The Story of Creation as Told By Theology and By ScienceAckland, T. S. (Thomas Suter)
Religion
The Story of Creation as Told By Theology and By Science
Ackland, T. S. (Thomas Suter)
Bible and science; Creation; Religion and science
The first appearance of mammalia, as has been already noticed,
must have been long before this, as the earliest fossils yet found
are at the lower limit of the Lias. They belong, however, to the
genus Marsupialia, of which, as far as we know, no representatives
were in existence in any part of the world known to Moses, so that
even on the supposition that he intended to give an account of the
first appearance of the classes of animals which he mentions, the
omission of these would have been inevitable. His words, however,
appear to point to a time when the mammalia occupied the leading
place, just as the reptiles had occupied the leading place at a
previous epoch. And his words are fully borne out by the records
of the rocks.
At the close of the tertiary period great changes once more took
place in the Northern hemisphere. There was a great and extensive
subsidence, in consequence of which a large portion of Northern
and Middle Europe must have been under water, the mountain summits
only appearing as detached islands. At the same time, from causes
utterly unknown to us, there was a great depression of
temperature, the result of which was, that all, or nearly all the
land, in those regions which were not submerged, was covered with
glaciers, much as Greenland is now, and from these glaciers vast
icebergs must from time to time have been detached by the sea and
floated off, carrying with them fragments of rock, some freshly
broken, some rounded by long attrition, which were deposited on
the then submerged lands as the ice melted, and are now found as
boulders, sometimes lying on the surface, at others dispersed
through beds of clay and sand formed under water from the debris
worn down by the glaciers. A subsequent movement of elevation
ushered in the state of things which exists on the earth at the
present time.
2. Man.
"And God said, Let Us make man (Adam) in Our image after Our
likeness; and he shall have dominion over the fish of the sea, and
over the fowl of the heaven, and over the cattle, and over all the
earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.
"And God created man (the Adam) in His image, in the image of God
created He him; male and female He created them.
"And God blessed them, and God said to them, Be fruitful and
multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and rule over the fish
of the sea, and the fowl of the heaven, and over every animal that
creepeth upon the earth.
"And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb seeding seed,
which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree which has
in it the fruit of a tree seeding seed; to you it shall be for
food.
"And to every animal of the earth, and to every fowl of the
heaven, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, in which
is the soul of life, every green herb is for meat; and it was so.
"And God saw every thing--which He had made, and behold it was
good exceedingly.
"And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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