Page:Evolution and Theological Belief R. V. Chamberlin 1911.pdf/1



Aspects of their Relationship Historically Considered

RALPH V. CHAMBERLIN.

The conflict of opinion aroused by Darwin will subside like the evil passions of our civil war. Surely the reverent study of nature cannot lead man astray. These two great movements of love and of knowledge, first of the spiritual, then of the intellectual and physical, well-being of man, will be seen to be in harmony and not a discord.—H. F. Osborn ('09).

The dualism or antagonism manifested in what has been widely spoken of as the conflict between science and religion, has been a conspicuous phenomenon in the life of recent generations. The same conflict, in one form and another, extends back to very early times. In Greece, centuries before the foundation of Christianity, contention was rife, which largely parallels in some fundamentals the controversy of recent times. In truth, however, a large amount of the modern conflict has been either over nonessentials or has been due to mutual failure on the part of the combatants to understand each other. If these would stop long enough to agree upon definitions and to reach some real understanding of each other’s meaning and point of view, they would in most cases end by agreement. It is another case illustrated by the dispute over the two-sided shield. Those who saw but one side might conclude the shield to be black; but the other side of the shield might be white, and those who had had this side alone presented to them might justly contend for the whiteness. Both would be in possession of the truth, but not of the whole truth, which would consist in a combination of the truth possessed by the two. In this conflict both sides have been guilty of the folly of dogmatism:

and in a large number of cases the question has ceased to be one as to fact or truth, and has become one as to the relative skill of the opponents in debate.

Stripping off all surplusage and coming to the heart of the matter, the underlying cause of the controversy with which we are dealing has always been a difference in the philosophic interpretation of Nature. Since the days of early Greece there have been men who saw Nature as something designed and sustained by a conscious intelligence; while there have been others who saw nothing in or behind Nature excepting so-called natural causes, forces acting blindly and inevitably. Either God controls Nature, it has been thought, or else Nature runs itself by virtue of blind resident causes. Thus we have Theism and Naturalism respectively. The Naturalism of recent times has been essentially Materialism, embracing the view that the Universe can be reduced wholly to "matter and motion." We see, then, that it is over the questions of efficient causation that controversy has been especially waged and can understand why so much importance has been attached to the matter of origins. Now evolution, in the ordinary acceptation of the word, deals essentially with the origin of organic forms and in the minds of many has seemed thereby to bear with great weight upon this question of causation. Hence, we can easily understand the tremendous storm raised fifty years ago when the theory was revived with so much vigor by Spencer, Darwin, and others. There were then many opponents of religion, who short-sightedly claimed that the establishment of the truth of evolution would be the last link in the

evidence required for the complete proof of Naturalism; and there were likewise many theologians who with the utmost folly acquiesced in this opinion that Naturalism and Evolution were one and inseparable.

It is very interesting and instructive to note that while theologians of fifty and of twenty-five years ago thus so widely and so warmly opposed evolution as making for pure Materialism, most of those of the early part of the eighteenth century and especially those of earlier times did not look upon the evolution of species from species or even their origin spontaneously from inorganic matter as having any theological bearing other than as "instances of that various wonder of the world which in devout minds is food for devotion." In the best minds of those earlier centuries there was never so much as a well-defined suspicion that theological faith was in any way opposed by the phenomena of the natural origination of the different forms of plants and animals. On the contrary, many of the ablest men of the Church not only accepted the doctrine of evolution, but extensively developed the theory as describing the method or one very important method of creation.

It is clear that the Babylonians and neighboring peoples of the ancient East believed that in the beginning space was filled with a continuous mass of waters. According to the main Babylonian account, for we have recovered a number, the earth was first given shape in the midst of this watery chaos as a flat body over which, as a second step, a solid vault or firmament was formed to keep back the waters from the surface. Then dry land could appear. After so much