Theodore Graebner

“ Again we ask, when there is such orderly arrangement and plan throughout nature, should the orderly plan of plant and animal life be regarded as a proof of evolution? Certainly, atoms have not evolved from atoms, nor planets from planets.
And again, since omnipotence alone can account for the "sweet influences of the Pleiades," the "bringing forth of Mazzaroth"—the constellations of the heavens in their nightly revolutions,—why resist the conviction that omnipotence, voiced forth in the beginning, accounts for the life on earth that now exists? ”

“ Thus do we find, that the greatest of Darwinians, on a mature consideration of the subject, reached a conclusion which makes evolution as a theory quite unnecessary; he found that the world is ruled not by blind forces inherent in matter but by Supreme Intelligence. And in their effort to keep themselves from being engulfed in the apostacy of a great leader, the scientists, as by a unanimous chorus, announce that the scientific dogmas which enter more or less essentially into their atheistic conception of the universe, are nothing but surmises! ”

“ Each plant, each animal, created in its own place in the scale of living thing, but each created as a species,—"after their kind," the phrase repeated after each creative act of the third, fifth, and sixth day, except with reference to man, who was not created as a "species" but after the image of God.
But the evidences of design are yet of a higher nature than we have so far considered. There is not only Creative Intelligence at work in the pollen of flowers, the breathing of sponges, and the eagle's orb of vision; Mind dominates the universe as a whole. ”

“ In all the domain of natural science there are no wonders more amazing than those of instinct. The subject is simply inexhaustible. Moreover, every animal is absolutely dependent on instinctively performed actions and habits. The life-story of many wasps, of the various ants,—someone has called the brain of the ant the most wonderful speck of protoplasm in the world,—and of the insects generally, is bound up with instincts that partly interlock marvellously with the life-story of plants, and which are, even viewed in themselves, the greatest wonders of creation. ”

“ Science is, indeed, only concerned with things that can be demonstrated by observation and from experience; and since no one has seen the beginning of matter, science is very properly not concerned with it. But evolution is not a science. It is a hypothesis, a theory. It is an explanation proposed for certain phenomena. 'And we have a right to demand that, if it wants recognition even as a theory, it must explain those phenomena. Now the principle of evolution is: All things have developed through certain forces which inhere in matter. ”

“ Compare all that has been said by scientists themselves about the evolutionary theory, and what remains? This, only, that some how, we do not know when, life arose, and some how, we do not know by what laws, one form evolved from another, until we and the world about us have become what we are now. Now, the fact that no laws have so far been discovered by scientists to account for this presumed development of all things by inherent forces, is very significant and the conclusions which logically follow from it deserve our attention. ”

“ As useless rudiments they would be quite as likely to survive in one place as in another. If spurs could not have been preserved by natural selection through their rudimentary stage, why assume that they have been evolved according to this law? If they could survive through the critical rudimentary period till they became of use, why not assume that their evolution was continued according to the same law? ”

“ Nor, indeed, do evolutionists hesitate to express an opinion concerning the origin of matter and force. The universe, as it exists to-day, is made up of matter disposed in various forms,—stars, rock, plants, animals,—and endowed with energy in various forms; and from the earliest age of speculation, as we have seen, the human mind conceived of a time in which there was unorganized matter, substance without form. Like the ancient Greek philosophers, evolutionists to-day try to formulate a working hypothesis to account for the origin of the universe. ”

“ The Christian believer may admire the achievements of science without being carried away by the speculations of scientists. Great is the progress of modern medicine, so great, that even the past ten years have witnessed great advances in treating disease. Chemistry has developed greater marvels than was ever ascribed to the wizard's wand by Oriental poets. What astounding performances in applied science—the Panama Canal, the Hudson Tunnels, the development of the automobile and of the airplane, and the perfection of the telephone and the moving picture! ”

“ Since Darwin's solution, Natural Selection, was discarded, twenty or thirty years ago, many other solutions have been propounded, but none has received the assent of even a respectable group of scientists, let alone by all. These solutions, —such as the theories of de Vries and Mendel, are frankly no more than guesses based on certain observation in plant life and insect life and their originators by no means assert that they have found a law by which the universe can be accounted for. But if there is no universal law, there is only chance. ”

“ There is nothing more wonderful and mysterious in nature than the instincts of bees. What can be more remarkable than that instinct of the workers which causes them to prevent the queen from stinging to death the young queens in their cells? Here we see the instinct of the workers opposing that of the queen, and thus saving the colony and insuring the propagation of the species. And yet at other but proper times the workers permit the old queen to kill the young ones in their cells. ”

“ Darwin's views, it is our clear conviction that, as the evidence stands, it is not absolutely proven that a group of animals, having all the characters exhibited by species in nature, has ever been originated by selection, whether artificial or natural." And again. "Our acceptance of the Darwinian hypothesis must be provisional so long as one link in the chain of evidence is wanting; and so long as all the animals and plants certainly produced by selective breeding from a common stock are fertile with one another, that link will be wanting." ”

“ Miller, "that the chain of being, from the lowest to the highest form of life, should be, in some degree, a continuous chain; that the various classes of existence should shade into one another, so that it often proves a matter of no little difficulty to point out the exact line of demarcation where one class or family ends and another class or family begins. The naturalist passes from the vegetable to the animal tribes, scarcely aware, amid the perplexing forms of intermediate existence, at what point he quits the precincts of the one, to enter on those of the other. ”

“ They had brought all science to the feet of Darwin. The few benighted dissenters who still held out against the doctrine were looked upon as not worthy even of contempt. The whole world had adopted the creed of evolution. Was it wantonness then, or was it conscience, that prompted Huxley in what is now a historically famous speech, delivered at the unveiling of a statue to Darwin in the Museum at South Kensington, to openly declare that it would be wrong to suppose "that an authoritative sanction was given by the ceremony to the current ideas concerning evolution?" ”

