Note 6 — Chapter V · IRRECONCILABLE DIFFICULTIES CONNECTED WITH EVOLUTION

Now let us consider the opinions of our spiritual guides. At the Shrewsbury Church Conference, in 1896, Archbishop Temple said that, “in his opinion, the full acceptance of the doctrine of Evolution would prove a great help to Christian thought and Christian life.” In his book, The Relations between Religion and Science, he states that “the doctrine of Evolution leaves the argument for an intelligent and beneficent Creator and Governor of the world stronger than it was before.” A decade has passed, and still how few Christians know of this “help,” of this “stronger argument”! In the course of his address at the Weymouth Church Conference in 1905, the Bishop of Gloucester admitted that “Darwin’s teaching on evolution and development” had “revolutionised our ideas of God’s action in nature.” If this be so, how comes it that such a vast number of the pious still adhere to the old ideas? Is it not the duty of the pastor to educate his flock? What “ideas of God’s action in nature” are missionaries even now putting into the heads of their converts? If we inquired of the average religionist, should we find that his or her ideas had been revolutionised? Not only are worshippers in the House of God kept in ignorance, but theological students are distinctly warned against the full acceptance of the doctrine of Evolution. For instance, Dr. Orr, a professor of apologetics, delivered a course of lectures before the professors and students of the Princeton Theological Seminary in 1903, the object of which was to show the dangers that must accrue to the Faith if the theories of Darwin were accepted in their entirety. He stoutly denied that man and woman were an evolution by slow stages from creatures that had gone before, and asserted that the first man came into being, as did the first woman, by a special act of creation. Unfortunately for the validity of his assertion he labours under the delusion that science concedes that man, or anything like man, cannot be traced further back than the post-glacial period, and that the brain capacity and physical characteristics of primeval man stood on as high a level as the average man of to-day!6