Is "survival of the fittest" compatible with the Bible?

It seems to me that if we understand that the church of the living God is thus the pillar and base of the truth, we can humbly but firmly reject all idea that Christianity is to absorb a little from Buddhism and a little from Mohammed and a little from Darwin, etc., to become a perfect religion for all mankind. It comes to dictate, not to listen; and rightly so, for the living God, to whom all ages are ever present, has marked out the lines of the foundation on which everything true and answering to Himself is to be constructed for the and eternity. "WITHOUT CONTROVERSY, great is the mystery of godliness." What can evolution do after God manifest in flesh? It is not the working up into some state higher by any means, whether survival of the fittest or the striving of the whole race after its grandest ideal, but it is the coming down of the mighty God to us in Christ that is to be the true lever for man's recovery to God.

The doctrine of the Survival of the Fittest has little thought of hope or comfort for any of those whose fangs are not strong, whose claws are not sharp, whose faculties are not entire, and whose hearts are not pitiless. Even Professor Huxley lately admits that in itself it is not sufficient to produce the highest forms of human character, and Mr. Wallace, Darwin's twin-discoverer (of Lamarck's obsolete theory) never considered that it was sufficient to produce human character at all. Is He the God of the Fit only? is He not also the God of the Unfit? Is not His strength made perfect in weakness? His greatest victories accomplished in defeat? Many of the most glorious and enduring achievements have been done by the Unfit whom He has fitted. To all those who are conscious of being maimed and limited in function or faculty of body or mind, the words of that great leader of men, who bore about in his body the "stigmas" of Christ, come as an inspiration and a hope, — "when I am weak, then am I strong." "As thy days, so shall thy strength be." The maimed Ehud struck such a blow with his left hand that it still reverberates through history, what time he laid prostrate the colossal iniquity of Moab.

The loveless doctrine of “the survival of the fittest” permeates the policy of every nation; it is modified somewhat, perhaps, in such countries as Britain and America, who, by the way, possess all the territory they desire; nevertheless it is there, and only awaits the translation of the church to heaven to show itself in all its naked horridness. The philosophy of Nietzsche will be the gospel of the Beast and Antichrist (Rev. 13); when they appear, the devil's supermen, in whom will be fully expressed all the evil intentions of the devil, might will then be right, and only that will be thought worthy of applause which is strong and ruthless. To this the nations of the world are moving both surely and swiftly.

The loveless doctrine of "the survival of the fittest" permeates the policy of every nation; it is modified somewhat, perhaps, in such countries as Britain and America, who, by the way, possess all the territory they desire; nevertheless it is there, and only awaits the translation of the church to heaven to show itself in all its naked horridness. The philosophy of Nietzsche will be the gospel of the Beast and Antichrist (Rev. 13); when they appear, the devil's supermen, in whom will be fully expressed all the evil intentions of the devil, might will then be right, and only that will be thought worthy of applause which is strong and ruthless. To this the nations of the world are moving both surely and swiftly.

What of evolution? We find that General von Bernhardt claims its doctrines as supporting Germany in the initiation and conduct of the great war. “The survival of the fittest,” was practically Germany’s war slogan. We can in contrast point to definite tangible efforts made by Christians for the happiness and blessing of the human race; evolution is condemned because of the lack of anything definite and tangible produced for the happiness of mankind.

We get here with a vengeance the “survival of the fittest”—fittest only by reason of brute strength and ferocity, as a lion or tiger would survive an unarmed man.

They see, too, how these doctrines of “survival of the fittest”—these biological theories of evolutionists—run on parallel lines with the thoughts which led to the great war (1914-1918) with all its unspeakable brutality. They compare,

But we come now to consider His government; in which there are difficulties that give room and exercise for faith. His appointed times contemplate darkness as well as light. This is plainly the point in question; and thus the moon is mentioned before the sun; and as to the latter simply his going down. Yet the moon shows darkness not unrelieved; and not relieved by haphazard. Darkness, however, is of His appointment; which is comfort and yet mystery: and at His appointment, too, the night brings the wild beasts from their lairs. The young lions are cared for, as the innocent sheep, and roaring after prey, seek it and find it from God. Thus the devourer is provided for, as all else: there is no shirking that; and nature witnesses plainly as to it: tooth, claws, and tongue bear witness for the lion. Who gave them to him? The Same who gave to the lion's prey the agility for escape. An equal hand has been at work for both, as it if were designed to have the world a battlefield of not very unequal forces, each cared for and sustained. If the fittest do survive, as some say, it is hard enough to tell who are the fittest. The giants perish, and the pigmies live. "The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong." If there be design; then strife seems designed: as if the good and the evil, with the inevitable conflict arising from their co-existence, must have its counterpart and reflection in the whole frame of things amid which man is found; as it must, if nature at large be in any sense a parable of spiritual things — if the analogies between them be otherwise than mere deceptions.

And not only does creation groan under the outward effects of sin, but the poisonous influence of it has affected its inmost parts. Sin has permeated the whole creation and corrupted everything. The passions of anger and strife, envy, greediness, vengeance and violence, we perceive throughout the whole animal world around us, from the ferocious lion down to the little angry bee, from the tame dog to the rapacious wolf. Through the microscope we perceive in a single drop of water thousands of tiny animalculae, invisible to the naked eye, pursuing and consuming each other. The "right of the stronger" exists not only amongst men, but amongst animals, from the eagle amid air and the mute tribes of the deep down to the animalcule in a drop of water. In the millennial kingdom, beneath the sceptre of the "Prince of Peace" and "King of Righteousness," at the time of the "liberty of the glory of the children of God," the whole creation, now groaning and travailing together in pain, and "in earnest expectation waiting for the manifestation of the sons of God," shall be "delivered from the bondage of corruption. Then "the wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them. And the cow and the bear shall feed; their young ones shall lie down together: and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. And the sucking child shall play at the holes of the asp, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the adder's den," whilst Satan himself, "that old serpent," shall be "shut up in the bottomless pit."

We are now in a position to realize as never before what creation is. Redemption is the key, and the only key, that will fully unlock its treasures; for redemption alone can remove the shadow which, after all, invests its brightest scenes, and lift the sadness which will intrude itself upon every contemplation of it. Nor only so: unbelieving suspicions find their lurking-places amid these shadows, and give bitterness to this sadness. Nature, pervaded by law, as the science of the day more and more assures us, seems cast in a rigid mould from which we shrink inevitably. The more perfect as a machine, the less we find heart in it; and the smiles with which it decks itself seem often but very cruelty and hypocrisy, as we realize it to be the monster that without remorse consumes day by day its own offspring. The more we grow in knowledge, the more impossible it seems to escape the conviction that this is no effect of moral ruin introduced by Adam into what was before a deathless paradise. Death seems wrought into the constitution of things from the beginning. We have in the geological strata a history of the earth stretching long ages back of Adam; and far down as we may pierce, nothing but convulsion and ruin can be discerned. We dwell upon the accumulated dust of multitudinous generations, which sometimes constitute in fact the very substance of the strata themselves. Not merely individuals but countless types of form have passed away; and the "fittest" that "survive" — if they do survive — have been (according to the theory) produced at the cost of a prodigal waste of life on the part of the less perfect which have yielded them only temporarily the place which in a brief time they too must yield to others.