Creationism - National Center for Science Education
Creationism - National Center for Science Education
Creationism - National Center for Science Education
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“If God had not given each species a fixed and permanent existence,” he continued, our<br />
spiritual and intellectual life, lacking firm unchanging foundation, would crumble. “The<br />
indestructibility of the species is the necessary condition of a healthy mental<br />
development. Its changeableness would mean the intellectual ruin of humanity.” Worse,<br />
Darwinism denies the immortality of the soul (1901:134-5).<br />
Sir John William Dawson, the great Canadian geologist, said that evolution was<br />
embraced by those seeking “deliverance from all scruples of conscience and fears of a<br />
hereafter” (1887). In a later work he wrote that evolution has “stimulated to an intense<br />
degree that popular unrest so natural to an age discontented with its lot,-.which threatens<br />
to overthrow the whole fabric of society as at presently constituted” (quoted in Price<br />
1920:166).<br />
In Evolution—A Menace, a book published the year he became president of the<br />
Anti-Evolution League of America (1922), John W. Porter stated that evolution denies<br />
moral responsibility, destroys belief in the Bible and Christiianity, and “logically and<br />
inevitably leads to war” (quoted in Gatewood 1969:129). Porter, editor of the Baptist<br />
Western Recorder, was a leader in the ef<strong>for</strong>t to ban evolution from Kentucky schools.<br />
In Collapse of Evolution Luther Townsend preaches against evolution’s evil<br />
effects on morality:<br />
If under the sway of evolution the present trend keeps on warfare will continue with no leagues strong<br />
enough to prevent it; the world will become a slaughter-house, every man a murderer, who is not murdered;<br />
it will become an asylum <strong>for</strong> an idiotic race and a mad house with padded cells without anyone to lock or<br />
unlock its doors. The last man, a degenerate, will curse God, dying with the curse on his pallid lips. Such<br />
is the world’s prospective doom if the theory of a Godless and Christless evolution takes the place of Bible<br />
revelation and command, and these conclusions appear to be based upon established facts and have been<br />
reached by approved scientific methods... [1922:35]<br />
Any theory that tends to dethrone God, elevate monkeys and degrade men (every scheme of evolution<br />
points that way), is sure, if followed, to end in disaster. [1922:59]<br />
Giuseppe Tuccimei, an Italian anti-evolutionist, expressed the same fear: “This<br />
perverse determination to place man and brute in the same category, interests me not so<br />
much from the scriptural standpoint as <strong>for</strong> reasons moral and social.” The consequences<br />
of evolution are “socialism and anarchy” amongst the “ignorant and turbulent masses.” If<br />
man arose from the animals, “why should we not enjoy in common with them the right to<br />
gratify every instinct?...why not proceed then to a general leveling of the existing social<br />
order?” If evolution is true, then free will, the soul, and life after death become myths,<br />
and morality loses its sanction:<br />
what guilt will there be in the delinquent who lapses into the most atrocious crimes?... And behold the<br />
suffering, the un<strong>for</strong>tunate, and the dying deprived of their sole consolation, the last hope which faith held<br />
out to them, and society reduced to an inferno of desperadoes and suicides! [Quoted in G.B. O’Toole<br />
1926:361]<br />
Dan Gilbert is equally direct in Evolution: The Root of All Isms (1935:8).<br />
Evolution must be judged by its fruits, and by comparison with God’s Word:<br />
Who can reasonably defend the evolutionary dogma, even though it be attested by every scientist on earth,<br />
if it acts as the tap root from which has sprung the upas tree of atheist-communism? Who can honorably