Theistic Evolution

A "theist" is one who believes in a God, "theism" being simply the opposite of "atheism." A Mohammedan is a theist. Hence "Theistic Evolution" signifies the acceptance of the theory in a form which does not deny the existence of God. As a matter of fact, the term "Theistic Evolution" is little more than a name. Those who have brought forward and have popularized the doctrine of Evolution are not in the least concerned about "Theism." Their aim has ever been to abolish God altogether, or at least (since a "First Cause" is essential to the theory) to deprive Him of all personality and attributes, and to banish Him to the remotest confines of time and space.

      Much less are evolutionists concerned about Christianity, except to antagonize its vital truths. Evolution was put forth as an anti-christian and infidel doctrine; and for fifty years it has supplied the platform from which, and the weapons with which, Christianity has been assailed. Haeckel, the infidel naturalist, termed Darwin's Origin of Species the "Anti-Genesis," and exultingly proclaimed that "With a single stroke Darwin has annihilated the dogma of creation." This antagonism between Evolution and Christianity is a fact which, we suppose, no sincere evolutionist would deny.

      Nevertheless, there has arisen in recent years a large class of theologians who, while choosing to call themselves "Christians," nevertheless accept and advocate the doctrine of Evolution. These have attempted to effect a compromise between the two irreconcilable systems, and to that compromise they have been pleased to give the name "Theistic Evolution." [58] They would hold to Evolution as a general cosmic process, but would put it under the control and supervision of God, and would allow of Divine intervention by direct action at those stages which evolutionists find it particularly hard to get over. They would allow just so much "Theism" as seems necessary to help Evolution over the hard places. But inasmuch as this compromise permits enough Divine action in the affairs of the universe to destroy the theory of Evolution, as set forth by the responsible exponents thereof, we may dismiss "Theistic Evolution" as a mere verbal expression to which there is, and can be, no corresponding reality. True evolutionists would not recognize such a self-contradiction as "Theistic Evolution."

      In this connection we quote further from Prof. Fairhurst:

      "The first great evolutionists, beginning with Darwin, and including Huxley, Spencer, Tyndall and others, based the theory of evolution on matter, motion, and force. It was purely a system of naturalism, that did not recognize God, nor the Bible, nor what the Christian regards specially as the supernatural."

      "No cosmic evolutionist can accept a miracle at any point of the natural process. To him a miracle as a part of Evolution would be unthinkable."

      Thomas Huxley speaks quite as plainly as Haeckel, saying: "Not only do I hold it to be proven that the story of the Deluge is a pure fiction; but I have no hesitation in affirming the same thing of the story of the Creation."

      According to Herbert Spencer nothing is known of God except that He is "unknowable." If this is not practically the same as denying the existence of God, it would not be easy to say wherein the difference lies. If there be a Supreme Being, and He is [59] "unknowable," then it must be either because He has not the power to make Himself known, or because He has not given to the highest of His creatures the capacity to know Him. The first supposition is disposed of by the consideration that, if God did not have the power to reveal Himself and to create beings capable of knowing Him, He would not be God. And the alternative is disposed of by the fact that Man actually possesses the faculty of reflecting upon God, that he has a consciousness of God, and that he has the ability to understand communications from others equal or superior to himself in the scale of being.

      Mr. Spencer dogmatically asserts that "the deepest, widest, and most certain of all facts" is this, namely, "that the Power which the Universe manifests to us is utterly inscrutable" (First Principles, p. 46). This is, for all practical purposes, pure atheism. It asserts that there is no revelation from God, and can be none. It is, however, an assertion of the most reckless sort, which has absolutely nothing to back it up except Mr. Spencer's spiritual blindness and deadness. It has no more weight or authority than would attach to the assertion of a blind man that the deepest, widest, and most certain of all facts is that total darkness is the universal and perpetual state of nature. That a man may be in complete ignorance of God is evident enough; but that one should make his own ignorance the ground of denying the possibility of knowing God is simply to add colossal presumption to total ignorance.

