What is theistic evolution?

Before closing this letter, and the first portion of my remarks, I would observe that next to redemption nothing could be of such transcendent moment to us all as creation, the divine account of which is given in Genesis 1. Whether as regards mere matter, — the lower animal creation, or the creation of man, language could not be more clear and precise; nor could anything be more deliberate or more solemn than the mode in which God created our first parents, making them as He did, in His own image, after His own likeness, i.e. moral beings, — rational and accountable. To make therefore anything co-eternal with God is to deny His absolute Deity. Yet our author says (p. 27), "We should be forsaking the lines of nature were we to imagine for a moment that the new creature was to be formed out of nothing. Ex nihilo nihil — nothing can be made out of nothing. Matter is uncreatable and indestructible!" This is simple heathenism, and in reference to evolution (which abominable theory is the very gist of this book), he says, "There is no intention here to countenance the old doctrine of the permanence of species" (p. 292, note)! And what has become of divine revelation, and of the Christianity it teaches, if the following is true? "All that has been said since, from Marcus Aurelius to Swedenborg, from Augustine to Schleiermacher, of a besetting God as the final complement of humanity, is but a repetition of the Hebrew poet's faith. And even the New Testament has nothing higher to offer than this!"

The fact is that, as regards Evolution, none are so utterly inconsistent as those who profess to believe the Bible, and yet attribute evolution to God as His plan and method. God has told us as plainly as it can be written that He created man from the dust of the ground; and there is no more difficulty in believing this than in believing that in the resurrection He will raise man from the dust. To attribute evolution to Him, therefore, is simply to contradict Him. Avowed infidelity is honest compared with this, and much less inconsistent. In short, our author's book is rejected alike by incredulity if honest, and by honest Christianity. He has fallen between two stools, — much to his own injury and not a little to the injury of others.

"The gospel is emphatically a world-saving power. It enters into the life of the world in an organic way … the scheme that says, 'There can be no real marriage of divine and human powers, of the life of Christ, with the life of the race, in an abiding, historical, sacramental union, and continuing in the world in such a way as to carry forward society in a living process of life and growth in knowledge, and in faith, and in hope, and in charity, and in all that belongs to the existence of an emancipated and regenerated humanity' … is not only unreal and unhistorical, but it seems to run directly in the face of the plainest teachings of the word of God. This teaches that God is in Christ, and that Christ is the life of the world," etc. Thus writer, indeed, though making God create the world by His omnipotence, yet, as to its present form, whether accomplished in six days or six long geological periods, tells us that "all nature was made to rise, by an inherent law and tendency, from one gradation of development to another under the moulding generic power of the Almighty, until, finally, the whole culminated in the creation of man," which is little less than Darwinianism, and the progress from atomic cellules by "an inherent law and tendency."

Thus one would imagine now that to entertain the novel theory of evolution would be to consign to oblivion this great argument of design in nature. Yet here we are taught that this great discovery of the nineteenth century need not be thought to invalidate the evidence of design, for the divine purpose in view throughout the long age-lasting upward progress to nature's crowning product, man, is, if anything, the more evidenced thereby. Were it not better frankly to avow, if one could go no further, that if this truly epoch-making hypothesis be indeed confessed as a clearly established axiom of science — which is, however, even on its own ground, by no means the case — then that its account and that of scripture being so utterly at variance, the disparity between the two is evident and must be faced. Certainly, in the matter of man's origin, the difference is marked enough between nature's crowning product" and Adam created in God's image. As to which affords true evidence, not only of design, but of divine care and interest, where is the comparison? One must suppose it is all a question of the kind of God we are content to prove the existence of. If One to whom every one of us must give account of himself; One with whom we have to do; if a God whose goodness unfallen creation proclaimed, whose love has since been manifested, and whose grace is presently offered to all — a theory which delegates the production of all things, and man above all, to the progress of ages through the agency of natural selection, will be as little satisfying to us as the more ancient, and scarcely less worthy, idea of a fortuitous concourse of atoms. No; if God be the God we adore, the God whose word we believe (and what have we, even if nature's witness were increased tenfold, if we rest not there), our universe owes its being to Him, and man infinitely more so, in a far more direct manner than evolution would teach. "He spake and it was done. He commanded and it stood fast." "God breathed into man's nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul."

