Creationism

“ The ability to create life from the not-living implies the ability to make full-grown trees or birds or beasts in twenty-four hours, instead of waiting for months or years, as is usual at the present time.
As we have already found regarding matter and energy, so of life. The record in Genesis is confirmed, for modern science compels us to believe in Creation as the only possible origin of life,--a Creation entirely different from anything now going on, and one that can never be made to fit into any scheme of uniformitarian evolution. ”

“ M. Hoernes, for instance, writes: “The Cosmogonies, i.e., the theories of creation, of all nations ascribe the origin of man to a supernatural act of creation, whereby the Creator is imagined as a human being, because at the intellectual stage corresponding to these notions something created could only be conceived as something formed, something constructed.” Thus the theory of creation, and the Christian doctrine of the genesis of man, is disposed of as a notion of the lower intellect. “On the contrary, we are taught by science to look upon the highest mammals as our nearest blood-relatives.” ”

“ And the doctrine of Evolution, in so far as it has been shown to be true, does but fill out in detail the declaration that we are 'fearfully and wonderfully made; marvellous are Thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well.' There is nothing in all that Science has yet taught, or is on the way to teach, which conflicts with the doctrine that we are made in the Divine Image, rulers of the creation around us by a Divine superiority, the recipients of a Revelation from a Father in Heaven, and responsible to judgment by His Law. ”

“ And it much more exactly answers to what we mean by a miracle than it did under the old theory of creation before Evolution was made a scientific doctrine. For under that old theory the creation of living creatures stood on the same footing as the creation of metals or other inorganic substances. It was part of that beginning which had to be taken for granted, and which for that reason lay outside of the domain of Science altogether. But if we accept the two evolutions, the creation of life, if unaccounted for, presents itself as a direct interference in the actual history of the world. ”

“ For myself, I am not conscious that in examining the theory of evolution I have been influenced by my belief in what is called revealed religion. I have, at all events, studiously excluded from the argument all that has been inculcated by the Hebrew or the Christian records as authorized or inspired teachings, and have treated the Mosaic account of the creation like any other hypothesis of the origin of man and the other animals. ”

“ An evolutionist, therefore, who denies the fact of creation, goes as far beyond the evidence which science offers as if he had asserted his belief in "the Maker of heaven and earth."
2. But then evolution does clearly offer us a theory as to how the world came to be what it now is, and in this we are told it contradicts the Bible and the unvarying faith of Christendom. We have here a clear issue raised between two alternative theories—the one the theory of Darwin, the other the theory of "special creation" and they are mutually destructive. ”

“ In the two accounts imperfectly fused together in Genesis, and also in the third account of which we have indications in the book of Job and in the Proverbs, there is presented, often with the greatest sublimity, that same early conception of the Creator and of the creation—the conception, so natural in the childhood of civilization, of a Creator who is an enlarged human being working literally with his own hands, and of a creation which is "the work of his fingers." ”

“ Whatever additional factors may be added to natural selection—and Darwin himself fully admitted that there might be others—the theory of an evolution process in the formation of the universe and of animated nature is established, and the old theory of direct creation is gone forever. In place of it science has given us conceptions far more noble, and opened the way to an argument for design infinitely more beautiful than any ever developed by theology. ”

“ What splendor, too, is seen in the endless processes of creation described in these words of the Lord—"As one earth shall pass away, and the heavens thereof, even so shall another come, and there is no end to my works." Science settles to its sure foundations in that doctrine. It is, in a way, and within certain limits—to put it in modern phrase—a sort of "evolution and devolution," with each succeeding wave in the process of the "evolution" rising to still higher states of excellence and grandeur and glory. ”

“ The Scientific Genesis attributes the appearance of every living creature upon the earth to a law of "evolution," by which one thing constantly overlaps another, forming a sort of stairway for lower organisms to climb into higher, without regard to "kind," or even orders, genera, or species.
6. The Scientific Genesis distinctly takes issue with that of the Bible respecting the divine origin of man, and insists that he has been climbing up from protoplasmic matter, through a thousand other and lower organisms, until he finally leaped from an anthropoid ape into man. ”

“ If, taking this point of view, we were to explain the origin of the first terrestrial organisms, from which all the others are descended, as due to the action of a personal Creator acting according to a definite plan, we should of course have to renounce all scientific knowledge of the process, and pass from the domain of true science to the completely distinct domain of poetical faith. By assuming a supernatural act of creation we should be taking a leap into the inconceivable. ”

“ I have yet to learn that the main propositions of this essay can be seriously challenged.
In the essays (II., III.) on the narrative of the Creation, I have endeavoured to controvert the assertion that modern science supports, either the interpretation put upon it by Mr. Gladstone, or any interpretation which is compatible with the general sense of the narrative, quite apart from particular details. The first chapter of Genesis teaches the supernatural creation of the present forms of life; modern science teaches that they have come about by evolution. ”

“ The most important facts which we have to mention, as bearing upon the position of the Christian doctrine of the creation of man in reference to the evolution theory, have been treated of in Chapter I, A. We have especially convinced ourselves of the fact, that the new, even if it has its secondary causes, and comes into existence in gradual development, is no less a creation of God, and has no less the full value of the new, than if it were created instantaneously. ”