      It requires no great penetration to see that the real object of attack by the supporters of Evolution is the Bible, with its revelation of Christ as the Redeemer and Saviour of men. It matters little or nothing whether a perishing child of Adam believes in the existence of God or not, so long as he is blinded to the one thing which most concerns him to know, and that is the salvation of God, which the Bible reveals, [60] and which is received by all who believe "the testimony that God gave of His Son."

      That Evolution serves most effectually to blind the minds of all who accept it to the facts of sin and Redemption is undeniable. Therefore the pretence, masked by the term "Theistic Evolution," that the doctrine can be reconciled with the truth of Christianity, is merely an attempt to make it more successfully destructive, by throwing incautious people off their guard. There is not a single deadly heresy, among all that were, in past generations, openly opposed to the faith of Jesus Christ, which has not now succeeded, by one means or another, in entering into and establishing itself within the precincts of professing Christendom, and which is not, in our day, openly preached and taught in the "churches" and theological seminaries.

      When the main features of the present state of Christendom, as briefly outlined above, are understood, there will be, as Prof. Graebner has well said, "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 that view of the origin of the world 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."

      The spread of the doctrine of Evolution has been phenomenal. Therefore, many theologians became alarmed, "because they thought that 'Science' had succeeded in proving that all things were produced by Evolution. They began to consider how they could reconcile theology and 'Science.' They imagined that evolution was an established science. They said: 'We will change the lion into a lamb by [61] changing its name.' And so they called it 'Theistic Evolution,' but accepted the agnostic or atheistic method, and then began to sleep comfortably over their wisdom (?)"( Fairhurst).

      It is indeed a fact that those "Christians" who have thus surrendered to infidel Evolution have done little more than devise a name.

Evolution and Christianity

Between Evolution and Christianity there is and can be nothing but the sharpest antagonism. Prof. Fairhurst well says, "Christian evolution is inconceivable."

      Christianity is based upon the fact that the Bible is a Divine revelation. But the Bible, according to Evolution, is itself but a detail of the cosmic process. Here is an issue as to which reconciliation is impossible. One cannot hold Evolution, and also hold the Christian view--which is Christ's own view--of the Holy Scriptures. If the Bible is from God, if every Scripture is God-breathed, if holy men of old spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost, then Evolution is false, and its author is that father of lies, whose chief aim is to "deceive the nations" and to "blind the minds of them that believe not."

      One of the best known writers of our day, Mr. H. G. Wells--himself a thorough-going evolutionist--has lately declared in print that Civilization owes both its origin and its preservation until now, to the Bible, saying: "It is the Book that has held together the fabric of western civilization"; it has "unified and kept together great masses of people"; and in fact "the civilization we possess could not have come into existence and could not have been sustained without it." And Mr. Wells drives his point to its logical conclusion by showing that, without something to take effectively the place of the Bible, civilization will speedily be overthrown. [62]

      This frank admission involves, if true, the complete negation of Evolution. For, according to that theory, the Bible should be the product of Civilization, and man's ever-advancing Progress should be continually producing, by slight variations, better and better Bibles. But here is an evolutionist who forgets his doctrine long enough to declare that the Bible produced Civilization, and not Civilization the Bible. Here then, in that ancient Book, which is forever correcting and improving man, but which receives no correction or improvement from man, we have a complete disproof of Evolution. What we here assert is, not merely that the statements contained in the Bible contradict the doctrine of Evolution, but that the very existence and persistence of the Bible, in its place of undisputed supremacy among books (a place it holds despite the most strenuous efforts to dislodge it); the hold it establishes upon the hearts and consciences of men; the stupendous and morally excellent influence it has exerted upon the lives of individuals and the prosperity of communities; constitutes a proof of the most convincing sort that Evolution is a monstrous falsehood. If Evolution were true, the history of the Bible, with its place and influence among men, would have been an impossibility. Hence the existence of the Bible is a disproof of Evolution.

