The Other Side of Evolution: Its Effects and FallacyPatterson, Alexander
Religion
The Other Side of Evolution: Its Effects and Fallacy
Patterson, Alexander
Bible and science; Evolution
We may consider in this connection the dissatisfaction of some of
the greatest minds of evolutionary circles with the results of their
own theory.
Mr. Herbert Spencer is thus quoted, writing in his eighty-third
year: "The intellectual man, who occupies the same tenement with
me, tells me that I am but a piece of animated clay equipped with
a nerve system and in some mysterious way connected with the big
dynamo called the world; but that very soon now the circuit will be
cut and I will fall into unconsciousness and nothingness. Yes I am
sad, unutterbly sad, and I wish in my heart I had never heard of the
intellectual man with his science, philosophy and logic." (_Facts
and Comments._)
Prof. Frederic Harrison, the agnostic, thus writes: "The philosophy
of evolution and demonstration promised but it did not perform. It
raised hopes, but it led to disappointment. It claimed to explain
the world and to direct man, but it left a great blank. That blank
was the field of religion, of morality, of the sanctions of deity.
It left the mystery of the future as mysterious as ever and yet as
imperative as ever. Whatever philosophy of nature it offered, it
gave no adequate philosophy of Man. It was busy with the physiology
of Humanity and propounded inconceivable and repulsive guesses about
the origin of Humanity." (_North American Review_, December, 1900,
p. 825.)
From the opposite side of the field, President Woodrow Wilson
writes: "This is the dis-service scientific study has done for us;
it has given us agnosticism in the realm of philosophy, scientific
anarchism in the field of politics. It has made the legislator
confident that he can create and the philosopher sure that God
cannot." (_Forum_, December, 1896.)
UNCERTAINTY OF SCIENTIFIC THEORIES IN GENERAL.
Another feature which strikes the non-scientific mind curiously
is the wide differences among great scientists as to the facts of
nature. The age of the earth is variously declared to be ten million
years by some, and by others equally able, a thousand million years.
The temperature of its interior is stated to be 1,530 degrees
by one, and 350,000 degrees by another. Herschel calculated the
mountains on the moon to be half a mile high, Ferguson said they
were fifteen miles high. The height of the Aurora Borealis is
guessed from two and a half to one hundred and sixty miles, and its
nature is still more widely described. The delta at the mouth of the
Mississippi was calculated by Lyell to have been 100,000 years in
forming. Gen. Humphrey, of the United States survey, estimated it at
4,000 years, and M. Beaument at 1,300 years.
The deposits of carbonate of lime on the floor of Kent Cavern in
England have been estimated by different scientists to have been
from a thousand to a million years in forming.
The discovery of radium and other similar substances, it is said, is
almost revolutionizing the theories of the constitution of matter
and affecting all physical science.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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