BOLD CHALLENGE

Taranaki Daily News, 16 January 1935, Page 7

BOLD CHALLENGE

DARWIN THEORY DENIED PRODUCT OF IMAGINATION CRITICISM BY SCIENTIST ACCEPTANCE OF MIRACLE By Telegraph—Press Assn. —Copyright. Rec. 11.50 p.m. London, Jan. 15. Sir John Ambrose Fleming, a prominent British scientist, in his presidential address to the Victoria Institute and Philosophical Society vigorously challenged the whole of the Darwinian theory of evolution, declaring that the hypothesis that man evolved over a vast period of time from a common pai'ent with the anthropoid ape was a product of the imagination not based on indisputable evidence. If prehistoric man was anything like what might be expected, Sir John said, the rate of increase of a single pair of humans in 9000 years would become 1,000,000,000. They would thus have filled the whole known world, yet the only discoveries were a few dozen skeletons in isolated and separate places, all of which facts were much more consistent with the Biblical version of a post-glacial creation of mankind. Adherence to the doctrine of evolution was entirely inconsistent with belief in the fundamental doctrines of Christianity. It was deplorable that so many clergymen accepted as proof mere unconfirmed speculations of materialistic anthropology, or denied miracles. Those who had examined the evidence of miracles most closely agreed that the bodily resurrection of Christ was one of the most certainly . attested facts of human history. This certified all the previous Biblical miracles. The Daily Telegraph editorial article pays a tribute to Sir John Fleming s service to science, but it argues that the fundamental meaning of the evolutionary principle is that living organisms and the universe itself have come to be what they are by a process of continuous chance which is still progressing. In this there is no denial of divine creation.