Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 062:246 (Apr 1905)
Article: The Theory Of Evolution And Religious Thought
Author: John R. Thurston

The Theory Of Evolution And Religious Thought1

Reverend John R. Thurston

This title, “The Theory of Evolution and Religious Thought,” is chosen, rather than “Evolution and Religious Thought,” because the question whether “evolution” is a fact of history is still in debate. If it be proved to be a fact, our only course is to adjust all our thinking to it, however much it may compel change of old beliefs. For our only quest is truth. This only is safe and ever best.

To avoid confusion, “the theory of evolution” as used in this discussion will be defined. The theory is this: All events in history have been the result of the action of forces which have been existing and operative from the beginning.

There are two implications of this theory that should be kept in mind: 1. No new force has come in from without, increasing the sum of these forces, or modifying their operation. They have been, from the first, without addition or diminution or interference. There has been a conservation of force from the beginning; 2. The operation of these forces has been in accordance with unchanging laws. This definition and its implications can be amply supported by quotations from such thoroughgoing evolutionists as Spencer, Huxley, Romanes, and

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John Fiske, and some will be given as we proceed. Mr. Darwin is not of these, as he holds to the coming in of a new force in the creative act of God as originating the first species.

The writer is well aware that, of late years, Professors Le Conte, Rice, and others have argued for a theory of evolution in which spiritual forces operate with natural forces, modifying and even controlling them. Dr. G. F. Wilkins’s “Control in Evolution” and Professor Drummond’s “Ascent of Man” have the same implication. But this is evolution plus a new force from without. It is not in keeping with the absoluteness of the law of “the conservation of force,” or the axiom that nothing can be “evolved” which has not been “involved.”

The wide acceptance of the theory of evolution is doubtless very largely due to the promulgation of the theory of Mr. Darwin as to the origin of species, and its general adoption by scientists. It is doubtless true that, as has been said by a scientist, “scientists almost unanimously believe that man has somehow been evolved”; and this belief, to many minds, warrants the belief of the larger theory of evolution. It is not strange, then, while scientists have believed and taught thus, that the public has very widely accepted evolution as a truth of science.

But it is forgotten that very few, if any, scientists claim that Mr. Darwin’s theory has been proved in the strict sense of that word. Mr. Huxley said, indeed, in his last public address before the Royal Society, in 1894, that it “had never been shown to be inconsistent with any positive observations”2 This was the most he could say. Observation had not proved it false. He remembered his insistence from the beginning, that, by experiment, a species must be produced which should be infertile with the species from which it was derived, in order to make the proof complete; and he remembered his confession in

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1891,3 that “no approximation to infertility had been made “by the experimenters, and that, “in this matter, we are just where we were thirty years ago.”

And now Professor Hugo de Vries tells us, that there are no interme...