“ Scientists as a rule disclaim any intention to account, on the basis of their hypothesis, for the origin of matter. When it is suggested to them that any theory of origins should also account for the FIRST ORIGIN, the beginning of things, they direct us to philosophy: "Evolution is not concerned with the origin of matter; it takes matter for granted; the origin of matter is properly a philosophical and not a scientific problem." ”

“ Again we say, if we already admit that the various great types of animal life could not originate without a special creative act of God, then why should we not accept the record of Genesis which says that the various species of plants and the various species of animals were created, each a separate species, in the beginning? Once admit special creative acts, and there is no longer any need for a hypothesis of evolution. ”

“ If the theory of evolution is contradicted as we believe by the data of experimental science, by the history of civilization, by the facts especially of religion, more especially of Christianity, then the question is justifiable: Why do scientists uphold the evolutionary theory in some form or other, in spite of such absence of proof and such insufficiency of the hypothesis? ”

“ Our point, however, is that there is such a tremendous difference between the intellectual and moral faculties of man and the barely instinctive impulses of the lower creatures, that no one can see any connection between the two, unless there is some serious defect in his own mental or moral perceptions. Every instinct and conviction of the human mind rises in indignant repudiation of the theory of man's descent. ”

“ Robert Patterson, such a theory tends to 'obliterate a belief in the divine origin and sanction of morality, and in the existence of a future life of rewards and punishments, and to promote the disorganization of society, and the degradation of man to the level of the brutes, living only under the laws of their brutal instincts.' Such a theory is dishonoring to man and offensive to God. ”

“ What reason has a Christian to surrender his faith on account of the contradiction of scientists? He has the oracles of God, the sure Word of Him Who created all things in six natural days. And if he but escape the fascination of scientific speculations, and study the works of God without bias, he will find in Nature nothing that does not agree with the Book. ”

“ Life on earth exists only through a combination of very complex physical conditions. These conditions are such as cannot, in their combination, be referred to chance, Fairhurst says, in his "Organic Evolution Considered:" "The simple substances which constitute the earth are of such kinds and are found in such relative quantities as not only to render life possible, but also to contribute to the well-being of man as an intelligent and moral agent. I look upon the concurrence of all these things, according to any theory of chance, as being entirely impossible. ”

“ How could these instincts in the workers, which act in exactly opposite ways by just the right times for the welfare of the community, have ever been evolved? Or how could that instinct have arisen which causes two queens when engaged in combat to refrain from inflicting the mortal sting if they would mutually destroy each other, and thus leave the hive without a queen?—acting as if they knew that the life of one of them was necessary for the welfare of the community. ”

“ Since Darwin we have been accustomed to consider the concept 'species' as something insecure and unstable. The whole organic world must be thought of as fluid if the evolution theory is to find room for action. It required, indeed, all the great investigator's keenness to fence his theory against the difficulty which the lack of transitional forms occasioned, and against the fact that the rise of a new species has never been observed, much more against the fact that all processes in artificial breeding have not sufficed to fix permanently the changes which have been attained. ”

“ If a materialistic conception of the universe is to prevail, if evolution in some form is to be accepted, we must have a universe of chance, not of a plan which spans the remotest star and the soul of the new-born infant in one tremendous arc. But it is highly instructive to observe how the scientists in 1903 met Wallace's argument. ”

“ Evolution represents the history of our race as a constant climb, from brute or near-brute beginnings, to ever higher forms of civilization, until the heights which our race has reached in the present century were attained. In reality, the reverse process, a constant and invariable process of degeneration characterizes the history of nations and peoples. Where Christianity entered as a factor, as in the history of Western Europe and in the results of Christian missions in heathen lands, we can indeed observe a rise out of barbaric or savage conditions to refinement and culture. ”

“ Then comes the question, Why do some live rather than others? If all the individuals of each species were exactly alike in every respect, we could only say it is a matter of chance. But they are not alike. We find that they vary in many different ways. Some are stronger, some swifter, some hardier in constitution, some more cunning. An obscure color may render concealment more easy for some, keener sight may enable others to discover prey or escape from an enemy better than their fellows. Among plants the smallest differences may be useful or the reverse. ”

“ Here the belief in one Supreme Being is clearly set forth. And yet this faith in one God in the course of time degenerated into a worship of 33,000 divinities—until Gautama the Buddha evolved a system that denied the very existence of God.
Turning to Greece we have the testimony of Prof. Max Mueller to this effect: "When we ascend to the distant heights of Greek history the idea of God, as the Supreme Being, stands before us as a simple fact." ”

“ Now observe how, in the following, the geologist leans upon the evolutionist: "The life of the globe has changed with the progress of time. Each epoch has had its peculiar species, or peculiar groups of species. Moreover, the succession of life has followed a grand law of progress, involving under a single system a closer and closer approximation in the species, as time moved on, to those which now exist. It follows, therefore, that identity of species of fossils proves approximate identity of age." Let us bear this in mind. Dana takes for granted the evolutionary process. ”

“ Turning to plant life, even the amateur student cannot fail to observe that the entire world of plants is built on a beautiful system which argues most powerfully not for accidental arrangement but for plan. ”

“ The laws according to which atoms unite,—so that, for instance, the hydrogen atom each unites with two atoms of oxygen, and so down the list of all known existences,—these laws are among the assured results of scientific study. Now, the entire science of chemistry in all its branches is built upon the axiom that molecules are absolutely unalterable and that molecules of the same kind are always absolutely identical. A molecule of water is always and invariably composed of two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen. ”