The Story of Creation as Told By Theology and By Science Part 8

On a clear evening in the early spring months, as soon as twilight is completely ended, a conical streak of light may be sometimes seen, arising' from the western horizon, and extending through an arc of 60 or 70 degrees, nearly in the direction of the Ecliptic, and finally terminating in a point. This is the Zodiacal light. In tropical climates it is seen much more frequently, [Footnote: Humboldt, Kosmos, vol. i. p. 126 (Bohu's edition).] and is much more brilliant than in England. This then is probably an envelope of still fainter light than the corona. It must extend beyond the orbit of Venus, as the maximum elongation of Venus is 47 degrees, while the Zodiacal light has been traced for 70 degrees, and probably farther. It is very possible that the earth is occasionally involved in it, and that from it we derive that diffused light which, though faint, is very serviceable to us on a starless evening, and of which no other account has as yet been given. The light we receive in this way is often as powerful as that which we should receive from the stars if they were not hidden by clouds.

These phenomena seem to point to the conclusion that the condensation of light in the sun has been a very gradual process, which is even yet incomplete. If we suppose that at the time of the formation of the coal measures it was not far advanced, but that a diffused light extended beyond the orbit of the earth, similar in some respects to the present Zodiacal light, but equal in intensity to the light which we now see in the corona, the phenomena of the third day will be satisfactorily accounted for.

There is, however, still an enormous amount of mystery connected with the sun. It is the centre from which an inconceivable amount of force in the shape of light, heat, actinism, and probably other manifestations, is hourly poured forth. If the whole of that force were divided into two thousand million parts, the portion received by the earth would be represented by one of those parts, and the whole amount received by all the planets would fall short of twelve of them. All the rest is radiated away into s.p.a.ce, and so far as we know at present lost to the system. The question then arises, "How is this enormous expenditure supplied?" Various sources of heat have been suggested, but none of them seem satisfactory. One conceivable source there is, but that lies out of the domain of science. Then again, metals, which only our most powerful furnaces will even melt, exist in the sun's atmosphere in the state of vapour. What must be the intensity of the heat which underlies that metallic atmosphere? and what can be the solid or fluid substances which, from the continuity of the spectrum, we know must exist there?

We turn now to the Mosaic Record to see what light it throws upon and receives from this investigation. The first thing to be noticed is that the word used by Moses for the sun and moon is not the same as that employed to denote light. It properly signifies a light-holder, such as a candlestick, and harmonizes with the view that the sun in his original state was not luminous, but was made a luminary by the condensation of light previously existent under other conditions. In the next place, though the apparent dimensions of the sun and moon are the same, Moses correctly describes the one as "the great light," the other as "the little light," thus indicating a knowledge to which the astronomers of his day had probably not attained.

The relation between the accounts of the first and fourth day's work becomes clear if we a.s.sume that the sun was not made a luminary till the fourth day. The division of night and day depends upon two things, the rotation of the earth upon its axis, and the concentration of light in the sun. Hence when the rotation of the earth commenced that division was potentially provided for, but the provision would not take effect until the second condition was fulfilled by the concentration of light in the sun. The indications given by the coal measures point, as we have seen, to the same conclusion.

The only remaining question is "What was going on in the earth at the same time?" Our materials for answering this question are but scanty. So great an alteration in the sources of light and heat must have involved great physical changes on the earth's surface, and there is reason to believe that great mechanical forces were at work producing vast changes in the relations of land and water.

"It has long been the opinion of the most eminent geologists that the coalfields of Lancas.h.i.+re and Yorks.h.i.+re were once united, the upper coal measures and the overlying Millstone Grit and Toredale Bocks having been subsequently removed by denudation; but what is remarkable is the ancient date now a.s.signed to this denudation, for it seems that a thickness of no less than 10,000 feet of the coal measures had been carried away before the deposition of even the lower Permian Rocks, which were thrown down upon the already disturbed truncated edges of the coal strata." [Footnote: Lyell, Geology for Students, p. 377.] And this is but a single instance.