The Law and the Gospel Not Evolved

The law of Moses, with the peculiar economy based thereon, and the peculiar people associated therewith--the Israelites--were not the product of Evolution. The children of Israel came out of Egypt utterly unorganized, having lived there for centuries in slavery, dominated by an idolatrous and polytheistic race. At the time of their departure from Egypt they had neither laws, government, worship nor organization. Yet they entered Canaan forty [63] years later with a law, statutes and judgments, and a system of monotheistic worship, utterly unlike anything previously existing in the world. The miracles recorded in the books of Moses explain what otherwise would be inexplicable. Judaism is a complete refutation of the theory we are discussing.

      But if the Jews, and their laws, institutions and worship cannot be accounted for by Evolution, still more impossible is it to account for Christians and Christianity by that theory. Christianity was not the product of Evolution. There were no "resident forces" in the world leading gradually up to it; no progress towards it; but just the reverse; for everything was going rapidly in the opposite direction. Judaism had departed completely from the spirit and teaching of the law and the prophets. Greek advancement in literature, philosophy and art had eventuated in a puerile system of polytheism, and in extreme moral degradation; while Roman progress in the art of government had produced atheism and unspeakable corruption and decay in morals. Christianity arose, not only utterly different in every feature from its environment, but in deadly antagonism to the tenets of Jews, Greeks, and Romans. Christianity, considered merely as an historic fact, in connection with its environment, destroys Evolution down to the ground. There is but one conceivable explanation of Christianity, and of the people who "were called 'Christians' first at Antioch," and that explanation is Christ; the Christ of the Gospels, born of a virgin; the Word made flesh and dwelling among men, as Immanuel, God-with-us; Christ crucified, and Christ risen from the dead; "Christ the power of God, and the Wisdom of God" (1 Cor. 1:24).

Evolution and Christ

To say that Jesus Christ was evolved, that He was the product of His environment, is both to repudiate Christianity, and also to reject the plainest facts of history. [64]

      Here we reach the climax of the matter. Christ is "the Truth"; and the conclusive test of every doctrine and every system is to bring it into the presence of Christ. When subjected to that test, Evolution fades into nothingness like the mists in the presence of the sun. The resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead was not an evolution. It was a complete reversal of the course of nature. The people who are "quickened together with Christ" are not an evolution, but a "new creation."

      Here again we quote a striking passage from Prof. Graebner.

      "We cannot leave this subject without briefly adverting to a great historic fact, indeed the most massive and significant fact in all history, which, in its more remote bearings, not only strikes at the very root of evolutionistic philosophy, but at the same time wounds it mortally in all its parts. I refer to the Resurrection of our Lord.

      "The resurrection of Jesus Christ is the central fact of our Christian faith; and it is, when rightly understood, the all-sufficient answer to the theory of Evolution.

      "Christ's resurrection is an historical fact, fully as much as the defeat of Xerxes at Salamis in 480 B. C., the discovery of America by Columbus in 1492, and the peace of Versailles of 1919 are historical facts, proven by the word and record of contemporary witnesses.

      "But, if Christ was raised, then we have proof for the following tenets, all contradicting evolutionary speculation at so many vital points: (1) The existence of a Personal God, Who is concerned with human affairs; (2) The reality of miraculous interference with natural forces; (3) The truth of atonement and redemption; and [65] (4) The inspiration of the Old Testament Scriptures (hence also of the creation account in Genesis). The details of the argument are beyond the scope of this paper; but a little patient study will bring to light the fact that each of these four basic ideas is dovetailed, mortised and anchored so firmly in the fact of Christ's resurrection, that you can get rid of them only by denying that fact. Hence it is, aside from any investigation of proofs of Evolution, clear to the Christian student that there must be some fault either in reason or in observation that vitiates the whole theory. The resurrection of Christ is a fact, to which the entire history of Christianity bears witness, the most tremendous fact in the history of the world. And it stands four-square against a theory which says that there is no personal God, no sin, no redemption; that there are no miracles, no revelation, no inspiration; that there is no absolute religion, and no absolute standard of right and wrong."

      The supreme disproof of Evolution then is the Risen Christ, and the results which have everywhere followed the preaching of the Risen Christ. [66]

[EATB 58-66]