“ Yet, just as at the time that Darwin's views were first made public, many thought that they were subversive of Christianity, so, even now, some whose acquaintance with the problem and its history is of a superficial character, are inclined when they see the word creation, even with the qualifying adjective "special" prefixed to it, used in contradistinction to evolution, to imagine that the theory of creation, and of course of a Creator, must fall to the ground if evolution should be proved to be the true explanation of living things and their diversities. ”

“ So to him who can see this truth it becomes a matter of indifference how far the history of the creation coincides with the facts of modern science. There are certain general statements here made, of even scientific accuracy, which the Divine Mind has used as a basis for the spiritual parable it sought to evolve; as, for instance, that the development of the earth proceeded by certain progressive and orderly steps, or that it became successively prepared to bring forth certain forms of life first the lower grades of vegetation, then the higher, then the fish, then the beasts, then man. ”

“ Skeletons and fossils of animals and plants which do not now exist, found deep below the earth's surface, favor this theory. This view neither ignores nor rejects the Bible teaching that man was a direct and perfect creation, made in the mental and moral image of his Maker, and not a development by a process of evolution, probably common to the remainder of creation. This view would in no sense invalidate, but would support, the Bible's claim, that nature as it is today teaches that an Intelligent Being ordered it, and was its first cause. ”

“ The Bible, therefore, and science agree in the truth that existing causes have been in full force since the creation of animals; and that since that period the exercise of creative power has been limited to the organic world. This has a curious bearing, not often thought of, on modern theories of evolution as compared with the teaching of the Bible. In one important sense, absolute creation, in so far as the inorganic universe is concerned, is in our Mosaic narrative limited to the production of matter and force at first. All else is called making, forming, or appointing. ”

“ I maintain that the man who replies in the affirmative does an injustice to his reasoning faculties and outrages the common sense of his fellows. The theory of creation is absolutely opposed to that of evolution on every point.
Now let us examine the second narrative, as given in the second and third chapters of Genesis. Here we have a direct contradiction of the story in the first chapter; for we are told that god created the earth, the heavens, vegetation and man, but not woman, all in one day. ”

“ There are three of these discrete degrees In the whole creation and in every part of it. They exist in the least things and in the greatest; in every mineral, plant, animal, and man. It is universal law of existence. The three essentials of the Divine nature are love, wisdom, and the two combined in use, or in the thing or being created. Taking the whole of being and creation into view, we have the Creator, the infinite source of all substance and power; the spiritual universe and the material universe. ”

“ Certainly the forming presupposes a matter out of which man is formed. And, on the other hand, where the Bible speaks of single beings in the kingdoms long before created and perfected, of the individual man who is originated by generation and birth, of single plants and animals—in general, of single processes and phenomena in the world long before perfected, of wind and waves, of rain and flames, which altogether have their natural causes of origin—it speaks of them all precisely in the same way as when describing their first creation as works of God. ”

“ It is this deep and intrinsic connection of the different theories of creation with the most important questions of philosophy that incites us to their closer examination.
The fundamental idea, which must necessarily lie at the bottom of all natural theories of development, is that of a gradual development of all (even the most perfect) organisms out of a single, or out of a very few, quite simple, and quite imperfect original beings, which came into existence, not by supernatural creation, but by spontaneous generation, or archigony, out of inorganic matter. ”

“ What reason have we to believe that the Creator works by the same methods in the spiritual world, or by methods that are of the same nature as those which we think we can discover to be his methods in giving existence to corporeal organisms? The two realms of spirit and matter are so completely unlike that we are not compelled to believe that the methods by which creation of organisms of the two kinds are effected by the Almighty are necessarily or probably the same. ”

“ The one essential idea is that the processes and methods of Creation are beyond us, for we have nothing with which to measure it; Creation and the reign of "natural law" are essentially incommensurable. The one thing that the doctrine of Creation insists upon is that the origin of our world and of the things upon it must have been brought about by some direct and unusual manifestation of the power of the Being whom we call the Creator ”

“ Within the memory of living men theologians have been compelled to ask themselves: What if the geologists should establish facts that contradict our Biblically derived doctrine that the universe was made in a week? Again have they been constrained to put to themselves the question: [96] What if the evolutionists should supersede our doctrine that the creation is the immediate product of successive fiats of the Creator by showing that it came gradually into existence through the progressive operation of forces immanent in the cosmos? ”

“ Here, however, we must remember that creation, as maintained against such materialistic evolution, whether by theology, philosophy, or Holy Scripture, is necessarily a continuous, nay, an eternal influence, not an intervention of disconnected acts. ”

“ Those who believe in the Divine origin of the creation may frankly admit all the facts of the advocates of Evolution. They may even gratefully accept them as a most important service to religion, and beautiful illustrations of the methods of infinite wisdom, while they utterly repudiate the essential theory they are summoned to prove. ”

“ But in calling that process creation and this one not, he gives the appearance of an opposition to the religious idea of creation—an appearance of which the greater part of the guilt is borne by those theologians who define the idea of the creation, even of a single form, in a manner which is only proper for the idea of the first origin of the universe. ”