Ralph Vary Chamberlin

“ A little thought shows, in fact, that the relationship of the doctrine to Naturalism Is precisely the same as that of any other law of nature. It is in exactly the same position as gravitation; and one is the equivalent of Naturalism no more than the other. Evolution does not add at all to the general argument for Naturalism. It is merely the latest link in the same chain that science from the first has been forging. From the beginning science has been revealing law and order in Nature ”

“ Stripping off all surplusage and coming to the heart of the matter, the underlying cause of the controversy with which we are dealing has always been a difference in the philosophic interpretation of Nature. Since the days of early Greece there have been men who saw Nature as something designed and sustained by a conscious intelligence; while there have been others who saw nothing in or behind Nature excepting so-called natural causes, forces acting blindly and inevitably. Either God controls Nature, it has been thought, or else Nature runs itself by virtue of blind resident causes. ”

“ It is very interesting and instructive to note that while theologians of fifty and of twenty-five years ago thus so widely and so warmly opposed evolution as making for pure Materialism, most of those of the early part of the eighteenth century and especially those of earlier times did not look upon the evolution of species from species or even their origin spontaneously from inorganic matter as having any theological bearing other than as "instances of that various wonder of the world which in devout minds is food for devotion." ”

“ He thus first conceived of an evolution definitely regulated by something akin to law. Heraclitus was particularly impressed with the constant and orderly changes occurring in the universe and, accordingly, saw in movement or change—in an evolution—the universal law or cosmic process. Among the Greeks the evolution theory reached its highest and most refined development in the master mind of Aristotle. Aristotle was much more than a mere speculator ”

“ Through the collapse of the ancient classic civilization and the crushing of Greek freedom of thought, the mental continuity of the kind of investigation and thinking represented so brilliantly in Aristotle was completely broken. For nearly two thousand years no real successor to Aristotle appeared, the writings on Nature that have come down to us from these long centuries representing a surprisingly lower plane. Among the Romans the poet Lucretius was much impressed with the evolution idea ”

“ In the last fifty years the theory of descent has been subjected to such a test as has never been given to any other scientific theory; but through this it stands out clearer and stronger than ever, insomuch that it has rightly to be considered the best demonstrated of all scientific laws. The factors concerned in the process have not been elucidated, and are subject of controversy; but the fact of evolution in the organic world is no longer considered open to question, and is the basis of all productive work in biology today. ”

“ Hence, we can easily understand the tremendous storm raised fifty years ago when the theory was revived with so much vigor by Spencer, Darwin, and others. There were then many opponents of religion, who short-sightedly claimed that the establishment of the truth of evolution would be the last link in the evidence required for the complete proof of Naturalism; and there were likewise many theologians who with the utmost folly acquiesced in this opinion that Naturalism and Evolution were one and inseparable. ”

“ The Naturalism of recent times has been essentially Materialism, embracing the view that the Universe can be reduced wholly to "matter and motion." We see, then, that it is over the questions of efficient causation that controversy has been especially waged and can understand why so much importance has been attached to the matter of origins. Now evolution, in the ordinary acceptation of the word, deals essentially with the origin of organic forms and in the minds of many has seemed thereby to bear with great weight upon this question of causation. ”

“ After so much had been accomplished the divine fiat issued and the waters of the earth brought forth fish and other sea animals, and again the earth was caused in like manner to produce land forms and plants. The whole organic creation is thus represented largely as a growth or crude evolution process initiated and controlled by the divine power or word. It will readily be noted by the reader that this, if exception be made to the interpolation regarding the moulding of man, is precisely the method of organic creation pictured in Genesis in a more refined and spiritual form. ”

“ The main features of the Babylonian account of creation seems to have passed to the Phoenicians, Assyrians, and other neighboring peoples, and through the Phoenicians to the Greeks, the fertile genius of whose philosophers took hold of the evolution idea and elaborated and extended it in a way at times strongly suggestive of modern conceptions. Anaximander shows clearly the influence of the Babylonian account. He was the first to suggest that man must have originated from lower forms. ”