During the interval between the deposition of the coal measures, which seem to belong to the third, and the Saurian remains which mark the fifth day, we have the Permian and Tria.s.sic Rocks, of which the Magnesian. Limestone and the new Red Sandstone are the most important representatives in England. Till a very recent period it was thought that these rocks belonged to a period remarkably dest.i.tute of animal life, very few fossils having been found in them. Recently, however, some very rich deposits have been found in the Tyrol, belonging to this period, but they are only local.

Of the Permian formation Sir C. Lyell says, "Not one of the species (of fossils) is common to rocks newer than the Palaeozoic." [Footnote: Geology for Students, p. 369.] This was not then a time for the origination of new forms of life. In the Trias, however, the new development of life, which was to attain its full dimensions on the fifth day, begins to open upon us. The earliest Saurian fossils are found, and the rocks still present us with impressions of the feet of reptiles and birds, which walked over the soft seash.o.r.e, and left footprints, which were first dried and hardened by the sun and wind, and then filled up with fresh sand by the returning tide, but never entirely coalesced with the new material.

At the close of this period the first traces of mammalian life occur, in the shape of teeth, which are supposed to have belonged to some small Marsupial quadrupeds, and in America the whole lower jaws of three such animals have been discovered; but no other remains have as yet been traced.

The Trias then seems to mark the boundary between the fourth and fifth days. The fourth day seems to have been on the earth a period of great change, not only in physical conditions, but also in the forms of life. In the latter point of view, however, it seems to have been marked by the pa.s.sing-away of old forms much more than by the origination of new ones, and hence the barrenness of the Geological Records is in exact accordance with the silence of the Mosaic Record as to any new developments.

SECTION 8. THE FIFTH DAY

"And G.o.d said. Let the waters swarm swarms, the soul of life, and let fowl fly above the earth in the face of the firmament of heaven.

"And G.o.d created the monsters, the great ones, and every soul of life that creepeth, with which the waters swarmed, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind; and G.o.d saw that it was good.

"And G.o.d blessed them, saying, Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the waters in the sea, and let fowl multiply on the earth.

"And there was evening, and there was morning, a fifth day."

The fifth and sixth days of Creation are those to which the theory of development chiefly refers. It will, therefore, be better to defer the consideration of its bearing on the narrative till the relation of that narrative to Geological facts has been considered, since it can only be thoroughly weighed when taken in connexion with the facts which belong to the two days.

The beginning of the fifth day may be a.s.signed to a point near where the Trias is succeeded by the Lias. As the Trias is drawing to its close, the cla.s.s of reptiles, whose first known appearance belongs to the carboniferous epoch of the third day, begins to show signs of advance. The first true Saurians are found in the Trias: the great development takes place in the Lias and Oolite, while in the chalk large quant.i.ties of kindred remains are found, which, however, are not identical with the species found in the earlier groups. Of these some were probably almost entirely aquatic, as their limbs take the form of paddles; others were purely terrestrial, a large proportion were amphibious, and some, as the pterodactylus, bore the same relation to the rest of their cla.s.s as the bats bear to the other mammalia, being furnished with membranous wings, supported upon a special development of the anterior limbs. One important characteristic of the race at this time was the great size of many of its members: thirty feet is by no means an uncommon length. This marks the fitness of the name given to the cla.s.s by Moses.

Very few actual remains of birds have been found; but this is not surprising, since birds would rarely be exposed to the conditions which were essential to the fossilization of their remains. The earliest known fossil bird is the Archaeopteryx, the remains of which were found in 1862 in the Solenhofen Slates, which belong to the Oolite formation. Though the actual remains of birds are very few, traces of their footprints have been found in many places, from the New Red Sandstone upwards, and these traces prove not only that they were very numerous, but also that they attained to a gigantic size, as their feet were sometimes from twelve to fifteen inches in length, and their stride extended from six to eight feet. During this period, then, these two cla.s.ses must have been the dominant races of the earth. As the precursors of these cla.s.ses made their appearance at a much earlier period, so the epoch of birds and reptiles witnessed the beginning and gradual advance of the cla.s.s which was to succeed them in the foremost place--the mammalia. Generally, however, the mammalian remains of this period belong to what are considered the lower cla.s.ses--the monotremata and marsupialia. The close of this period must have been a time of great disturbance in the Northern Hemisphere, since the chalk which runs through a great part of Northern Europe, and frequently attains a thickness of 1000 feet, must have been deposited at the bottom of a deep sea, and subsequently elevated.

