Orthodoxy: Its Truths And ErrorsClarke, James Freeman
Religion
Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors
Clarke, James Freeman
Unitarianism
But between true naturalism and true supernaturalism we do not think there
need be any war. We know that there are many men so rooted in their faith
in nature, that they cannot see anything outside of it, or beyond it. To
them God is law, and law only. Even creation is repugnant to them, because
they see that creation is really a supernatural thing. Hence come the
theories of development; the “Vestiges of Creation;” the nebular
hypothesis; the Darwinian theory of formation of species by natural
selection; the notion of man coming out of an ape; pantheistic notions of
a God so immersed in nature as to be not its intelligent guide, but only
its unconscious soul; the whole universe proceeding according to an order
which is just as much above God’s knowledge as above ours. Now, the best
geologists assure us that there is no evidence in support of the
transmutation of species. Mr. Darwin’s theory of the formation of species
by natural selection is this: In the struggle for life, the strongest and
best adapted animal lives, the rest die. This animal transmits to its
offspring its own superior qualities; so a higher animal is gradually
developed. For example, the giraffe was not made by God with a long neck
in order that it might browse on the leaves of high trees. But when leaves
were scarce, the animal who happened to have a neck a little longer than
the rest was able to get leaves. So he lived, and the rest died. His
children had longer necks by the law of hereditary transmission. So, in
the course of ages, animals were gradually found with very long necks.
Thus the walrus has a curved horn growing downwards from his lower jaw, by
which he climbs on to the floating ice. We must not suppose, however, that
God gave him the tusk for that purpose; but the walrus, or seal, who
happened to have a little horny bone under his chin, could climb on the
ice and get his food more easily, and so he lived, while the rest died;
and his descendants in the course of a few hundreds of thousands of years
came, by repeating this process, to have horns, and so this species of
phoca arrived.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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