The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and MoralitySchmid, Rudolf
Religion
The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality
Schmid, Rudolf
Evolution; Religion and science
He pronounces the belief that God created the new species in "continual
interference" with the regular process of things, a lower conception, "a
limitation of the Creator's power" (page 280), hence something which he
makes objection to directly in the interest of religion. Moreover, he sees,
especially in those stages which caused the physical development of man,
and which became the material basis of his spiritual productions, moments
of development which cannot be explained by natural selection or by a
coincidence of material circumstances, but only by the preformation of the
body after a certain design and for a certain purpose.
Richard Owen, the celebrated anatomist, and palaeontologist of England, who,
after having for a long time resisted the Darwinian theories, lately
accepted the idea of development and rejected that of selection, takes a
similar position. In the last part of his "Comparative Anatomy of
Vertebrates," which was issued separately in 1863 under the title
"Derivative Hypothesis of Life and Species," he sees in the causes which
produced the new species only the servants of a predestinating {222}
intelligent will--for instance, the horse predestinated and prepared for
man; and on page 90 of vol. V. of "Transactions of the Zooelogical Society,"
he says, "that natural evolution, through secondary causes, by means of
slow physical and organic operations through long ages, is not the less
clearly recognizable as the act of all-adaptive Mind, because we have
abandoned the old error of supposing it the result of a primary, direct and
sudden act of creational construction.... The succession of species by
continuously operating law is not necessarily a 'blind operation.' Such
law, however designed in the properties and successions of natural objects,
intimates, nevertheless, a preconceived progress. Organisms may be evolved
in orderly succession, stage after stage, towards a foreseen goal, and the
broad features of the course may still show the unmistakable impress of
Divine volition."
Professor Huxley, of London, the zealous and oft-mentioned advocate of the
descent of man from the ape, says--what is so energetically contested by
his warmest friends in Germany, by Buechner, Haeckel, O. Schmidt, and
others--that the teleological and the mechanical mode of viewing nature by
no means exclude one another. He does this, of course, without going into
any details of the religious question.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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