Smithson's Theory of Special CreationSmithson, Noble
Religion
Smithson's Theory of Special Creation
Smithson, Noble
Creation
Darwin (Origin of Species, vol. 1, p. 228) says: “Have we any right
to suppose that the Creator works by intellectual powers like those
of man?” On the same page he refers to “the works of the Creator” as
being superior to those of man. In the same work (vol. 2, p. 304) he
refers to “the laws impressed on matter by the Creator.” Again (p. 306)
he refers to life as “having been originally breathed by the Creator
into a few forms or into one,” animal, at the beginning of life on the
earth. In his Descent of Man (p. 95) he says: “There is no evidence
that man was aboriginally endowed with the ennobling belief in the
existence of the omnipotent God.” Referring to the question: “Whether
there exists a Creator and Ruler of the Universe.” On the same page
he says: “And this has been answered in the affirmative by some of
the highest intellects that have ever existed.” In the same work (p.
627) he says: “The idea of a universal and beneficent Creator does not
seem to arise in the mind of man, until he has been elevated by long
continued culture.” On the same page he says: “Few persons feel any
anxiety from the impossibility of determining at what precise period,
in the development of the individual, from the first trace of a minute
germinal vesicle, man becomes an immortal being.” Again (pp. 627-628)
he says: “The birth, both of the species and of the individual are
equally parts of that grand sequence of events which our minds refuse
to accept as the result of blind chance. The understanding revolts
at such a conclusion.” Thus it appears that Darwin believed in the
existence of a personal God and in the immortality of the human soul.
But he also believed “that the production and extinction of the past
and present inhabitants of the world” have been “due to secondary
causes, like these determining the birth and death of the individual.”
(Origin of Species, 2, p. 304.) In brief, Darwin maintained that the
Creator directly and specially made one or a few primordial forms, and
turned them loose upon the earth to shift for themselves, subject to
the “factors of evolution.”
Although Darwin appears to believe in the special creation of the first
one, or the first few, animals and plants, and in the immortality of
the human soul, yet his theory of evolution is highly materialistic;
and the publication of this Origin of Species gave materialism an
immense impetus.
The Encyclopedia Britannica (9 ed., vol. 2, p. 109), referring to
“thinkers, who hold materialistic views,” says:
“According to this school, man is a machine, no doubt the most complex
and wonderfully adapted of all known machines, but still neither more
nor loss than an instrument whose energy is provided by force from
without, and which, when set in action performs the various operations,
for which its structure fits it, namely: to live, move, feel and think.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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