Evolution | Page 8

is not only unprogressive, he is also not so
much immoral as unmoral. For where there is no society there is no sin!
Therefore the bases of right and wrong lie in conduct towards one's
fellow; the moral sense or conscience is the outcome of social relations,
themselves the outcome of the need of living..... While the lower
instincts, as hunger, passion, and thirst for vengeance, are strong, they
are not so enduring or satisfying as the higher feelings which crave for
society and sympathy. And the yielding to the lower, however
gratifying for the moment, would be followed by the feeling of regret
that he had thus given way, and by resolve to act differently for the
future. Thus at last man comes to feel, through acquired and perhaps
inherited habit, that it is best for him to obey his more persistent
impulses..... Morals are relative, not absolute; there is no fixed standard
of right and wrong by which the actions of all men throughout all time
are measured..... That which man calls sin is shown to be more often
due to his imperfect sense of the true proportion of things, and to his
lack of imagination, than to his willfulness." Clodd adds that if conduct
has been made to rest on "supposed divine commands (!) as to what

man shall and shall not do," that is an assumption which at best serves
to restrain the "brutal and ignorant."
J. B. Warren, of the University of California, has well stated the effects
of the evolutionary theory on religion and morals:
"Its legitimate tendency is to degrade mankind from that mental and
moral dignity that is always recognized as belonging to them, and to
place them on an essential level with the brute creation--even with the
lowest forms of vegetable and animal existence. According to that
theory, man differs from the lower organisms not in kind so much as in
the degree of development. Mr. Darwin himself was troubled about the
value of his own convictions, on the ground that his mind was evolved
from that of lower animals. That is to say, he reckoned his own mental
actions as valueless and untrustworthy, because of the essential identity
between his mind and that of the lowest creatures that live in the mud
of our swamps. Thus we see the legitimate tendency of this theory to
degrade the mental dignity of man. And it also degrades the moral
nature and faculties of man, and undermines the very foundations of
moral and religious principle, in that it teaches that man is only a better
developed brute--the natural result being that man is no more under
moral obligation than the brute, or has no different basis of moral
obligation from the brute, but only a better idea of right and wrong,
because on a higher plane in the process of evolution. It strikes at the
root of the doctrine that men are, by their origin and nature, under
peculiar and special obligations to God. In the words of the late Dr.
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."
When these discrepancies between a world-view governed by the
Christian's faith in Revelation and one governed by the theory of
evolution are once clearly understood, there will be no need to inquire,
why, on the one hand, enemies of the Bible in all ranks of life greeted

with such joyous acclaim the principle announced by Darwin and, why,
on the other hand, a chief purpose of Christian apologetics has become
the demonstration that Christianity is justified even by reason in the
world-view which it inculcates, and that, on the other hand, the
evolutionary hypothesis is contradicted by the facts of religion, of
history, and of natural science.
CHAPTER TWO.
Unexplained Origins.
The evolutionary scheme of development is, by its originators and
defenders, accepted as a working hypothesis by which it is believed
that the origin of all forms which matter has taken, and of the activities
of living things, including man and human society, can be accounted
for. It is an attempt to answer the old question, suggested to the
thinking mind by a contemplation of nature: Whence these things? It it
a theory of origins.
Now, a hypothesis, being "a theory, or supposition, provisionally
employed as an explanation of phenomena," must be verified before it
can be accepted as truth. Moreover, it can stand even as a hypothesis
only if it meets the test of