Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 93:369 (Jan 1936)
Article: Editorials
Author: Anonymous

BSac 93:369 (Jan 36) p. 1

Editorials

“Dreaming History”

The unthinking members of the reading public are continually fed in current popular literature with assumptions which under careful examination prove to be without foundations in fact. Especially is this true of the many implications growing out of the theory of evolution. The editor of a popular magazine1 begins an editorial, entitled, Ancestor Worship, with these words: “Worship of the dead and their ways, is, as everyone knows, a barbarous practice. We have evidence that it started at least a hundred thousand years ago, perhaps earlier, with Neanderthal man. And it continued a long time.”

Who, intelligent men of all conditions are constrained to ask, knows how, when, and what this creature, from whose body the bone fragments survive which bear the name of the locality in which the remains were found, worshipped? Only through a series of the most far-fetched inferences can anything be assumed concerning such a question, dating back, as it is claimed, more than ninety millenniums before Homo sapiens left any historical records of worship or anything else. Yet this editorial proceeds upon the assumption that the claimed evidence is factual, and thousands of unthinking readers swallow it as such.

In this connection, Nathan Grier Moore says: “In the verbiage of the evolutionist some of us have been saying that man is on his way upward, but now we are finding that he can only with difficulty keep his original level. The highest authorities in biology are now agreed that he has never been down. The error arose in part from the persistence of the theory of evolution, which was supposed to rest on a basis of fact.... It is the voice of science that if there has been a change since the Cro-Magnon [the name science gives to the earliest of the race of Homo sapiens] it has been a

BSac 93:369 (Jan 36) p. 2

retrogression.... The writer regards the theory of evolution as both unprovable and unintelligible, and believes that it is bound to go the way of astrology and mind-reading. Yet there remain serious men of scientific pursuits who are still discussing the Neanderthal, and treating his condition and capacities as a problem today. Within the past year imaginary pictures of him have been painted on the walls of the great Field Museum. Yet it is no longer to be doubted that, regarded as a candidate for humanity, he is dead and buried many a long year ago.”2 As to worship, all the facts, archaeological and Scriptural, point to the certainty that monotheism was the pristine belief of Homo sapiens. Any creature before this was not man and therefore not capable of worship. The i...