With regard to Man I leave out, acknowledging a grave omission, the
doctrine of the Fall and of Sin. And I do so because these have not
yet, as I believe, been adequately treated: here the fruitful reaction
to the stimulus of evolution is yet to come. The doctrine of sin,
indeed, falls principally within the scope of that discussion which
has followed or displaced the Darwinian; and without it the Fall
cannot be usefully considered. For the question about the Fall is a
question not merely of origins, but of the interpretation of moral
facts whose moral reality must first be established.
I confine myself therefore to Creation and the dignity of man.
The meaning of evolution, in the most general terms, is that the
differentiation of forms is not essentially separate from their
behaviour and use; that if these are within the scope of study, that
is also; that the world has taken the form we see by movements not
unlike those we now see in progress; that what may be called proximate
origins are continuous in the way of force and matter, continuous in
the way of life, with actual occurrences and actual characteristics.
All this has no revolutionary bearing upon the question of ultimate
origins. The whole is a statement about process. It says nothing to
metaphysicians about cause. It simply brings within the scope of
observation or conjecture that series of changes which has given their
special characters to the different parts of the world we see. In
particular, evolutionary science aspires to the discovery of the
process or order of the appearance of life itself: if it were to
achieve its aim it could say nothing of the cause of this or indeed of
the most familiar occurrences. We should have become spectators or
convinced historians of an event which, in respect of its cause and
ultimate meaning, would be still impenetrable.
With regard to the origin of species, supposing life already
established, biological science has the well founded hopes and the
measure of success with which we are all familiar. All this has, it
would seem, little chance of collision with a consistent theism, a
doctrine which has its own difficulties unconnected with any
particular view of order or process. But when it was stated that
species had arisen by processes through which new species were still
being made, evolutionism came into collision with a statement,
traditionally religious, that species were formed and fixed once for
all and long ago.
What is the theological import of such a statement when it is regarded
as essential to belief in God? Simply that God's activity, with
respect to the formation of living creatures, ceased at some point in
past time.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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