among animals and plants, though there may be variation in plenty within certain limits, perhaps within even much wider limits than used to be thought possible, yet among these distinct organisms, little and big, new forms develop only after their ancestral type, in full accord with the record given in the first chapter of the Bible? ”

“ For the old-time friends of the Bible, the night of darkness and doubt is rapidly passing; the morning of a fuller knowledge and a fuller confidence is at hand. Gone are those agonies of doubt regarding the truthfulness of the Bible's history and the adequacy of its ethics for the needs of our modern world. ”

“ When we remember that such nonsense constituted the wisdom of the scientific world only about two centuries ago, we begin to realize the fact that the doctrine of Biogenesis is indeed a very modern doctrine. But it may be well to ask in passing, How could the people of former ages understand or appreciate the great truth of Creation as we moderns are able to do? ”

“ Those who refuse to admit the possibility of "action at a distance," who insist on inventing a connecting material medium between every observed effect and some material object with which it seems to be in causal connection, will, I suppose, have to be allowed to exercise their ingenuity in any way to satisfy their minds, even though they may have to revise their theory with every fresh discovery in optics or radioactivity. ”

“ Would we not have to attribute to each constituent of this living substance the properties which we now attribute to the whole?--that is, the properties which we attribute to masses of protoplasmic units, such as plants, or birds, or human beings?
We look at ourselves and we feel sure that we have a separate and real existence, that we are rationally conscious and are endowed with choice and free will. We can say almost as much for an intelligent bird or dog. ”

“ But no scientist of to-day doubts that all the physiological processes of animals or of plants conform exactly to the law of the conservation of energy that energy is neither created nor destroyed by any means known to science. In other words, the amount of energy in our world, if science can at all determine such a matter, seems to be a fixed quantity, gradually being dissipated into space, it is true, but momently replenished from the sun at exactly the same rate now as hundreds or thousands of years ago. ”

“ Accordingly, we might establish the Evolution doctrine by showing that matter can be made de novo, that energy can be created or increased in amount, that life can be made from the not-living, and that new and distinct forms of life can be produced in modern times,--all by natural law as now prevailing.
Or we can practically demonstrate the historical reality of a direct Creation at some time in the past, if we can show that the net results of all modern science tend to prove that the forces and processes now in operation can never account for the origin of things ”

“ From the materialistic point of view, nobody knows why protoplasm acts as it does, least of all, why some masses of protoplasm act one way, and exact duplicates act differently. But if, on the other hand, we look beyond the facts and methods of physics and chemistry, and even beyond the most plausible theories of genetics, we can readily explain this remarkable action of the cells as the result of the will of an ever acting, omniscient, almighty God. Certainly nothing else is adequate to explain the behavior of living cells. ”

“ All separate masses of protoplasm, such as the one-celled amoeba or the individual cells of our own bodies, are constantly taking in food and as constantly throwing off wastes. Hence, in the very nature of things, it is impossible to find any mass of protoplasm absolutely pure. And a further and impassable barrier to chemical analysis, or indeed to any adequate scientific examination, lies in the fact that we can never deal with protoplasm exactly as it is, since no analysis can be performed upon it without destroying its life. ”

“ Finally, there is the further conclusion, the only conclusion now possible, if there is no definite order in which the fossils occur, namely, that life in all its varied forms must have originated on the globe by causes not now operative, and this Creation of all the types of life may just as reasonably have taken place all at once, as in some order prolonged over a long period.
As I have pointed out in my "Fundamentals," a strict scientific method may destroy the theory of Successive Ages, and it may show that there has been a great world catastrophe. ”

“ This inorganic world is staked off from the living world by barriers that have never yet been crossed from within. No change of substance, no modification of environment, no chemistry, no electricity, nor any form of energy, nor any evolution, can endow a single atom of the mineral world with the attribute of life. Only by the bending down into this dead world of some living form can these dead atoms be gifted with the properties of vitality ”

“ The physical laws may explain the inorganic world; the biological laws may account for the development of the organic. But of the point where they meet,--of that strange border-land between the dead and the living,--science is silent. It is as if God had placed everything in earth and heaven in the hands of nature, but had reserved a point at the genesis of life for His direct appearing." [6]
It would be superfluous to emphasize further this great outstanding fact that the not-living cannot become the living by any of the processes which we call natural ”