Part 4

Intolerant people--and they are legion--either lack faith in the power of truth to triumph over error, or they harbor a lurking doubt in their own minds in regard to the amount of truth embodied in the belief they so anxiously shield. They regard belief--their belief--as something to be protected at any cost. Freedom of opinion, intellectual honesty, truth itself must yield rather than their belief be in jeopardy. They seem to think it more blessed to believe something they received at second hand than to investigate and know the truth. With them it’s “Believe so and so; open your mouths like young mocking-birds and swallow it, smack your lips and call it good.” For people of that mental type to tell us to think--why, that is never thought of.

This forcing one to subscribe to a doctrine through fear, or to accept an idea on authority, belongs to the medieval age. And we resent it--we whose minds have not been altogether shaped by the kingly, priestly authority of five hundred years ago. We say, “Give us the evidences of your belief; if they are sufficient we cannot help believing. Let us meet in fair discussion and compare evidences. Drop your intolerance. Let your idea stand or fall on its merits--that’s all we ask of ours. Let the law of natural selection have a chance to operate.”

Not belief, but truth, is the one essential, and when discussion reveals the evidence supporting it belief is attracted to it like steel filings to a magnet. O ye of little faith, doubt not that in a struggle for existence between truth and error the fittest, that is, truth, will survive and error be eliminated.

Truth crushed to earth will rise again-- The eternal years are hers-- While Error, wounded, writhes in pain And dies among her worshippers.

“A lie on the throne is a lie, still, and truth in a dungeon is truth, still; and a lie on the throne is on the way to defeat, and truth in a dungeon is on the way to victory.”

“If there is anything that cannot stand the truth, let it crack.”

EVOLUTION AND THE BIBLE

The Bible itself contains evidences of evolution. As the Jews climbed up in the scale of civilization their ideals, their conception of what should constitute a God, also arose. It is a far cry from the ancient Hebraic conception of God, down through the prophets to the idea of divinity as taught by Jesus. Let the reader lay aside his prejudice, if any he has, be honest with himself, and compare Jehovah of the early Jews with Jesus’ portrayal of God as a father, as one whose synonym is live.

Jehovah, according to the early writers, was stern, wrathful, vengeful--“I will mock you in your calamities”; vain and jealous--“I, the Lord thy God, am a jealous God”; cruel--hardening the hearts of his powerless victims in order to punish them for doing what they could not help doing, and according to Joshua, Jehovah commanded him to kill all his enemies, old and young, even the children, and he gave the captured wives of the enemy to the soldiers of the Jewish army; deceptive--“I have sent lying spirits unto Ahab”; in short, and in very truth, he was a god having all the frailties and imperfections of man, and not man at his best either.

Take the Genesis story of creation:--When Jehovah created Adam he knew (being an all-wise God) that Adam would fall. Therefore, Adam could not have done otherwise than to yield to temptation; for to have resisted would have proved God’s foreknowledge false. Then why pronounce a curse on one (and his billions of descendants) for doing what God’s foreknowledge made unavoidable?

Again it is said that when Jehovah made up his mind to destroy the human race “it repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth”--that is, he had made a mistake, like you and I, and was sorry of it, like you and I. How like a man was Jehovah in his short-sightedness!

And this is a part of that story of the origin of man which we are asked to accept by the anti-evolutionists instead of the scientific explanation.

Before history there was mythology. Beyond the earliest ascertained historic facts of every people, of every early nation, was a mass of myths portraying its childish beliefs concerning its origin, its gods, its heroes, etc. The Jewish nation was no exception. Scriptural literalists, those who believe in the verbal inspiration of the Bible, know that all ancient peoples had their myths--all except the Jews. In the face of a million facts they still contend that the impossible stories of the early Jews are true as gospel--in fact that they are a part of the gospel.

The greatest obstacle to the popular acceptance of the doctrine of evolution is a belief in the verbal inspiration of the Bible and its literal interpretation. The more conservative or orthodox element of the churches regards the Bible as a direct quotation of the exact words of God. Their conception of inspiration is that the various writers merely held the pen while God caused it to move over the surface of the parchment tracing the characters that spelled his very words. The fact that the various books of the Bible are written in almost as many different styles would seem to disprove verbal inspiration to any thinking mind. Certainly, those books called the Bible are inspired, and in precisely the same sense as Shakespeare’s plays, Burns’ poems and Emerson’s essays are inspired--that is, the writers felt strongly an impulse to write; and in every instance the writings were stamped with the individuality of the author.

All inspiration is not on the same level--the higher the spirituality the deeper the source. For example, as one writer has pointed out, when Paul said, “Alexander the coppersmith did me much evil; the Lord reward him according to his works,” he was not inspired in the same sublime degree as was Jesus, when, rising above his own sufferings, he remembered his tormentors in the prayer: “Father, forgive them; they know not what they do.”

