Creationism - National Center for Science Education

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