This at once stamps as being most absurd and disgusting the modern theory, dignified with the name of philosophy, that man is but the development (not yet perfect, perhaps) of some primeval immature creature. These are soi-disant philosophers who will not even admit that man is an improved monkey, but refer backwards and find his origin in a jelly-fish, and attempt to trace from that source the various steps of development to man such as we see him now. What a blasphemous libel upon Him who said, "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness"! As before said, Adam was made in the likeness of that body which was ever present to the eye of God, and which the Son took when He came. Nor does nature itself fail to exhibit the falseness and absurdity of this notion. For, even if the progressive development theory were true in a physical sense — that is, the higher order of animals the produce of the lower, in other words, the effect greater than the cause — how can they account for the change in the same line of descent from an irresponsible parent to a responsible offspring? There must have been a "fiat" from the Creator to produce this. Has the monkey — to take the stage immediately preceding that of man — a moral perception of the being of a God? Of one to whom it owes obedience and is accountable for its actions? This faculty inherent in man, savage or civilised, when did this immense change occur? I do not say that man has now a true idea of God even as a Creator, although the visible things of creation are before his eyes, leaving him without excuse, but that man in his rudest condition has the instinctive perception of a Being above him, more or less controlling him, and noting his actions, though in every case a Being he fears, never loves. But in the process from monkey to man when was this faculty acquired, or given? Was it synchronous with the excision of his candal appendage! To say that the faculty was developed is sheer nonsense, for development implies the previous existence of the germ of that which is developed. If the development theory be true there must have been a moral element in the constitution of the original jelly-fish! These philosophers object to the "fiats" of the Creator, because it disturbs their theory of progressive development, and what they are pleased to call the order of nature. They do not deny that God originally made the world, but they imagine it to be a clever machine endowed with perpetual motion and which can work out perfection for itself, and by itself, apart from the care and sustaining power of God. It is a direct denial of providence. They exclude God from His own creation, and will not allow Him to have anything to do with it save when and how they please. In effect they say, There is no God. The absurdity of this theory is only equalled by its horrible infidelity, and is repellant to every sober mind.

A few years ago the theory of evolution was carrying all before it. "Development" was the magic key which was to open every lock, and so use the treasures of nature. When applied, however, the ascertained results of the use of this key were far from commending themselves to the thoughtful, not to say Christian, mind. With more or less modification, it was taught that the world as we see it to-day has been developed from primary matter which has gradually organized itself according to certain principles which are not supernatural, with the result of life in its animal and vegetable displays, of which man is the latest product. So popular did the theory become that it was adopted by many who still called themselves by the name of Christian. In some cases it was modified in the effort to harmonize it with the truths of revelation; while in most it was seen that if the one were true, the other was necessarily untrue. Many of the people of God trembled, like Eli, for the safety of the ark. Was it possible that all we had learned of God as the creator and preserver of all things; of the essential distinctions between the various classes of the animal and vegetable creation; of the uniqueness, personality and responsibility of man to his Maker — was it possible that all these were mistaken ideas of an old-fashioned religion which were utterly inconsistent with the real facts in the case

The principle advocated is indeed profane, though the spirit in which it is handled is not so, and consequently I do not accuse the author of profanity. The ungodly theory of Evolution is not only held by him without a notion of its ungodliness, but is pushed even into heaven itself, and to God, as its goal. On this side it is called "Advolution." "It is surely obvious that the complement of Evolution is Advolution" (p. 401). "Then from a mass of all but homogeneous 'protoplasm', the organism must pass through all the stages of differentiation and integration, growing in perfectness and beauty under the unfolding of the higher evolution, until it reaches the Infinite Sensibility, God" (p. 402). Were this not arrant nonsense, we should simply call it profanity; — happily better motives and the utter want of logical sequence save the book, or at least its author, from such a charge.* The fact however that Mr. Drummond is, doubtless, a good and a christian man, is no excuse for doctrines and views of an anti-christian and dangerous character. The most injurious heresies — those which have most widely and permanently corrupted the church — have owed their effect mainly to the personal character of their original propounders. Take Irvingism for instance, the poison of which heresy will probably (in a more or less diluted form) infect the church as long as it is on earth. And yet Irving himself was in the ordinary sense a good man as well as a very attractive man. And though the theory of evolution had a secular and so-called scientific origin, yet it is utterly antagonistic to divine revelation, and when accepted and propagated by Christian men, the result is terribly disastrous. It is no exaggeration to say that the state of things in the church is in the highest degree alarming, and that it fills one's mind with anxiety and solicitude, especially on behalf of the young. "Schools of thought," and incessant conflict of opinion, tend to confuse and unsettle the mind, and to retard at least, if not finally to hinder, sound and settled conviction.

