CORESPONDENCE WEEK 5

CORRESPONDENCE WEEK 5

The Inconsistencies of the Evolutionist View.

(R) Our larger arguments have certainly proved the existence of God. So really has the smaller one as to man’s appearance on the scene.

(J) You did not go into that.

(R) Not minutely, but it was sufficiently indicated. Man now exists: once he had no existence. Nothing but exquisite power and wisdom could have brought such a being upon the scene. Briefly, that is the argument.

(J) The doctrine of evolution has taken a good deal of the force out of that argument.

(R) No doubt: with those who have received it. But that doctrine is far from being established.

(J) It is generally received.

(R) By a certain class, no doubt.

(J) A large class!

(R) Yes, a large class; nevertheless, it is a mere hypotheses with which many facts are entirely inconsistent: and as a matter of fact, a reaction has commenced against it.

(J) What facts do you think of when you say they are inconsistent with Evolution?

(R) Well, they are really numerous, but they may be grouped under two or three heads. First, if man is a development of lower forms of life, there ought to be no lower forms of life now.

(J) Why so?

(R) Because if the force of the universe “evolves” by mechanical tendency, without discernment, discrimination or design, its evolution should march abreast. There ought to be no monkeys, no dogs, “no primordial germs,”-only men.

(J) I don’t see that. Surrounding circumstances have to do with the form and the extent of development. These circumstances, doubtless, exercise a natural selection. Grass under a stone for example does not grow like grass in the open. Circumstances may have so checked and favoured certain developments as to leave the lower forms behind while pushing on the higher till they ended in man?

(R) Well, suppose we allow that for the sake of argument, how do you account for there being only one sort of man?

(J) There are all sorts-black, brown, red, yellow, as well as white.

(R) Ah, that is as regards colour or dissimilarities on the surface. But taking the thing fundamentally, all men have a head, two arms, a body, and two legs. None have horns: none have wings; none have tails.

(J) Well what of that?

(R) Why, just this: if man is but the modification of lower forms through the action of circumstances, as there are all sorts of circumstances, there ought to be all sorts of men at all sorts of stages of development. There ought to be men capable of living in the water, because there are animals that can: the hippopotamus to wit. There ought to have been men capable of flying in the air, for certainly they want to, and there are creatures that can. There ought to be men with six, or eight, or twenty arms, like many legged insects; for often, they could be very useful. There ought to have been men with eyes at the back of their heads, or in their heels, or at the end of their fingers: for there are creatures among the smaller insects with eyes so distributed: and man very much wants eyes in other parts of his body beside those in front. That is as regards man.
But see how the argument acts with regard to the animals. If man is but a development on the ascending scale of physiological activities, shaped and guided by the pressure of circumstances and necessities, of course the animals would have the full benefit of the same law. Why then have we no speaking animals?

(Note: Darwin's tree of life has since been uprooted see here.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/4312355/Charles-Darwins-tree-of-life-is-wrong-and-misleading-claim-scientists.html

(J) There are parrots.

(R) Ah, but I mean creatures with the gift of speech the power of expressing idea. It cannot be said that the animals have no necessity to speak. The necessity must often bear on them with all the force with which it is even supposed to have done in the case of man. Yet they are as destitute of this faculty as any tree of the forest. It ought not to be so on the Evolutionist hypothesis.
There being every variety of circumstance and “environment,” there ought to be every variety of development: every form of creature: every state and kind of faculty. Is it not so. There is an unbridgeable gap between the lowest human specimen and the highest animal. The facts are inconsistent with the theory.
They are in perfect harmony with the conclusion I have been trying to establish from the beginning, viz.: that the true “force” of the universe is the being of universal extension, revealed as the God of Israel, “who works all things after the counsel of His own will,” and who in His own wisdom, and by His own power, has fashioned heaven and earth and the countless creatures they contain, after the form and patterns in which we find them.