Even Ezekiel of old, with few democratic traditions, but deeply reflecting upon the ways of God, rejected the doctrine that worth or desert depends upon membership in any ancestral or other group. The people expressed their traditional view in the aphorism, “The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are on edge,” but the prophet declared that God judges “everyone according to his ways.” One would expect those who are not only heirs of the democratic tradition but also lovers of the Bible to take the same point of view. Yet it is chiefly persons versed in the Bible who complain that belief in evolution must degrade us in our own eyes. Perhaps “versed in the Bible” is not the best designation, for the persons in question are those who are most inclined to a literal interpretation of the biblical story of creation, which declares that man was made “out of the dust of the ground.” How, one wonders, does this text affect the Fundamentalist’s notion of human dignity? Evidently there is something in the background of the objector’s mind that is not specified in his argument. What is this unmentioned premise? Is the complaint that the dignity of man is affronted by the theory of evolution a case of “rationalization,” that is, the invention of a reason that for some cause is more convenient than the facts--an invention that may not be realized to be thus artificial? The objection does not rest upon any alleged letting-down of conduct that can be traced to a belief in evolution. It may very well have happened that, by the roundabout way of a different sort of rationalization, consciousness of our evolutionary origin has promoted loose living. For example, those whose philosophy of life already was, “Let us eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die,” might have said, “We are animals anyway; let us live as such.” This would have been self-sophistication, of course, for no evolution-theory ever said that we are not, _qua_ human, different from other animals; moreover, the “Let us” was not derived or derivable from the theory. At most, we have here a rationalizing excuse by which to maintain one’s “face” to oneself or to others. But anti-evolutionists fail to give specific evidence that even in this indirect and sophistical way the theory has produced a letting down.