“The science of the first chapter of Genesis is the science of the age in which it was written; but upon this imperfect, and in many respects false science, its author, under the influence of the Divine Spirit, has grafted a wonderfully sublime and spiritual representation of the Sovereign Author of nature, conceiving and presenting Him as a purely spiritual Being; who, moulding the material substance of the universe to His will, adapts the world gradually, by successive stages, to become the abode of lower and higher forms of life, and (ultimately) of beings endowed with reason, and who assigns to every living species upon it its proper office and function.”

The theory of evolution puts man as a created being at the greatest possible distance from his Creator, and, denying the directness with which he came from the hands of God, destroys the sense of relationship to, and of immediate dependence on, God; it mocks the solemnity of his creation as described in Scripture, ignores the moral likeness to God in which he was created, and leaves the first origin of life wholly unaccounted for. It admits a sort of climax or goal, towards which the process of evolution is tending, or has tended, and prefers to attribute to it, rather than to diversity in unity, as God's creative plan, the wonderfully complex yet harmonious universe of which we form part, i.e. to blind impulse rather than to a preconceived design on the part of the Almighty. There is in organic life a continuity of design, and a unity in design. Emanating from the same creative centre, the Deity, there is progress in the scale of creation, yet with separativeness of origin. Hence, like so many other catch phrases, Lyell's use of the term "independent creation" is, to say the least, extremely ambiguous.

Distinct acts of creation harmonise with creation as a whole, whilst being distinct: as each piece in a dissected map is in itself distinct, yet requisite to the completeness of the map in its entirety. In all God's works, creation as well as revelation, there is a wonderful co-ordination, and mutual adaptation, and in this sense no one specific act of creation is independent. But as to the fact of distinct and separate acts of creation, Scripture is express, and all human investigation and discovery, confirm it. Speaking of the grass, the herb, and the fruit tree, it says of each, "whose seed was in itself after his kind;" and of fishes "after their kind," also of terrestrial animals that they were created "after their kind:" i.e. God created each kind separately, endowing each with its own seed; as conversely we read in 1 Cor. 15:38-39 that to each seed God has given its own body, and that in a similar manner one flesh differs from another. Hence in principle the definition of species is true, viz., "a species consists of individuals having a common resemblance, and reproducing their like by generation." The records of geology, confirmed by all human experience and observation, establish the fixity within reasonable limits of species as above defined, and are utterly opposed to the theory of transmutation.

I see nothing in the elaborate statement at the opening of the Belfast meeting which affects the evolution system, or divinely-formed species at all. Creation it does not touch, as none of them do. But more, that embryos were gradually formed in the womb was always known. That microscopic investigation has discovered segmental division, and the separation into an upper and lower set, with the lines between, may be very interesting to anatomists, adds nothing but details. So, that there are general principles of formation from lower to higher genera in the foetus growth is curious, and shows God's acting analogously, and with system, but no more, unless the contrary to the development theory, because after all men and women have human children, and cocks and hens chickens, and it shows that these analogies of formation do not make intermingled species now. Phillips in his Geology, though afraid to say so, shows there was no cross-intermingling of species. And it is one of the remarkable things that from the same materials and analogous processes, both in plants and animals, specific results are produced. The oak and the bramble grow from the same soil, but the oak does not become a bramble, nor the bramble an oak. Forms of inception, and food, and digestion are the same, and we have eggs, and upper and lower segmentary division, but a man grows into a man, and a pig into a pig.

I do not see that evolution or development, once creation is fully recognised, is anything that concerns us. We all admit it. A corn of wheat, if it has lain 4,000 years without germination, if it meets "the scent of water" will sprout. Supposing the microscope discover there protoplasm itself, or appropriating power leading to organic growth, that is what in English we call "life" in its broadest sense, tree, animal, or man; in every case protoplasm in a cell. What was there 4,000 years is evolved, appropriates extrinsic stuff, and is a plant of wheat, and will, by "seed in itself after its kind," produce more evolved wheat. Now if God pleased (and who can say He did not) - chose - when chaos reigned, to-hu (wasteness), bo-hu (emptiness), to form such plants all at once from protoplasm to wheat, or an oak, and cause them to produce "after their kind," by an instantaneous act of will, what should or could prevent it? This the evolutionists do not pretend to explain, nor can they - that is, how protoplasm came there.

The Duke of Argyll's book is useful in the main, but as in the case of miracles, so in creation, stops short of Christian ground and truth. The things which were seen were not made of the things which do appear. In the beginning God created. That there may be proofs of progress and developed design, and of laws, and of uniformity in it, may be all true: but this does not hinder that they exist, and the law too, by the fiat of the Creator.