THE OTAGO DAILY TIMES TUESDAY, JULY 14, 1925. EVOLUTION AND PROGRESS.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 19531, 14 July 1925, Page 6

THE OTAGO DAILY TIMES TUESDAY, JULY 14, 1925. EVOLUTION AND PROGRESS.

Tennessee, it seems, has decided that the theory of evolution is useless, dangerous, and ought to b© abolished. The’ attitude thus taken up towards the most far-reaching thought ever promulgated from and to the human mind would be ludicrous were it not mischievous j for it is certain to delude many of the unenlightened and thus increase the darkness which it presumably aims at dispelling. Of all men who have influenced human thought in science and philosophy,—indeed in the whole range of human intellectual activity,—none, not even Aristotle, is the compeer of Darwin. This does not imply that Darwin’s intellect or knowledge was the equal of that of Aristotle; indeed, the opposite was the case. But the nature of the field in which Darwin worked, the dynamic penetrativeness of the theory which he formulated, its' universal applicability, its immediate and continuously expanding elucidation of much that was previously only guessed at, the forward light it casts, a beam in darkness, along the track that investigation must travel to find the truth, —all these elements combine to give it a primacy amongst the hierarchy of man’s intellectual gradations. Even were it outdone or superseded tomorrow, as in a minor degree Newton’s theory of gravitation has been partially transcended by Einstein’s theory of relativity, it would still, like Newton’s theory, be a beacon light to the scientific investigator. There is no department of scientific research immune from its all-pervasive power. Wherever we tum in anthropology, philosophy, speech, music, government, locomotion, religion itself, we find the same processes manifesting themselves. At first a crude undifferentiated mass homogeneous as of a magma like that, for instance;, that we see in the case of ordinary dough; gradually the homogeneous dough, acted on by its environment —the baker and the furnace—and elected for survival in various ways by the purchasing public, evolves into a group of heterogeneous, specialised products, and takes the form of bread t cakes, shortbread. As these products come out of the imperceptible into the perceptible, so they pass on everyone in a state of flux, again disintegrating into the imperceptible, to be recombined once more in the future in an infinite complexity of varying modes. To say that evolution negates religion is absurd. Rather it clarifies it, shows its processes, its unfolding, its possibilities of advance. The crude anthropomorphism of primitive man, worship of stocks and stones, placation of jealous dieties, sacrifice of animals and men to tribal gods, the gradual expansion of the tribal god into a national god, the gradual ascription to this god of moral attributes and ultimately the worship of a Being throned afar who has set His convenant in man’s heart and desires of His creatures mercy and justice,—all these phases find their analogues in the Old Testament. To read that Book, —or rather library—of continuous and progressive revelation in the light of evolution is to get a new view of God and of His ways with men. It is to picture man rising out of a succession of lower lives, casting the ape and tiger behind him, and yet all the time in his struggle forward battling for a triumphal adjustment against the low desires, the hatred, the brutality, the bestiality that clogged his lower nature in the seons of the past. Religion itself, i£ must be reasserted, owes more to evolution than the world has yet realised. Education is also in its debt. The greatest educational figure in the world to-day, Dr Montessori, founder of a new system and incidentally founder of Daltonism and several other new methods, is a declared evolutionist in her procedure,— her system is a biological’ system. No university of any note in the world could dream of refusing to maintain evolutionary teaching. Unfortunately the embittered polemics of fifty years ago have bequeathed a heritage of opposition to a supposed device of th<* Devil. Evolution is said to deny Genesis. As a matter of fact, anyone accustomed to deal with ancient codices knows that in many places the text of the Old Testament is hopelessly corrupt. No manuscript of the New Testament is earlier than about 350 a.d., —none of the Old before 900 a.d. The originals had all yielded to the ravages of time long before. But even were the originals of Genesis still extant, the fact would still remain that God has written His Revelation in the rocks, in man’s physical nature, in the rise and decay of species, as well as in man’s heart and in the Scripture. Usually the Bible is regarded as God’s word to man: let it be remembered it is also man’s word to God. The 23rd Psalm is not God’s word; it is man’s word—his song of trust. Evolution will throw light on this record of man’s outpouring to God, while at the same time it is not concerned to deny inspiration. But it does deny emphatically that a belief in evolution is incompatible with a belief in Christianity. The day Ts coming oh when the Church Universal will welcome back her intellectual sons, recognising that they, too, have not been denied the gift of inspiration by the Giver of all gifts.