“ Men came to accept the view that life comes only from life. This resulted in the view that in the evolution process new beings must have come only from other living things. All living beings had sprung directly from the limited number created directly in the beginning. In the seventeenth century and during most of the eighteenth it became generally accepted by theologians and scientists alike that all closely related species had had a common genetic origin from a single ancestral form. ”

“ Linnaeus came soon to enunciate the dogma that each existing species was created as such with all its distinguishing features, and that there were upon the earth today just as many species as had been thus independently created in the beginning. ”

“ While the theory of descent seemed for a time to many to do away with creation and the necessity of a Creator altogether, the same thing has been true of various other laws of nature at the time of their first effective enunciation. ”

“ God neither formed man with bodily hands nor did he breathe upon him with throat and lips." He advocated the growth doctrine and argued that even though living things come into being from other substances or things, God is none the less their creator as the ultimate author of the productive power according to which or as a result of which the beings arose. This productiveness was involved potentially in the primary creation. ”

“ Nature was not directly studied, but the ablest minds of these times were in the Church, and among them speculation upon matters treated in scripture and the earlier church fathers was rife, Among these matters those involved in the creation were prominent. Among many other questions that as to the mode of creation was naturally much considered. A dominant belief in this matter, based upon the passage in Genesis referring to the formation of man, was that God moulded directly with his hands all things, both living and dead. ”

“ At all times, however, there was present along with this belief another one equally ancient and rather more scriptural, according to which creation in the beginning was largely potential. According to this the impress of the Creator was given once for all, and under its power the actual formation and unfolding of natural things was even yet continuing—the creation occurring largely through the operation of secondary causes as an evolution process. ”

“ On the contrary, many of the ablest men of the Church not only accepted the doctrine of evolution, but extensively developed the theory as describing the method or one very important method of creation. ”

“ Finally, when the old and familiar doctrine of evolution was put forward in the middle of the nineteenth century upon a scientific basis, theological belief had become so set and developed about the Linnaean dogma of special creation that the churchmen, as before indicated, vigorously assailed the evolution theory in its new dress with its indication of control by natural law and processes as nothing short of pure materialism. ”

“ That the earth is spherical, that the sky is not made of metal, that the earth moves about the sun, that it is very old, that granite and related rocks had once been in a molten state that Jerusalem is not at the precise center of the earth's surface as stated by Ezekial—each of these views in turn was shown to be unscriptural and was thought to militate against religion and was accordingly opposed for a time by Christian theologians. ”

“ Basil in the eastern church declared that in the beginning at the command of God the waters and earth were gifted with productive powers, and that the same command which gave this generative power to the earth in the beginning should be effective until the end of the world. ”

“ In truth, however, a large amount of the modern conflict has been either over nonessentials or has been due to mutual failure on the part of the combatants to understand each other. If these would stop long enough to agree upon definitions and to reach some real understanding of each other’s meaning and point of view, they would in most cases end by agreement. ”

“ In the best minds of those earlier centuries there was never so much as a well-defined suspicion that theological faith was in any way opposed by the phenomena of the natural origination of the different forms of plants and animals. ”

“ Augustine held still more free and positive opinions in this direction and completely opposed the current of belief as to a creation "like that by which a toy maker brings into existence a box of playthings." "To suppose that God formed man from the dust with bodily hands is very childish. ”

“ According to the main Babylonian account, for we have recovered a number, the earth was first given shape in the midst of this watery chaos as a flat body over which, as a second step, a solid vault or firmament was formed to keep back the waters from the surface. ”

“ Furthermore, a vast number of facts as to the geological history and geographical distribution af animals, as to their comparative anatomy and development, were being accumulated which seemed inconsistent with any other theory than that of a common descent for all living things. ”