SECTION 9. THE SIXTH DAY.

1. The Mammalia.

"And G.o.d said, Let the earth cause to go forth the soul of life, cattle, and creeping thing, and the beast of the earth (wild animals) after his kind; and it was so.

"And G.o.d made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every creeping thing of the ground after his kind; and G.o.d saw that it was good."

In these two verses there are one or two points which call for notice. In the first place, the creatures mentioned are divided into three cla.s.ses, of which two, cattle and the beast of the earth, are tolerably clear in their general significance, though their extent is not determined. The third is denoted by a word which had already been employed to describe the work of the fifth day, and is translated in our version "creeping thing." The probability seems to be that it has reference to such cla.s.ses of animals as the smaller rodentia, and the mustelidas, whose motions may be appropriately described by the word "creeping." That it denotes four-footed creatures has already been pointed out. The next point is, that in each case the singular is used; in the case of the domestic animals this fact is lost to the English reader by the use of the collective noun "cattle." Of course it is a common usage, to denote a cla.s.s of animals by a singular noun used generically, but the statements of the pa.s.sage would also be justified if one pair only of each of the three types specified were called into existence at first. It is also to be noticed that while the word [Hebrew script], the earth is used to define the wild beast; another word, [Hebrew script] the ground, is applied to the "creeping thing." There is probably a reason for this, though it may not at present be apparent.

When we turn to the Geological record, we find that the period of the chalk was followed by the deposition of the tertiary strata.

During the upheaval of the chalk these strata seem to have been gradually laid down in its hollows, and around its edges. They extend from the London clay upward to the crag formations which appear on the Eastern coast of England at intervals from Bridlington to Suffolk. In these strata we see signs of an approach to the existing state of things. As we ascend through them, a gradually increasing number of the fossil sh.e.l.ls are found to be specifically identical with those which at present inhabit the ocean.

Another characteristic of this period is the abundance of fossil remains of mammalia; but in this case, although the remains are evidently, in many cases, those of creatures nearly allied to those now existing, they are not identical, very great modifications both of bulk and of minor structural details having taken place. One very important point of difference is the vastly superior bulk of these ancient animals: a good ill.u.s.tration of which may be seen in the skeletons of the mammoth and of the modern elephant, which are placed near each other in the British Museum. Many of these animals appear not to have become extinct till long after the appearance of man.

The first appearance of mammalia, as has been already noticed, must have been long before this, as the earliest fossils yet found are at the lower limit of the Lias. They belong, however, to the genus Marsupialia, of which, as far as we know, no representatives were in existence in any part of the world known to Moses, so that even on the supposition that he intended to give an account of the first appearance of the cla.s.ses of animals which he mentions, the omission of these would have been inevitable. His words, however, appear to point to a time when the mammalia occupied the leading place, just as the reptiles had occupied the leading place at a previous epoch. And his words are fully borne out by the records of the rocks.

At the close of the tertiary period great changes once more took place in the Northern hemisphere. There was a great and extensive subsidence, in consequence of which a large portion of Northern and Middle Europe must have been under water, the mountain summits only appearing as detached islands. At the same time, from causes utterly unknown to us, there was a great depression of temperature, the result of which was, that all, or nearly all the land, in those regions which were not submerged, was covered with glaciers, much as Greenland is now, and from these glaciers vast icebergs must from time to time have been detached by the sea and floated off, carrying with them fragments of rock, some freshly broken, some rounded by long attrition, which were deposited on the then submerged lands as the ice melted, and are now found as boulders, sometimes lying on the surface, at others dispersed through beds of clay and sand formed under water from the debris worn down by the glaciers. A subsequent movement of elevation ushered in the state of things which exists on the earth at the present time.

2. Man.

"And G.o.d said, Let Us make man (Adam) in Our image after Our likeness; and he shall have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the heaven, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

"And G.o.d created man (the Adam) in His image, in the image of G.o.d created He him; male and female He created them.

"And G.o.d blessed them, and G.o.d said to them, Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea, and the fowl of the heaven, and over every animal that creepeth upon the earth.

"And G.o.d said, Behold, I have given you every herb seeding seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree which has in it the fruit of a tree seeding seed; to you it shall be for food.

"And to every animal of the earth, and to every fowl of the heaven, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, in which is the soul of life, every green herb is for meat; and it was so.

"And G.o.d saw every thing--which He had made, and behold it was good exceedingly.

"And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day."

The terms in which the Creation of man is spoken of are such as to challenge particular attention and to induce us to expect something very different from what occurred on any previous occasion. In the first place, more agents than one are introduced by the use of the plural form of the verb, and thus at the very commencement of man's career there is an intimation of that mysterious fact of the Trinity in Unity which was to have so important an influence upon his future destiny. Then we are told that man was to be formed in the Image of G.o.d, a statement which probably is of very wide import. It has been variously interpreted as having reference to the spiritual, moral, and intellectual nature of man; to the fact that the nature of man was afterwards to be a.s.sumed by the Second Person of the Trinity; to the delegated empire of this world which man was to hold. There are two expressions of St. Paul: that "man is the image and glory of G.o.d" (1 Cor. xi. 7), and that "the invisible things of Him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal Power and G.o.dhead"

(Rom. i. 20), which seem to indicate that this record has a significance which as yet we can only partially understand. Then the story of man's creation is repeated in the second chapter, and while the other events recorded in the first chapter are very briefly summarized, that of man is very much amplified. This does riot necessarily indicate an independent account, as is sometimes a.s.serted; at the fourth verse of the second chapter a distinct portion of revelation commences--the special dealing of G.o.d with man, and this could not be intelligible without an amount of detail with reference to man's origin, which would have been out of place in the short account of the origin of the world by which it is preceded. In this account the creation of Adam and Eve is recorded as two separate events, the latter of which is described in terms of deep mystery, of which all that we can say is that they point to that still deeper mystery--the birth of the Bride-- the Lamb's Wife from the pierced side of the Lamb. But in the case of Adam there is a remarkable difference from anything that has gone before. Two distinct acts of creation are recorded; one of which places man before us in his physical relation to the lower animals, while the other treats of him in his spiritual relation to his Maker. "The Lord G.o.d formed man (the Adam) dust from the ground (adamah), and breathed into his nostrils the breath of lives; and man became a soul of life." The inspiration of the "breath of lives" distinguishes the creation of man from that of all other creatures.

The Geological records harmonize exactly with the Bible as to the date of man's appearance on the earth. It is towards the close of the age of gigantic mammalia, that the earliest remains of man's workmans.h.i.+p make their appearance in the shape of tools and weapons rudely fas.h.i.+oned from stone. Parts of human skeletons have also been occasionally found, but they are exceedingly rare.

Weapons and bones are alike confined to superficial, and comparatively very recent formations. From such traces as have been found there is no reason to believe that any physical changes of importance have taken place in man's body since his first appearance on the earth. The differences which do exist are of the same kind as, and not greater than, the differences which exist between individuals at present.

The gift of dominion over the lower animals seems to indicate something different from that which gives one animal superiority over another, and accordingly we find that it is not by physical power that that dominion is exercised; but that in most of his physical faculties man is inferior to the very animals which he holds in subjection. It is partly in virtue of his intellectual superiority, and partly perhaps by means of an instinctive recognition on the part of the animals of man's higher nature (Gen. ix. 2) that that supremacy is maintained.

SECTION 10. DEVELOPMENT.

We have now to consider the question of development, in reference to the Mosaic Record of the last two days, and to the known facts to which that record has relation. The account of the third day's work has also a bearing on the subject, but as the same considerations will to a great extent apply to animals and to plants, it will not be necessary to make any special reference to it.

The facts in favour of the theory of development are these:--1.

The different cla.s.ses of plants and animals are not separated by broad lines of demarcation, but shade insensibly into each other.

2. The characteristics of the same species are not constant; the lion, for instance, the horse, the elephant, and the hyena of the present day differ in many minor points from the corresponding animals of the Tertiary period, so that unless there was a possibility of spontaneous change, we must a.s.sume successive creations of animals, with only trivial differences. 3. In all animals there are minute individual differences, and if under any circ.u.mstances these differences had a tendency to acc.u.mulate, they might in the course of time result in great structural modifications. 4. Man has been able to take advantage of this fact and by careful selection to mould the breeds of domestic animals to a certain extent in accordance with his own wishes.

The theory of development a.s.sumes that for the care of man other forces might be subst.i.tuted, which in a long course of ages might result in changes of far greater extent than those produced by human agency. The forces a.s.signed are natural selection and s.e.xual selection. The difficulties in the way of this hypothesis have been already considered, and only require to be briefly re-stated.

1. As regards modifications of organs already existing, the two alleged causes are insufficient to account for the results which we witness, since in each individual case the concurrence of many contingent causes, continued through a long series of ages, is required to produce the result. But the probabilities against such, a concurrence in any one case are enormous, and against their concurrence in a large number of cases the chances are practically infinite.

2. That such causes do not at all account for cases in which an entirely new organ is developed, such as mammary glands--or for the case of man, in which intellectual superiority is accompanied by a loss of physical power.

3. That from the nature of the case it is impossible for us to ascertain that natural or s.e.xual selection has ever acted to produce a single modification, however small, and that the results of man's superintendence have not as yet pa.s.sed beyond certain narrow limits, so that there is no justification for the a.s.sumption that such modifications are capable of being carried to an unlimited extent.

We see that in the only case in which change is known to have been brought about, it has been the result of choice and design. If then there is a probability that choice and design may have been exercised by a power higher than man, there is no longer any reason to doubt but that results much greater than any to which man can attain may have been brought about by the same means. And in fact the advocates of the theory of development do virtually admit the existence and action of such a power, whenever they have recourse to a.s.sumed "laws" to account for phenomena for which their naked theory can give no reason. For, as has been shown, law, if it is to be a.s.signed as an efficient cause, and not merely as the statement of observed facts, can only be regarded as the expressed and enforced will of a higher power. And there was no reason why those minute variations themselves, which are the basis of Mr. Darwin's hypothesis, should be considered casual. Instead then of natural selection, or s.e.xual selection, let us suppose that the selection took place under the superintending care of the Creator, and was directed towards the carrying out of His designs, and then we shall have no reason to doubt but that all results which consisted only in the modification of existing organs may have been obtained by the operation of those laws which we term natural, because they express modes of operation with which we are so familiar that we look upon them as automatic.

But there are other results for which no natural laws with which we are acquainted will thus account. Just as no mechanical laws within our knowledge will account for the rotation of the earth, so no physiological laws yet discovered will account for the changes when totally new orders of being came on the stage--when the course of life took, as it were, a new point of departure. But it is precisely at these points that the Mosaic Record points to a special interference on the part of the Creator. How that interference took place we are not informed. Very possibly it may have been the result of other laws which lie wholly out of the reach of our powers of observation. But whatever may have been its character, it does not in any way imply change or defect in the original plan, unless we know, (what we do not know, and cannot ascertain) that such interference formed no part of the original design. Everything bears the marks of progressive development, and there is nothing improbable, but rather the reverse, in the supposition that such a plan should include special steps of advance to be made when the preparation for them was completed.