The belief in verbal inspiration has scotched the wheels of progress at every turn. Four hundred years ago those who taught the rotundity of the earth were denounced as heretics. It was a belief in verbal inspiration that inspired the church to force Galileo, who taught that the earth is not the center of the universe, but that it revolves around the sun, to make the recantation: “I, Galileo, being in my seventieth year, being a prisoner and on my knees before your eminences * * abjure, detest and curse the error and the heresy of the movement of the earth.” Even Newton’s great discovery of the law of gravitation was denounced as “subversive of natural, and inferentially, of revealed religion.”

A hundred years ago the use of anesthetics in childbirth was opposed in Scotland on the ground that it was seeking to remove the curse God had placed upon the daughters of Eve for her transgression.

King Charles of Spain declared that the digging of a canal across the isthmus of Panama, thus severing North and South America, would be a sin; for is it not written: “What God hath joined together let no man put asunder”?

In America the famous Rev. Cotton Mather wrote a letter to John Higginson informing him that the “general court” had given secret orders to a sea captain to waylay William Penn and the one hundred Quaker colonists--“heretics and malignants”--who were then on their way to Pennsylvania, capture the “ungodly crew” and sell them “to Barbadoes, where slaves fetch good prices in rum and sugar,” for in so doing “the lord may be glorified and not mocked on soil of this new country,” closing his pious letter with the felicitous phrase, “Yours in the bowels of Christ.”

In 1826 the school board of Lancaster, Ohio, refused to permit the use of the schoolhouse for a debate as to whether railroads were practicable. The letter reads: “You are welcome to the schoolhouse to debate all proper questions in, but such things as railroads and telephones (the possibility of which were talked then) are impossibilities and rank infidelity; there is nothing in the Word of God about them. If God designed that his intelligent creatures should travel at the frightful speed of 15 miles an hour He would have clearly foretold it through his holy prophets. It is a device of Satan to lead immortal souls down to hell.”

Is there needed stronger proof than this of the mental slavery to which the belief in verbal inspiration reduces its devotees?

Today those who oppose evolution for biblical reasons occupy the same absurd position as those who persecuted Galileo, denounced Newton, opposed the use of anesthetics in childbirth, thwarted the digging of a Panama canal, regarded the introduction of railroads and other industrial innovations as tricks of the devil to damn our souls, and approved the selling into slavery of the adherents of a rival Christian sect.

This medieval belief of verbal inspiration has filled the Christian world with strife and intolerance, and has drenched its soil with the blood of tens of thousands of “heretics.” It was this belief that for hundreds of years impelled whatever sect that had the power, be it Catholic or Protestant, to persecute, imprison, torture, burn, kill in every conceivable way those who differed with it in the interpretation of certain scriptural texts. This narrow, intolerant belief, the very negation of the Christ spirit, lives today--but, thanks to modern science and intellectual progress, its teeth are drawn.

Let us get this straight: evolution is not, in the slightest degree, opposed to religion; but it does conflict with the noxious growths of superstition and doctrinalism which half conceals religion. True Christianity will shine all the brighter with its concealments cleared away. The study of evolution broadens and enlarges one’s conception of religion. Those who are afraid that to accept evolution would cause them to “lose their faith” are already weak in faith.

Those who insist on, as of paramount importance, a belief in some mystical “plan of salvation,” including certain rites to be observed, are Paulinists rather than Christians. Scattered throughout Paul’s writings are expressions regarding the fall of Adam, the total depravity of man, the atoning blood of Christ, etc., which are harmless enough if regarded simply as rhetorical flourishes, but linked up in a finely wrought out scheme of redemption, and coupled with an insistence on the absolute necessity of belief in the same as the only means of individual salvation--why, this Pauline gospel has catered to human selfishness, has filled the world with theological disputations and sectarian strife, and has relegated into the background the great, yet simple spiritual truths of the lowly Nazarene. As a doctrine, its mysticism has a natural affinity with inherent superstition, dregs of which lie at the bottom of every human soul.

It is Jesus’ persistent insistence on the duty of each to serve humanity that made him a great religious teacher. And it is His teachings, if we heed them, that will “save” us, and not his shed blood; that dried up within a few hours of his crucifixion. To say that we are “saved by the blood of the lamb” is a fine figure of speech, though a well-worn one. Of course, the martyrdom of Jesus adds emphasis to the truths he expounded, but it makes them not one whit truer than they were.

Will the verbal inspirationalists please tell us when God quit sending messages to the world couched in his own words? It may be that that kind of inspiration ceased before Paul began preaching. If so, Paul is no greater, as an authority, than Whitefield or Moody.

There is no reason why we should not read the Bible just as we would any other book, with reason enthroned.