Mark I. Vuletic

Last updated 21 March 2008

Analysis

(i) Even if this were true, it would not count against the truth of evolution; all it would mean is that we would need to find the maturity and humility to face up to a humble origin.

(ii) However, many people think our evolutionary origin far grander than anything dreamt up in ancient Hebrew mythology. Darwin's eloquent thoughts on this matter are, of course, well-known, but bear repeating:

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved. (Darwin 1859:400)

Of course, since Darwin is much hated by the religious right, from which creationism draws most of its support, it would do well to hear similar sentiments from a person who remained an ardent defender of Christianity all his life. One such man was British Prime Minister William E. Gladstone (1809-1898), a progressive creationist, who once asked

if pride causes us to deem it an indignity that our race should have proceeded by propagation from an ascending scale of inferior organisms, why should it be a more repulsive idea to have sprung immediately from something less than man in brain and body, than to have been fashioned according to the expression in Genesis (Chap. II., v. 7), "out of the dust of the ground?" There are halls and galleries of introduction in a palace, but none in a cottage; and this arrival of the creative work at its climax through an ever aspiring preparatory series, rather than by transition at a step from the inanimate mold of the earth, may tend to magnify than to lower the creation of man on its physical side. (Gladstone 1887: 71-72)

Thus, while some creationists decry the evolutionary history of life as not worthy of their own personal majesty and perfection, other believers see the evolutionary history of life as a tribute both to man and to God.

References

Darwin C. 1859 [1999]. The Origin of Species. New York: Bantam.

Gladstone WE. 1887. The Honorable William E. Gladstone to Colonel Ingersoll on Christianity: Some remarks on his reply to Dr. Field. pp. 59-85 in Ingersoll 1993.

Ingersoll RG. 1983. Reason, Tolerance, and Christianity: The Ingersoll Debates. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus.