7     Creation

 

In Westminster Shorter Catechism Q. 8 it is said that “God executes his decrees in the works of creation and providence.” The decree itself, we have seen, as immanent in the divine being, is formed in eternity and is one single act which simultaneously includes all that comes to pass in all space and time. But as emanent and transitive, it passes into execution by a gradual and endless succession of events and phenomena. The two general modes in which the divine decree is executed are creation and providence. It might at first sight seem as if redemption should constitute a third mode; but theologians have commonly included this under the head of providence, as the special manner in which God provides for the needs of men as sinners.

Creation Ex Nihilo

Creation, in the proper sense of origination ex nihilo, is the very first work that God does ad extra. Nothing precedes it, except that eternal activity in the divine essence which results in the trinitarian persons. These latter are not creations, but emanations. Hence creation is called “the beginning of God’s way” (Prov. 8:22); and God is said to have created the heaven and earth “in the beginning” (Gen. 1:1). The doctrine of creation is taught in Gen. 1:1; Neh. 9:6; Job 26:3; Ps. 19:1; 104:30; 124:8; 146:6; John 1:3; Acts 17:24; Rom. 11:36; 1 Cor. 8:6; 2 Cor. 4:6; Col. 1:16; Heb. 3:4; 4:4; 11:3. The peculiar characteristic in creation, namely, the origination of entity from nonentity, is mentioned in the following: “The worlds were framed so that things which are seen were not made of things that do appear” (Heb. 11:3); “God commanded the light to shine out of darkness” (2 Cor. 4:6); and “by him were all things created, visible and invisible” (Col. 1:16).

Creation ex nihilo is peculiar to the Scriptures. It is not found even in the most rational and spiritual of the ancient cosmogonies. Even when an intelligent architect of the universe is affirmed, as in the systems of Plato and Aristotle, an eternal hylē,¹ or chaotic matter, is postulated, out of which it is formed. Philo (On the World) takes the same view. In the Platonic writings, God is rather a demiurge than a Creator. Plutarch (Procreation of the Soul) describes Plato’s view as follows: “The creation was not out of nothing, but out of matter wanting beauty and perfection, like the rude materials of a house lying first in a confused heap.” Ranke (Universal History 1.22) marks the difference between the Mosaic and the Egyptian and Assyrian cosmogonies as …

an express counterstatement. With the Egyptians and Babylonians, everything is developed from the inherent powers of the sun, the stars, and the earth itself. Jehovah, on the other hand, appears as the Creator of heaven and earth; as both the originator and the orderer of the world. The conception of a chaos is not excluded, but this conception itself rested on the idea of a previous creation. (See supplement 3.7.1.)

In Scripture, the term creation is sometimes employed in a secondary sense: “You send forth your spirit, they are created” (Ps. 104:30); “I create evil” (Isa. 45:7); “the Lord has crated a new thing in the earth” (Jer. 31:22); “create in me a clean heart” (Ps. 51:10); “I create new heavens and a new earth” (Isa. 65:17; Rev. 21:1; and other passages). In these instances, divine agency operating by means of second causes is intended. Creatures are propagated under laws established by the Creator; sin is permitted and controlled by God employing the human will; an extraordinary event in history is brought about by divine providence; the regeneration and sanctification of the human soul is a secondary creation.

Under the head of creation, we have to do only with the primary and strict signification of the term, as denoting origination from nothing: de nihilo or ex nihilo. The poverty and inadequateness of human language is very apparent in respect to this idea. Words are more or less pictorial in their roots and elements. But the creation of entity from nonentity utterly forbids any picturing or imaging. For this reason, more or less of qualification or explanation must be employed, in all languages, in connection with the words that are used to denote this purely abstract and inexplicable conception.

The Hebrew word employed to denote the idea of creation is bārā˒.² According to Gesenius (in voce) it signifies “(1) to cut, to carve; (2) to form, create, produce; Gen. 2:3 reads bārā˒ la˒ăśôt:³ which he created in making, that is, which he made in creating something new.” Says Delitzsch (in Lange’s Commentary on Gen. 1:1), “Bārā˒⁴ in the Piel signifies to cut, hew, form; but in the Qal,⁵ it is employed to denote divine products, new and not previously existing in the sphere of nature and history (Exod. 34:10; Num. 16:30; and frequently in the prophets) or in the sphere of spirit (Ps. 51:10). In the Qal it never denotes human productions and is never used with the accusative of the material.” In Exod. 5:16, ˓āśâ⁶ is used with the accusative of material: “Make brick.” Dillmann (on Gen. 18:21) agrees with Delitzsch. Oehler (Theology of the Old Testament 1.169) takes the same view. Dorner (Christian Doctrine 2.23) endorses it. The patristic, medieval, and Reformation exegesis adopts this interpretation.

The clause ex nihilo is explanatory of the term creation and is necessary to define it and guard it from misuse. Unless it be employed, creation may be used to signify evolution or development, which is a wholly different conception. Ex nihilo denotes that a created thing is not produced out of existing matter of any kind whatever: “ ‘Out of’ (ex) does not indicate matter but rather excludes it.”⁷ Creation of entity from nonentity is expressed in Rom. 4:17: “God calls those things which be not, as though they were (ta mē onta hōs onta).”⁸ The same idea is suggested in 2 Cor. 4:6: “God who commanded the light to shine out of darkness.” It is not meant that darkness is the material of which light is made, but the state or condition of things in which light is made to begin by a fiat. Hebrew 11:3, which says that “things which are seen were not made of things that do appear,” teaches that there is an invisible cause for all visibles; and Col. 1:16, which says that “all things visible and invisible” were created (ektisthē)⁹ by the first begotten, teaches that God creates the invisible forces of matter, as well as the invisible spirits of angels and men. In the apocryphal 2 Maccabees 7:28 it is said that “God made the heaven and earth of things that are not (ex ouk ontōn).”¹⁰ Creation ex nihilo has its human analogies. The understanding originates thoughts from nothing; and the will originates volitions from nothing. Thoughts and volitions, however, are not entities or substances, and here the analogy fails. But they are ex nihilo. One thought is not made out of another thought; nor is a volition made out of another volition. Here the analogy holds good.

The maxim “nothing comes from nothing”¹¹ is true in the sense that nothing comes from nothing (a) by finite power, (b) as the material out of which something is produced, and (c) by the mode of emanation, generation, or evolution, because this supposes existing matter. Lucretius (1.151) lays down the position that “nothing ever was brought forth from nothing by divine power.”¹² The reason that he gives why even by divine power (divinitus) nothing can be produced from nothing is that in this case there would be no need of a seed or egg and that, consequently, everything might be produced out of everything: men could be originated out of the sea, and fishes and birds out of the earth. Lucretius does not conceive of the seed or egg as created, but as eternal. His reasoning is valid against pseudoevolution or evolution defined as “the transmutation of the homogeneous into the heterogeneous.” Everything may be originated out of everything, upon this theory. The homogeneous vegetable may develop into the heterogeneous animal; the homogeneous animal into the heterogeneous man. And the process may be downward as well as upward, because either process is alike the transmutation of a homogeneous substance into a heterogeneous one. If it were possible by the operation of merely natural law to convert the inorganic mineral into the organic vegetable, it would be possible by the same method to convert the organic vegetable into the inorganic mineral. The rule would work in both ways. As plausible an argument might be constructed out of the deterioration and degradation of some of the human family to prove that man may be evolved downward into an anthropoid ape, as that which has been constructed to prove that he has been evolved upward from one.

Spinoza’s definition of “substance” was intended to exclude the doctrine of creation ex nihilo. He defines substance as “that which exists of itself, that is, the conception of which does not require the conception of anything else” (Ethics 1.3). But the conception of a creature is the conception of a substance that requires another substance to account for it. A created substance, consequently, is precluded by Spinoza’s definition of substance. There cannot be any such thing. Descartes had previously defined the absolute and primary substance as “that which so exists that it needs nothing else for its existence”; and Aquinas (1.29.2) so defines a trinitarian subsistence or person. But Descartes added a definition of created or secondary substance as “that which requires the concurrence (concursus) of God, for its existence.” Spinoza in his early life made an abstract of Descartes’s philosophy for the use of a pupil (Concerning the Principles of Rene Descartes’ Philosophy).¹³ His editor, De Meyer, remarks that Spinoza must not be understood to agree with Descartes and mentions that he rejected Descartes’s distinction between intellect and will, but says nothing about the distinction between primary and secondary substance (Bruder’s Spinoza 1.89). Subsequently, when Spinoza published his own system, he rejected the distinction between primary and secondary substance and gave no definition of any substance but the “one and only substance,”¹⁴ of which everything is a modification. By this begging the question¹⁵ or postulate of one substance only, he excludes created substance and lays the foundation of pantheism.¹⁶ This theory of the universe energetically rejects creation ex nihilo and maintains emanation. Fichte says that “the assumption of a creation is the fundamental error of all false metaphysics and philosophy.” Hegel explains the universe of matter and spirit as an immanent process of God, a material efflux out from the absolute which is retracted again as immaterial spirit. Strauss expresses the same idea in the statement that “Trinity and creation are, speculatively considered, one and the same thing; only the former is the rational, and the latter the empirical aspect.”Kant, on the contrary, asserts that “the proposition that God, as the universal first cause, is the cause of the existence of substance can never be given up without at the same time giving up the notion of God as the being of all beings and thereby giving up his all sufficiency, on which everything in theology depends” (Practical Reason, 279 [trans. Abbott]). (See supplement 3.7.2.)

The maxim “nothing comes from nothing”¹⁷ is false in reference to the supernatural and omnipotent power of God. The Supreme Being can originate entity from nonentity.¹⁸ The following are the characteristics of creation from nothing:

1.      Creation has a beginning. It is not the eternal emanation of an eternal substance or the eternal evolution of an eternal germ. This is taught in Gen. 1:1 by the clause in the beginning and in the phrase before the foundation of the world frequently employed to denote eternity. Origen held that God is eternally creating; otherwise he would have nothing to do and would be mutable in deciding to create (Schleiermacher, Dogmatics 1.197). The opera ad intra meet the first objection. The eternal generation and spiration are divine activities prior to the creation of the universe and independent of it. Boethius asserted that God is eternal and that the world is perpetual. Rothe (Ethics §40) affirms eternal creation. Defective trinitarian or positively antitrinitarian theories logically tend either to the dogma of an eternal creation or else of emanation in order that the deity may have an object for himself as a subject. True trinitarianism finds this object within the Godhead. God the Son is God the Father’s object. If creation is eternal, the universe is as old as the Creator. It could be said of it, as the Nicenes said of the Son of God: ouk ēn pote hote ouk ēn.¹⁹

2.      Creation is optional, not necessary, for God. It proceeds from free will and is expressed by fiat: “He has stretched out the heavens by his discretion” (Jer. 10:2). Emanation is necessary and constitutional, like the generation of the Son and spiration of the Spirit.

3.      Creation originates another new substance; but emanation and evolution produce only modifications of an old and existing substance.

The conception of creation from nothing is purely intellectual, like that of a mathematical point, line, or surface. These latter cannot be explained or even illustrated by sensuous images and are held as valid conceptions by a purely rational act of the mind unassisted by sensation. The atheistic mathematician who denies the being of God and creation ex nihilo, because he cannot image them, should upon the same principle deny the validity of the mathematical conceptions of a point, line, and surface. Owing to man’s strong propensity to image his knowledge and explain conceptions by a sensuous method, he attempts to account for the universe by postulating an eternal substance of some ethereal kind, out of which it is made. Hence even Plato and Aristotle suppose a hylē,²⁰ which is formed into the cosmos by the supreme architect. Müller (Literature of Greece, 87–88) asserts that the idea of creation from nothing is wanting in the Greek conception of the deity and is found in the Eastern nations. But the only Eastern people who had the idea were the Hebrews. The Persian cosmogony is dualistic; and the Indian is pantheistic. “It is,” says Augustine (City of God 11.2), “a great and very rare thing for a man, after he has contemplated the whole creation, corporeal and incorporeal, and has discerned its mutability, to pass beyond it, and by the continued soaring of his mind to attain to this unchangeable substance of God, and, in that height of contemplation to learn from God himself that none but he made all that is not of the divine essence.” Mosheim, in a note to Cudworth (3.140), proves by a survey of ancient philosophy and theology that the doctrine of creation ex nihilo is found only in Scripture.

Creation Account in Genesis

The first verse of Genesis mentions the first of the opera ad extra of the triune God, namely, the creation of the present universe. The clause heaven and earth denotes all that is not God, namely, the worlds of matter and of finite mind or the sensible and intelligible worlds. “Heaven and earth” means the universe; as when one says of another: “He would move heaven and earth to accomplish his purpose.” The sacred writer begins with an all-comprehending proposition: God created all finite beings and things. The same truth is taught in Col. 1:16: “By him were all things created, that are in heaven and that are in earth, visible and invisible.” Here, the creation of the universe is referred to the second trinitarian person. A portion of the universe is spiritual in its substance and is denoted by “heaven”; and a portion is physical and is denoted by “earth.” The spirits of angels and men constitute the spiritual part of the universe, and matter constitutes the physical part of it. From Job 38:7 it appears that the angels were created before the six days’ work, and from Gen. 1:26 that men were created on the sixth day.

This is the old patristic interpretation of Gen. 1:1. Says Augustine (Confessions 12.7): “You created heaven and earth: things of two kinds; one near to you, the other near to nothing.” By this latter, Augustine means the rarefied matter of chaos. Again (Confessions 12.7) he says, “You created heaven and earth; not out of yourself, for so they should have been equal to your only begotten Son, and thereby equal to you also.”²¹ (See supplement 3.7.3.)

The created universe of mind and matter, denominated “heaven and earth” in Gen. 1:1, is diverse from God, that is, is another substance. It is not God or a part of God, because God created it from nonentity. God and the universe are not one substance, but two substances: one primary and the other secondary, one necessary and the other contingent. God and the universe do not constitute one system of being, but two distinct and different systems; for a system implies that all the parts are of one nature and coequal in dignity and duration. Some theists, like Edwards, for example, under the phrase being in general, have unintentionally taught Spinozism. This phrase brings God and the universe into a single system and makes God a part of it. Whatever is really one system of being is a numerical unity and is of one and the same essence. The three trinitarian persons, for example, constitute one system of divine being, and they are numerically one substance. The universe is not infinite, but finite, and therefore cannot belong to the system of the infinite. The term infinite in the proper sense is applicable only to God. For that which is strictly infinite is also eternal and necessary. But neither eternity of being or necessity of being belongs to the “heaven and earth” that was created “in the beginning” of time. The universe is the finite, and God is the infinite (see Howe, Oracles 2.9). The universe is unlimited, in distinction from infinite. The unlimited is capable of increase, diminution, and division; the infinite is not. Space, time, and matter are unlimited; they can be added to, subtracted from, and divided. God is infinite and incapable of addition, subtraction, or division. The finite spirit is also unlimited, not infinite. It is capable of increase and diminution; not by addition and subtraction of substance, but by development of latent properties or suppression of them. “World” is sometimes put for “universe.” In this case, “world” denotes all being that is not God. Coleridge’s formula illustrates this: “World minus God = zero. God minus world = reality absolute. The world without God is nonentity. God without the world is, in and of himself, absolute being and infinite perfection” (Marsh, Remains, 162). The use of “world” as the antithesis of “God” and the equivalent of “universe” is more common in philosophy than in literature. In literature, “world” more generally denotes a part of the universe. Milton uses the term to denote the visible universe of matter:

How this world

Of heaven and earth conspicuous first began.

—Paradise Lost 7.62

In Gen. 1:2 Moses proceeds to speak of the first state and condition of the “earth,” in distinction from the “heaven”: “And the earth was without form and void.” He describes the “earth” (excluding the “heaven”) as a mass of chaotic matter which had been created ex nihilo in that “beginning” spoken of in the first verse. By the “earth” in the second verse is not meant merely the planet earth, but the whole material system connected with it, both solar and stellar. The ensuing description of God’s work upon that part of the universe called “earth” shows that the sun, moon, and stars belong to it. Says Matthew Henry (on Gen. 1:2):

A chaos was the first matter. It is here called the “earth” (though the earth in the sense of the dry land was not made until the third day), because it did most resemble that which afterward was called earth, mere earth, an unwieldy mass. It is also called the “deep,” both for its vastness and because the waters which were afterward separated from the earth were now mixed with it. This mighty bulk of matter was it, from which all bodies even the firmament and visible heavens were afterward produced by the power of the eternal word.

Between the single comprehensive act of the creation of the angels and of chaotic matter mentioned in Gen. 1:1 and the series of divine acts in the six days described in Gen. 1:3–31, an interval of time elapsed. This is the old patristic interpretation. The very common assertion that the church has altered its exegesis, under the compulsion of modern geology, is one of the errors of ignorance. The doctrine of an immense time prior to the six creative days was a common view among the fathers and Schoolmen. So also was the doctrine of the rarefied and chaotic nature of matter in its first form a patristic tenet. Kant’s gaseous chaos filling the universe, adopted by La Place and Herschel, was taught, for substance, by Augustine, in the following positions taken in Confessions 12.8.1. God created a chaotic matter that was “next to nothing,” that is, the most tenuous and imponderable form of matter. This chaotic matter was made from nothing “before all days,” that is, in that prior period marked by the words in the beginning. This chaotic unformed matter was subsequently formed and arranged in the six days that are spoken of after Gen. 1:1.

Augustine’s exegesis of Gen. 1 is substantially this: In the beginning, that is, in a time prior to the six days, God created ex nihilo the angelic world or “the heaven” and chaotic inorganic matter or “the earth.” Then in the six days he formed (not created) chaotic inorganic matter into a cosmic system, solar, stellar, and planetary, and upon the planet earth created (not formed) the organic vegetable, animal, and human species. This was the interpretation generally accepted in the patristic and Middle Ages. Lombard (Sentences 2.12) adopts Augustine’s views. David Kimchi, a learned rabbi of the twelfth century, respecting whom the Jews said, “No Kimchi, no understanding of the Scriptures,” explained Gen. 1 in the following manner: “First of all, God created the ‘heaven,’ that is the highest heaven with the angels; then the ‘earth,’ the first appearance and condition of which are described in the second verse and out of which the other creatures are subsequently formed. And it is called without ‘form and void,’ in opposition to heaven; which was immediately carried to its full perfection and replenished with inhabitants” (Witsius, Apostles’ Creed, diss. 8).

Respecting the length of the six creative days, speaking generally, for there was some difference of views, the patristic and medieval exegesis makes them to be long periods, not days of twenty-four hours. The latter interpretation has prevailed only in the modern church. Augustine teaches (On the Literal Meaning of Genesis 4.27) that the length of the six days is not to be determined by the length of our days. Our seven days, he says, resemble the seven days of the account in Genesis in being a series and in having the vicissitudes of morning and evening, but they are “quite unequal.”²² In 4.1 he says that it is difficult to say what “day” means. In 5.1 he calls attention to the fact that the “six or seven days may be and are called one day” (Gen. 2:4). In 2.14 he calls the six days “God-divided days,” in distinction from “sun-divided days” (see Lewis, “Genesis” in Lange’s Commentary, 131). Gangauf (Augustine, 111n) cites numerous passages to the same effect. Anselm (Cur deus 1.18) remarks that there was a difference of opinion in his time as to whether the six days of Moses “are to be understood like days of ours” as a successive creation or whether “the whole creation took place at once.” He says it is “the opinion of the majority” that man and angels were created at the same time, because we read: “He who lives forever created all things at once.”

There is nothing in the use of the word day by Moses that requires it to be explained as invariably denoting a period of twenty-four hours; but much to forbid it. The following facts prove this: (1) day means daylight in distinction from darkness (Gen. 1:5, 16, 18); (2)day means daylight and darkness together (1:5); and (3) day means the six days together (2:4). The first day (1:5) could not have been measured by the revolution of the sun around the earth because this was not yet visible. The same variety in signification is seen in the Mosaic use of the word earth: (1) the entire material universe (Gen. 1:1); (2) the solar, stellar, and planetary system (1:2); (3) the dry land of the planet earth (1:10); or (4) the whole of the planet earth (1:15, 17). The Ten Commandments were called by the Jews the “ten words.”The term word here denotes a truth or proposition, not a single word. Similarly, a period of time having its beginning and ending, its evening and morning, may naturally be called a “day.” (See supplement 3.7.4.)

The seven days of the human week are copies of the seven days of the divine week. The “sun-divided days” are images of the “God-divided days.” This agrees with the biblical representation generally. The human is the copy of the divine, not the divine of the human. Human fatherhood and sonship are finite copies of the trinitarian fatherhood and sonship. Human justice, benevolence, holiness, mercy, etc., are imitations of corresponding divine qualities. The reason given for man’s rest upon the seventh solar day is that God rested upon the seventh creative day (Exod. 20:11). But this does not prove that the divine rest was only twenty-four hours in duration any more than the fact that human sonship is a copy of the divine proves that the latter is sexual.

Harmony of the Biblical Creation Account with Physical Science

Respecting the harmony between physical science and revelation, it is to be observed in the first place that physical science is not infallible, so that an actual conflict between science and revelation would not necessarily be fatal to revelation. It might be fatal to science. In the seventeenth century the physics of Descartes had great authority, and much was made by the skeptics of that day of the fact that the Mosaic physics did not square with the Cartesian physics. Says Howe (Oracles 2.21), “Some are sick of the history of the creation, because they cannot reconcile the literal account thereof, in the beginning of Genesis, with the philosophy of their Descartes: as if his reputation were a thing more studiously to be preserved than that of Moses; though yet, more might be said than has been, to reconcile with natural principles even the whole history of the creation.” The “vortices” of the Cartesian physics are today an exploded and rejected “science”; and the most skeptical physicist of this generation would not dream of alleging a conflict between science and religion because Moses does not agree with Descartes.

Again, in the second place, physical science is not one and invariable in its contents. There have been a multitude of scientific theories that cannot be reconciled with each other. The Ptolemaic and the Copernican astronomies are examples. For centuries the Ptolemaic system was undisputed; and the skeptic of those centuries endeavored to show that the Bible did not agree with it, and the believer of those centuries endeavored with equal strenuousness to show that it did (Herschel, Discourse §336). Christianity, on the other hand, has had substantial invariability. The differences between Christian believers, even upon the more recondite doctrines, are by no means so great as those between the ancient Greek and the modern Englishman upon the nature and laws of matter. The difference between the Augustinian and the Semipelagian or between the Calvinist and the Arminian is not at all equal to that between Ptolemy and Copernicus. The doctrines of the Trinity, incarnation, apostasy, the redemption have always constituted the essential substance of the Christian faith. But no such substantial invariability as this appears in the history of physical science. Even, therefore, if it could not be shown that revelation is in harmony with a science that confessedly is not infallible and actually is not invariable, it would not be a very serious matter for revelation. The error might be upon the side of science.

After this preliminary observation, we remark, in the first place, that the biblical physics does not conflict with the heliocentric Copernican theory. Nothing at all is said in the opening of Genesis respecting the motion of the earth in relation to the sun; and the phraseology in other parts of Scripture is popular and to be explained as it is when the modern astronomer himself speaks of the rising and setting of the sun. In the second place, the order of creation as given in Genesis is corroborated by the best settled results of modern physics. The whole field cannot of course be gone over. Let us test the matter by referring to geology, in respect to which science the conflict has been the most severe.²³

The now generally accepted facts in geology remarkably coincide with the series of events related in Genesis. The sequence of the creative periods is substantially the same in both. Physical science may be regarded as having established with considerable certainty the following positions: (1) The planet earth, at first, was a chaotic mass in a state of fusion and enveloped in a totally dark atmosphere of vapor. This agrees with the statement in Gen. 1:2: “The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep.” (2) By the cooling caused by the radiation of heat, a crust was formed over the molten interior, and the atmospheric vapor was condensed into an ocean of water which covered the superficial crust. This primeval ocean is mentioned in Gen. 1:2: “The Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” The creative work under these two heads is not a part of the six days’ work. It occurred before the first day and belongs to the immense duration between “the beginning” and the six days’ work. (3) The condensation of vapor did not make the earth’s atmosphere clear and translucent immediately. But in course of time it so cleared it, that the light, which had been generated by the heat, could penetrate it with some obscurity. Light as a luminous haze could now be distinguished from darkness. This agrees with Gen. 1:3–4: God said, “Let there be light; and God divided the light from the darkness.”

The appearance of light before the appearance of the sun is one of the strongest proofs that the author of this narrative was instructed upon his point. Such a fact as this must have been revealed to him. Previous to modern physical investigations, this apparent misplacement of light before the sun was regarded as singular by the believer and absurd by the skeptic. The fact, moreover, that the sun and moon did not appear until the fourth day and that the vegetable kingdom was created on the third day and was growing without sun visible in the sky greatly increased the difficulty. But the theory of the modern geologist removes the difficulty and corroborates with Moses. According to geology, there was a long period when the primeval oceans were tepid water, when the atmosphere was a gloaming and was as moist, warm, and germinating as that of the rainy season in the tropics:

Over all the face of the earth

Main oceans flowed, not idle, but, with warm

Prolific humor softening all her globe

Fermented the great mother to conceive,

Satiate with genial moisture.

—Milton

The consequence was that rank growth of succulent, fernlike vegetation, of which the coal beds are now the exponent.

As the inorganic process of radiation of heat and condensation of vapors went on, the earth’s atmosphere became less and less vaporous and more and more luminous, until the space around the planet assumed the appearance of the empty, hollow arch of heaven. Previously, this space had been so much filled with vapor that no distinction between earth and sky was possible. This formation of the atmospheric welkin or dome is described in Gen. 1:6–8: “And God said, Let there be a firmament [expanse], and let it divide the waters which are under the firmament from the waters which are above the firmament. And God called the firmament heaven.” A similar atmospheric process is continually occurring on a smaller scale in the clearing up of a storm or fog. It is described by Shelley in “The Cloud”:

For after the rain, when with never a stain,

The pavilion of heaven is bare,

Prolific humor softening all her globe

The winds and the sunbeams with their convex gleams,

Build up the blue dome of the air.

By the contact of water with the lava beneath the earth’s crust, steam and gases are generated, causing earthquakes and convulsions which lift the crust, forming the mountain ranges, elevating tablelands, lagoons, and ocean beds. This process having taken place, the planet is fitted to support the first and lowest form of organized matter, namely, the vegetable. Up to this point in the Mosaic account, there is no life of any kind in that part of the created universe designated by the term earth in Gen. 1:2. Everything is inorganic and lifeless, and the only forces in operation are mechanical and chemical. Now the plant as a living species, which could not be originated by any of the mechanical and chemical that had previously been in action, is created ex nihilo, and the vegetable kingdom is established on earth. Geology finds no evidences of vegetable life in igneous rocks and corroborates the teaching of Moses in Gen. 1:9–12: “And God said, Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear. And God called the dry land Earth, and the gathering together of the waters called the Seas. And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after its kind.” With this is to be compared 2 Pet. 3:5: “By the word of God, there were heavens from of old and an earth compacted (synestōsa)²⁴ out of water (ex hydatos)²⁵ and amid (or through) water (di’ hydatos)”²⁶ (Revised Version). This teaching of St. Peter seems to agree with the geological view that earth got its solid consistence “out of” and above the water, by means of the convulsions that lifted it up, and “amid” and under the water, by means of the deposit of rocky strata.

In saying “let the earth bring forth (dāšā˒)²⁷ grass” (Gen. 1:11), it is not meant that the inorganic earth or mineral develops into the organic vegetable and thus that vegetable life is an evolution from the lifeless clod; because it is also said that God “created every plant of the field before it was in the earth and every herb of the field before it grew” (Gen. 2:5).²⁸ The words let the earth bring forth mean that the earth furnishes the nonvital material elements that constitute the visible form of a plant, which are vitalized and assimilated by an invisible principle of vegetable life—which invisible principle was a creation ex nihilo.²⁹ The creation of this is the creation of the species vegetable. This interpretation is evidently the true one, not only because it agrees with Gen. 2:5, but because the earth in verse 24 is said to bring forth animals also. If there be no intervening creative energy and the earth is the sole cause, then evolution produces out of the very same lifeless elements both vegetable and animal life. But even the evolutionist has not yet claimed that the animal comes directly from the mineral. The vegetable is the link between the two. The mineral first becomes a vegetable, and then the vegetable becomes an animal, according to the materialistic physics. Our Lord’s words in Mark 4:28 explain the words let the earth bring forth grass: “The earth brings forth fruit of herself (automatē),³⁰ first the blade, then the ear, then the full corn in the ear.” The earth today “brings forth fruit spontaneously of itself” only because of the seed planted in it. And on the third creative day, the earth “brought forth grass spontaneously” only because of the new vegetable species then created by God “before it was in the earth and before it grew” (Gen. 2:5).

The sun and moon now appear in the vault of heaven, that is, in the atmosphere entirely cleared of the primeval vapor. The seasons are now arranged, since the sun can exert its power, and the vegetable world in its higher as well as its lower forms is developed. This agrees with Gen. 1:14–19.

Animal life in the waters and in the air is then created (Gen. 1:20–23). It is acknowledged that marine life is the oldest of all animal life. The coral formations of the Florida reefs are the work of living creatures. Agassiz (Graham Lectures, 68) thinks that they are “hundreds of thousands of years old.” This distinguished naturalist, in his Fossil Fishes, shows that of the vertebrate animals fishes alone existed at first; that amphibious animals came later; and that birds and mammals appeared still later, the lower orders first and the higher afterward. Haeckel (Creation 1.68) concedes that Agassiz has shown this. The fiat “let the waters bring forth” is to be explained like “let the earth bring forth.” A specific animal principle is created ex nihilo, which builds up out of the vegetable and other elements now in the waters a particular form of fish or bird: “The causality of ‘the swarming of the swarm’ cannot lie in the water itself” (“Genesis” in Lange’s Commentary, 171; Philo, Works 4.284 [ed. Bohn]).

Animal life on the land is then created: (a) irrational animals and (b) man (Gen. 1:24–31). Geology shows that man is latest in the series.

The six days of Gen. 1 are six creative periods, each having its evening and morning and each one of these marked by a particular manifestation of divine power: some more distinctly than others, but all really so marked. This is indicated in the Hebrew: “There was [an] evening, and there was [a] morning: one day.” The first, second, and fourth days exhibit the Creator operating through those mechanical laws and chemical properties of matter, which he established “in the beginning” spoken of in Gen. 1:1. The effects in these three days are brought about by radiation of heat, condensation of vapor, chemical affinity and repulsion, attraction of cohesion, gravitation, etc. The third, fifth, and sixth days are periods during which life—vegetable, animal, and mental—is originated ex nihilo by creative energy. Neither of these forms of life can be accounted for by the operation of those laws and properties of matter which were employed on the first, second, and fourth days. The first, second, and fourth are inorganic days during which nothing vital is originated. The third, fifth, and sixth are organic days during which the vegetable, animal, and rational kingdoms are originated.

The Mosaic record mentions four and perhaps five creative fiats by which the living species in the organic world were originated ex nihilo. The first fiat creates the vegetable species (Gen. 1:11–12). The second creates the animal species in its lower forms, namely, fishes, reptiles, and birds (1:20–22). The third creates the animal in the higher forms of the quadruped (1:24–25). The fourth creates man (1:26–28). It is somewhat uncertain whether the bird is included under the same fiat with the fish and reptile because the Hebrew reads, “Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that has life, and let fowl fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven” (Revised Version). In this case, the “fowl” are not necessarily the product of the “waters.” The Authorized rendering “and fowl that may fly” represents the “waters” as bringing forth the “fowl.” St. Paul teaches the doctrine of distinct living species when he says, “All flesh is not the same flesh; but there is one kind of flesh of man, another of fishes, and another of birds” (1 Cor. 15:39).

These several fiats establish and fix the limits that separate the vegetable from the animal kingdom and the several species in the animal kingdom from each other. The result of each fiat is distinct from that of the others. The fiat that created the vegetable did not create the fish. The fiat that created the quadruped did not create man. No mere evolution of that which was created by the first fiat will yield that which was created by the second; in other words, no one of these distinct species can be transmuted into another by merely natural causes. The supernatural power of God must intervene in order to account for an absolutely new species. God must say: “Fiat.” The theory of evolution as presented either by Haeckel in its extreme form or by Darwin in its more moderate form unquestionably contradicts the Mosaic physics: “The divine word of power creates not merely a force in general; each new and distinct creative word introduces a new and distinct principle into the already existing sphere of nature—a principle which hitherto had not been present in it” (Lange’s Commentary on Gen. 1:9–13). Agassiz (Graham Lectures, 13) comes to the same conclusion from considering the diversities of structure in the kingdom of animal life: “It must be mind acting among these material elements, making them subservient to its purpose, and not the elements themselves working out higher combinations of structure.” (See supplement 3.7.5.)

At the same time, the Mosaic physics does not needlessly multiply the miracle, but admits the evolution of varieties under a species. If but one fiat is intended in Gen. 1:11–12 and no subdivisions are implied under it, then all the innumerable varieties of plants in the vegetable kingdom have been evolved by propagation from one original vegetable principle. Vegetable protoplasm, in this case, has developed into the endless variety of plants. The mention, however, of “kinds” of grass, herb, and tree looks like subdivisions under the general fiat. So, likewise, if only a single fiat without subdivisions is mentioned in 1:20–21, it would not contradict the Mosaic physics to concede that reptiles have developed from fishes and even birds from reptiles. But the mention of “kinds” (1:21) appears rather to imply subdivisions under the general fiat. Again, if in 1:24–25 but a single fiat without subdivisions is intended by the sacred writer, then the species quadruped originated on the sixth day has developed, under the law of propagation and by the influences of environment, into the innumerable varieties that now fill the earth. The fact, however, that the quadruped is produced “after its kind” would seem to indicate particular creative acts under the general.

While there is this amount of indefiniteness and flexibility in the Mosaic account respecting the breadth of a species, there is the strictest definiteness and inflexibility respecting the fact. While, according to Moses, the vegetable may evolve from the vegetable and the animal from the animal, it would utterly contradict the Mosaic physics to concede that fishes, reptiles, and birds have evolved from the plant or vegetable; that quadrupeds have evolved from fish, reptile, and bird; that man has developed from irrational biped or quadruped. The products of two general fiats cannot be brought under a single one. The species man, originated by a distinct fiat on the sixth day, has developed under the law of propagation and by the influence of environment into the several varieties or races of men. This fiat is distinguished from all the others in that God addresses himself, not the earth or the waters. It is certain, also, that no subdivisions under it are implied, as in the case of the others, because man is not said to have been produced “after his kind.”

This creation and fixedness of species is corroborated by the observations of the physicist. There are botanical and zoological provinces and groups on the globe. Each species has its own center and is propagated from it. Plants, fishes, reptiles, birds, and quadrupeds have their own habitat. The lion is not found in every zone nor the horse. Neither is the pine nor the palm. Man differs in this respect from all other species. He is found in all zones; and this because he has a higher grade of intelligence found in no other species by which he can supplement nature and counteract what is unfavorable or deadly in his environment. He can build a fire—a thing no other animal can do. He can sow and reap grain—which no other animal can do. He can make clothing to protect himself from cold, can build a house, can cook food.

Eternity of Matter vs. Creation Ex Nihilo

The first theory antagonistic to creation ex nihilo is that of the eternity of matter. One or the other doctrine must be adopted. Something is now and has been from eternity: “The very words there is nothing or there was a time when there was nothing are self-contradictory. There is that within us which repels the proposition with as full and instantaneous a light, as if it bore evidence against it in the light of its own eternity” (Coleridge, Friend in Works 2.464). If this “something” is not mind, then it is matter. The objections to the eternity of matter are the following:

1.      The idea of matter does not imply absolute perfection. Matter is not the most perfect substance or being that we can conceive of. The idea of matter does not include all kinds of perfection. Rational intelligence is a quality of which matter is destitute. So, also, is free will.

2.      The idea of matter does not imply necessary existence. This follows from its not being the absolutely perfect. Matter is contingent being. The supposition of the nonexistence of matter is not in conflict with the proposition that something is from eternity. We could still suppose the eternal existence of mind and account for the temporal existence of matter as its created product. But the converse is not supposable. For should we suppose the primary nonexistence of mind and its subsequent creation by matter, this would imply that the nonintelligent originates the intelligent, which is as difficult to believe as that nonentity originates entity.

3.      The idea of matter does not imply eternal existence, because it does not imply perfection and necessity of existence. The three conceptions stand or fall together.

4.      If matter is eternal it must be the first cause; but matter cannot be the first cause since this must be self-moving and perpetually moving. Matter is marked by the force of inertia.³¹ It must be moved ab extra;³² and its motion diminishes if not perpetuated ab extra.³³ The burden of proof lies upon him who denies this. The Newtonian physics and mathematics are inseparable from one another, and both must stand until they are refuted by a materialistic physics and mathematics. If therefore there was a time when there was nothing but matter, there could be no beginning of motion because there is nothing self-moving; and if there be no beginning of motion there can be no causation. Matter cannot therefore originate anything. Locke (Understanding 4.10.10) argues that inert matter, having no self-motion, can no more produce motion than nonentity can produce entity. If, in reply, the materialist should postulate an eternal motion along with an eternal matter, Locke replies that even if his postulate should be conceded matter and material motion could no more produce mind and mental motion or thought and will than nothing could produce something. Incogitative being, he says, cannot originate cogitative being. Matter cannot create mind. Locke sums up the whole in the following sentence: “If we suppose nothing to be eternal, matter can never begin to be; if we suppose bare matter without motion to be eternal, motion can never begin to be; if we suppose only matter and motion to be eternal, thought can never begin to be.” Says Henry More (Immortality 1.7): “If matter as matter had motion, that is, were self-moved, nothing would hold together; but flints, adamant, brass, iron, yea this whole earth would suddenly melt into a thinner substance than the subtle air, or rather, it would never have been condensed together to this consistency we find it.”

That self-motion is the characteristic of mind and that its contrary (vis inertiae) is the characteristic of matter has been the historical opinion. Plato (Phaedo) maintains that intellect is the only cause, in the strict meaning of the word. Matter is only apparently a cause. A material cause has another cause back of it and so backward indefinitely. We get no real cause until we get to a mind which is self-moved. Here we have real beginning and a true cause. Plato approves of and defends the dictum of Anaxagoras that nous esti archē tēs kinēseōs.³⁴ Berkeley has reproduced this view with great clearness and elegance. Cicero (Scipio’s Dream) says: “That which is ever moving is eternal; that which communicates to another object a motion which it received elsewhere must necessarily cease to live, as soon as its motion is at an end. The being which is self-moving is the only being that is eternal, because it is never abandoned by its own properties, neither is this self-motion ever at an end.”

Newton’s first axiom in the beginning of his Principia is that “every body continues in its state of resting or of moving uniformly in a straight line, except insofar as it, being acted upon by forces, is compelled to change its state.”³⁵ All matter uniformly remains in status quo, either of motion or of rest, unless it is made to change its state by external causes. The entire structure of the historical physics is built upon this foundation. That the distance between motion and rest is as great as between existence and nonexistence has from the first been the dictum of all physics that has a support in mathematics: “Matter has no inherent power, either of beginning to move when at rest, or of arresting its progress when in motion. Its indifference to either state has been expressed by the term force of inertia³⁶ (Turner, Chemistry, 1). The recent materialistic physics is anti-Newtonian in denying the vis inertiae and in postulating self-motion for matter. “Body and mind,” says Haeckel (Creation 2.360), “can in fact never be considered as distinct. As Goethe has clearly expressed it: ‘Matter never can exist and act without mind, and mind never without matter.’ ” The first part of Goethe’s remark is true, but not the last part. Goethe was a Spinozist, and Spinoza asserted one substance with the contradictory properties of thought and extension. Says Maudsley (Physiology of Mind, 148), “We must get rid of the notion of matter as inert. Matter is not inert.”

The hypothesis of the eternity of matter has been recently revived in that of molecular motion. This assumes that the ultimate atoms of matter have self-motion. A motive force is inherent in matter per se. The theorist postulates intrinsic motion along with his molecule. And he must, because he denies that there is any mental or intelligent source of motion. One molecule must impinge upon another molecule by its own motivity or not at all. The doctrine of self-motion is thus applied to atoms of matter. This is carried to its extreme in the so-called natural selection attributed to matter. Haeckel maintains that inorganic matter, by varying its molecular motion, becomes organic matter. Vegetable and animal life result from mechanical changes in dead matter, and these changes are “selected” and self-caused. Haeckel (Creation 1.18) quotes with approbation the following from Virchow: “Life is only a complicated kind of mechanics. A part of the sum total of matter emerges, from time to time, out of the usual course of its motions, into special chemico-organic combinations, and after having for a time continued therein, returns again to general modes of inorganic action.” Here, both self-motion and choice are ascribed to inorganic matter. Certain molecules, by their own election, pass or “emerge” from one kind of motion into a different kind and then go back or “return” to the first kind. Darwin confines this theory to organic matter. Only living protoplasm can effect such changes by its own motivity. Natural selection, according to him, is restricted to the molecules of living matter. A primitive protoplasm being supposed, all the varieties of vegetable, animal, and rational life can then be accounted for by natural selection—that is, by protoplasmic molecules altering their own motion. Huxley goes further and contends that the organic sprang from the inorganic: “What are called second causes produce all the phenomena of the universe” (Man’s Place in Nature, essay 2). (See supplement 3.7.6.)

Upon the theory of Haeckel and Huxley, there is no need of an intelligent and personal mind in order to account for the phenomena of the universe.³⁷ Self-motion and natural selection in the molecules of matter are sufficient to explain all. The difference in the direction and velocity with which molecules choose to move is the key. When molecules elect to move in one way, the product is a mineral—inorganic and lifeless. When they elect to move in another way, the product is a vegetable; in still another way is an animal; in still another way is a human soul. “The soul of man,” says Haeckel (Creation 1.179, 237), “just like the soul of animals, is a purely mechanical activity, the sum of the molecular phenomena of motion in the particles of the brain. The will is the habit of molecular motion. The will is never free. It depends upon the material processes in the nervous system.”

Lamarck, in his 1809 Zoological Philosophy, anticipated this theory in these terms:

All the phenomena of life depend upon mechanical, physical, and chemical causes which are inherent in the nature of matter itself. The simplest animals and the simplest plants, which stand at the lowest point on the scale of organization, have originated, and still do, by spontaneous generation. All animate natural bodies or organisms are subject to the same laws as inanimate natural bodies. The ideas and activities of the understanding are the motional phenomena of the central nervous system. The will is in truth never free. Reason is only a higher degree of the development and combination of [sensuous] judgments.

Lamarck’s opinion that infusoria are vegetable and not animal was refuted by Ehrenberg and Spallanzani, the eminent microscopists (Kirby, On Animals, 80–81). Lamarck, however, extended the theory no further than Darwin does. He derived organized beings from the microscopically organic, not from the inorganic. In so doing, he is inconsistent with his theory that “all the phenomena of life depend upon the mechanical, physical, and chemical causes which are inherent in the nature of matter.”

As we have before remarked, the materialistic physics is anti-Newtonian. If it be the truth, the physics of the Principia, of Copernicus and Kepler, is exploded. Matter has the properties of mind, namely, self-motion and self-direction. If the molecular force, in the words of Virchow, “emerges out of the usual course of its motion into special chemico-organic combinations and, after having for a time continued therein, returns again to the general modes of inorganic motion,” this is a self-motion and self-direction as real as any act of the human will. And what is still more important than this antihistorical attitude, this physics has and can have no mathematics to support it. It is wholly disconnected from calculus. Yet it ought to have a mathematical basis, if it be indeed true that vital and voluntary forces are mechanical. Whatever is mechanical is subject to laws that can be expressed mathematically. But no vital or voluntary force can be formulated algebraically. The vital action of a plant or an animal, the volitions of the human will, the feelings of the human heart, the thoughts of the human intellect cannot like the fall of an apple or the rise of a fluid in a vacuum be expressed in mathematical terms. The absence of a mathematics for the materialistic physics demonstrates its spuriousness.³⁸ (See supplement 3.7.7.)

The first objection to this theory is that mechanical motion obeys an invariable law and is incompatible with such varieties of motion as the theory requires. All observation shows that a material force left to itself never varies in any particular. Gravity never alters its direction, sidewise or upward. It is forever downward. And it never alters the rate of its velocity. Matter is marked in its motion by fixed necessity and immutability. To attribute a power of selection and of variability to it is to introduce imagination into science. The materialistic physics is as fanciful as that of the Middle Ages, which explained phenomena by the action of fairies and spirits. What is the difference between saying that a molecule moves of itself and “selects” the velocity and direction of its own motion and saying that the molecules of a gas rise and float on a sylph of the air and those of a mineral fall and sink in a gnome of the mine. The machinery of the Haeckel-Huxley physics is as fanciful as that of Pope’s Rape of the Lock.³⁹

Theorists of this school feel the difficulty and invent expedients for explaining how “selected” changes and varieties can occur within an immutable sphere like that of matter. Strauss, for example (Old and New Faith, 199), suggests that an adequate cause for such peculiar modes of motion among atoms “might exist in the conditions, the temperature, the atmospheric combinations of primeval times, so utterly different from ours.” But these themselves are all material causes. “Atmospheric combinations” are combinations of molecules, and why the “primeval” combinations should be “so utterly different from ours” is one of the difficulties to be explained and cannot therefore be introduced to explain a difficulty.

Another objection to the theory that explains all phenomena by matter and mechanical motion is that material motion is not perpetual. It gradually and surely exhausts itself. If observation and experiment have settled anything in physics, it is that the perpetual motion of matter by reason of a force inherent in matter is impossible. Friction finally brings moving matter to a rest. It may require millions of years to do it, but it will certainly be done. The motion of the bodies in the solar system approaches as nearly as anything does to perpetual motion. But the planets, says Newton, are marked by certain “small irregularities which appear to come from the mutual action of the planets and comets and which will probably become greater and greater in the course of time, until at last the system will again require its author to put it in order” (“Solar System” in Penny Cyclopaedia; Whewell, Astronomy and Physics 2.7–12). It is true that these irregularities caused by planetary and cometary attraction are very slight, because the great attraction of the vast mass of the sun overmasters and nullifies to a great extent. Still there is a disturbing element after all. Lagrange and Poisson have mathematically demonstrated the great stability of the solar system, but not its endless immutability (Foreign Quarterly Review 3.138). (See supplement 3.7.8.)

But this is not the whole difficulty. There is a positive resistance to the motion of the heavenly masses from the medium through which they pass. If this medium were as dense as atmospheric air, the motion would soon come to an end, unless reinforced ab extra.⁴⁰ It is not atmospheric air, but the so-called ether. Says a writer in the Penny Cyclopaedia (“Solar System”):

It has become highly probable that an external cause does exist which must, unless there be a counteracting force of which we know nothing, in time cause the destruction of the solar system. If the planets move in any medium which resists these motions, however little, the consequence must be a gradual diminution of their mean distances from the sun, and a gradual increase of their velocities, ending in their absolutely falling into the sun.⁴¹

The doctrine of the “correlation of forces” does not relieve the difficulty, in respect to perpetual motion. The forces of nature may be correlated to each other, that is, convertible into one another, and yet be diminishing in amount. That all material forces may be found, ultimately, to be but one material force, is not incredible. Physical investigations tend to this view. But this fact, even if established, would not prove that the sum total of this one material force is suffering no loss from millennium to millennium. Five forms of anything might be demonstrated to be but one and the same thing, but this would not prove anything respecting the quantity of being at any one time in this thing. This fact seems to be seen by the theorist, and an attempt is made to conceal it by calling the “correlation of forces,” the “conservation of force,” or energy. Conservation is a different conception from correlation and a stronger term. The “conservation of energy” may mean that in the transmutation of one force into another the whole of the primary form is conserved in the second form; or it may mean that only a part of it is conserved. Which of the two is the fact is the question in dispute.

The “correlation of forces” really amounts only to the analysis of force. Whether the sum total of material force in the universe be greater or smaller cannot be determined unless the analysis demonstrates that the quantity remains unchanged under all the different forms which material force assumes. The motion of a cannonball is preceded by a certain amount of heat from ignited gunpowder and is followed by a certain amount of heat in the iron plate which it strikes. But no experiment thus far made has demonstrated that the amount of heat is mathematically the same in the second instance that it was in the first, that the heat in the iron plate is exactly equal to the heat in the gunpowder. Heat is converted into motion, and motion reconverted into heat. Here is correlation of forces. One force is convertible into another. And here also is conservation of force. But how much conservation is the question. How much of the heat in the powder is conserved in the heat of the iron plate remains to be shown. Before we can say that there has been absolutely no loss of material force in these transmutations, it must be demonstrated mathematically. No experiment is nice or delicate enough to establish it. At this point calculus should come in, as it always has in the historical physics at points when sensible experiments fail.⁴² But, as yet, there is no mathematics for the new physics. A German investigator, Clausius, claims to have proved mathematically that motion when converted into heat is a mathematical equivalent, but that heat when converted into motion is not. There is, he says, some loss of motion in every instance in which heat is converted into motion. The final result, consequently, if there is no interference ab extra,⁴³ will be that motion will gradually diminish in the universe and finally cease; and heat or temperature will be uniform (Gardiner, Bibliotheca sacra, Jan. 1881).

This lack of demonstration is acknowledged by Balfour Stewart. He remarks (Conservation of Energy, 8) that

we have the strongest possible evidence for the assertion, that all the various energies in the universe are a constant quantity, which the nature of the case admits. The assertion is, in truth, a peculiar one; peculiar in its magnitude, in its universality, in the subtle nature of the agents with which it deals. If true, its truth certainly cannot be proved after the manner in which we prove a proposition in Euclid. Nor does it admit a proof so rigid as that of the somewhat analogous principle of the conservation of matter; for in chemistry we may confine the products of our chemical combination so as to completely prove, beyond a doubt, that no heavy matter passes out of existence.

Stewart then gives some indirect proofs which, he contends, make the position probable.

Another objection to the theory that mechanical and vital forces are identical is the fact that mechanical forces never originate varieties, while the vegetable and animal kingdoms are full of them. In inorganic nature, there is no deviation from the typical form. Crystals are rigorously confined to their order. No new varieties arise. Gold and copper always crystallize in a cube; bismuth and antimony in a hexagon; iodine and sulfur in a rhomb. But flowers are not thus rigorously confined to their type. A white flower, in some individuals, shows a reddish tint. This is a so-called accidental variety. If seeds be taken from it, its offspring will be redder yet. In this way, a new variety is artificially produced. But this cannot be done with a crystal. The geometrical form here is produced by a mechanical and inorganic, not a vital force; and it is unchangeable. There is no “accidental variety” of a crystal. No such alterations of typical form can be artificially produced in this inorganic province. A crystal can be produced artificially by chemical action, as well as by the natural action of mechanical forces. But in this case too, there can be no variation from the type. This proves a difference in kind between the inorganic and organic; the chemical and the vital.

A fourth objection to the hypothesis of the variation of mechanical motion is found in the immutability of the molecule. Maxwell, professor of Physics at Cambridge, in an address before the British Association, remarked as follows:

A molecule of hydrogen, whether on earth, in Sirius or Arcturus, executes its vibrations in the same time. No theory of evolution can be formed to account for this identity of molecules; for evolution implies continual change, and the molecule is incapable of growth or decay, of generation or destruction. None of the processes of nature have produced the slightest difference in the properties of any molecule. We are, therefore, unable to ascribe either the existence of the molecules, or the identity of their properties, to any of the causes we call natural. On the other hand, the exact equality of each molecule to all others of the same kind gives it, as John Herschel has well said, the essential character of a manufactured article and precludes the notion of its being eternal and self-existent. Though in the course of ages catastrophes have occurred, and may yet occur, in the heavens; though ancient systems may be dissolved, and new ones constructed out of their ruins, the molecules out of which these systems are built, the foundation stones of the material universe, remain unbroken and unworn. They continue this day as they were created, perfect in number, and measure, and weight; and from the ineffaceable characters impressed upon them, we may learn that those aspirations after accuracy in measurement, and justice in action, which we reckon among our noblest attributes as men, are ours because they are the essential qualities of him who, in the beginning created not only the heaven and earth, but the materials of which heaven and earth consist.

Theory of Evolution vs. Creation Ex Nihilo

The second theory antagonistic to the doctrine of creation ex nihilo is that of pseudoevolution. There is a true and a false theory of evolution. The former defines evolution to be simply “the transformation of the homogeneous”; the latter defines it to be the “transformation [transmutation] of the homogeneous into the heterogeneous.” This is Spencer’s definition adopted from von Baer. The two definitions and the two theories are direct contraries and contradictories. Evolution in the historical physics of Linnaeus, Cuvier, Hunter, Blumenbach, and Agassiz wholly excludes the heterogeneous. It is the same substance in kind under new forms. A vegetable seed evolves or develops into a root and stalk; but the root and stalk are still vegetable. They are still homogeneous with the seed. A vegetable bud, again, becomes a flower, and the flower becomes fruit; but both flower and fruit are still homogeneous with the vegetable substance of the bud; they are vegetable. If anything mineral or animal, anything heterogeneous, should appear in this evolution of the seed and the bud, this would prove that it was no evolution. But pseudoevolution postulates what true evolution denies, namely, that homogeneous substance transmutes itself into heterogeneous. It asserts that a homogeneous mineral, by intrinsic force, slowly, by infinitesimal degrees, converts itself into a heterogeneous vegetable. Evolution is thus not a mere change of form, but of matter. As this assertion is not supported by proof, it is surreptitiously introduced into a preliminary definition which the opposing party is expected to accept. But this is begging the question in dispute. The question is whether homogeneous substance ever does or can change itself into heterogeneous substance (Shedd, Theological Essays, 133–37, 154–67). (See supplement 3.7.9.)

According to this theory of evolution, all the kingdoms of nature issue out of each other without any intervening creative agency. The fiats in the Mosaic account are denied. The homogeneous mineral develops into the heterogeneous vegetable; the homogeneous vegetable into the heterogeneous animal; the homogeneous animal into the heterogeneous man. The doctrine is applied through the entire scale of existence. Vegetable life issues from the lifeless mineral. Sentient and conscious life evolves from the insentient and unconscious plant. Rational and moral life develops from an animal and brutal life that is utterly destitute of reason and morality. This accounts for and explains the universe of being. In each of these instances, the homogeneous substance is transmuted into the heterogeneous by purely material laws and causes. There is no rational act of an intelligent and personal Creator when the animal kingdom supervenes upon the vegetable or when the rational kingdom supervenes upon the animal. Impersonal, unintelligent, and unconscious evolution accounts for all varieties of being.

Several methods of explanation have been proposed. Lamarck explained by habit. The giraffe at first had a short neck. The habit of reaching up for the leaves of trees when the grass failed lengthened the neck. The frog’s foot and that of the goose was at first without web. The attempt to swim finally produced it. When the long neck and the webfoot were thus produced, they were propagated, and a new species was the result. St. Hilaire explained by circumstances. Somehow or other the atmosphere lost carbon, and the proportion of oxygen was increased. This made the breathing quicker; this heated the blood; this made the nerves and muscles more active; this changed the scales of reptiles into feathers; and thus the reptile was transformed into the bird. This scheme, just now, is revived in that of “creation by environment.”

The first objection to the theory of pseudoevolution is that it is contradicted by the whole course of scientific observation and experiment. It is a theory in the face of the facts. “Darwinism,” says Agassiz (On Classification), “is an a priori conception” and “a burlesque of facts.” It “shuts out almost the whole mass of acquired knowledge, in order to retain and use only that which may serve its purpose.” Quatrefages (Human Species 1.1) asserts that

to attempt, under any pretext whatever, to confound the inorganic with the organic, is to go in direct opposition to all the progress made for more than a century, and especially during the last few years, in physics, chemistry, and physiology. It is inexplicable to me that some men, whose merits I otherwise acknowledge, should have recently again compared crystals to the simplest living forms: to the sarcodic organisms, as they are called by Du Jardin who discovered them. A change of name is useless; the things remain the same, and protoplasm has the same properties as sarcode. The animals whose entire substance they seem to form have not altered their nature; whether monera or amoebas, these forms are the antipodes of the crystal from every point of view.

“No conceivable combinations,” says Roget (Physiology 2.582), “of mechanical or of chemical powers bear the slightest resemblance or the most remote analogy to organic reproduction or can afford the least clue to the solution of this dark enigma” (Foreign Quarterly Review 3.189–96).

No naturalist has ever discovered an instance of the transmutation of species. Varieties under a species have been seen to be changed into other varieties. Darwin shows how pigeons may be made to vary from pigeons, but not how pigeons can be evolved into the horse. No observer has furnished even a scintilla of proof that the vital develops from the nonvital. It is an axiom older than Aristotle and always accepted in the historical physics that “every animal comes from an egg.”⁴⁴ Life supposes life. The living individual issues only from the living germ. A material molecule never transmutes itself into a vegetable germ. A mustard seed is never changed into the egg of animal life. A grain of wheat may be kept in a mummy for three thousand years, and upon being cast into the ground it will begin to sprout. A true evolution of this vegetable seed immediately begins. But no natural or artificial force can cause a diamond to bud and blossom, can transmute this homogeneous mineral into a heterogeneous vegetable. The vast geological ages which the theorist brings in do not help his theory. A force of nature is no stronger in a million years than it is in a hundred. What gravitation cannot do in a century it cannot do in a hundred centuries. A mechanical force is fixed. It does not increase with the lapse of time. Rousseau (Dictionnaire botanique) thus speaks of the nouvelle physique of his day, which confounded the mineral, vegetable, and animal kingdoms and maintained that “minerals live, and vegetables feel”: “I have often seen a tree die which before had been full of life; but the death of a stone is an idea that would never enter my mind. I see exquisite feeling in a dog, but never saw it in a cabbage. The paradoxes of Jean-Jacques are very celebrated, but I never advanced anything so absurd as this.” (See supplement 3.7.10.)

The experimental and scientific evidence for the transmutation of substance is so deficient that only enthusiasts like Haeckel, Huxley, and Maudsley venture to maintain the evolution of the organic from the inorganic. Darwin confines the transmutation of substance to the organic world. He postulates life, primarily given by the Creator. “I imagine,” he says in phraseology that is curiously unscientific: “I imagine that probably all organic beings that ever lived on this earth descended from some primitive form, which was first called into being by the Creator.” In the Origin of Species (577) he speaks of “the breathing of life, by the Creator, into a few forms, or into one.” He does not assert that the mollusk can be developed from inorganic molecules; though he maintains that man may be evolved from the mollusk. While he bridges by evolution the chasm between the oyster and man, he lets it stand between the mineral and the oyster. His work upon insectivorous animals looks like an attempt to prove that animal life can be developed from vegetable, but he makes no distinct statement to this effect.

That this spurious theory of evolution is contradicted by the general course of physical experiment and observation is proved by its failure to obtain general currency. Lamarck did not supersede Linnaeus. Eminent microscopists like Ehrenberg and Spallanzani demonstrated that the infusoria which Lamarck asserted to be vegetable were animal (Kirby, On Animals 1.4). St. Hilaire made no impression upon the established zoology of Cuvier, so that to this day French physics is even more unanimous than either German or English in affirming an impassable limit between the kingdoms of nature. In Germany, Kepler, Leibnitz, Kant, Haller, and Blumenbach are greater names in physical science than Goethe, Oken, Haeckel, and Büchner. In England, the physics of Newton, Linnaeus, Hunter, Cuvier, Faraday, Whewell, Herschel, Agassiz, Guyot, and Dana influences the educated and disciplined intellect of the nation far more than do the speculations of Darwin, Huxley, and Tyndall. Haeckel (Creation 1.34) mentions it as a discouraging sign that the views of Linnaeus, Cuvier, and Agassiz are adopted by “the great majority of both scientific and unscientific men” and that “the majority of French naturalists are the blind followers of Cuvier.” He adds that “in no country has Darwin’s doctrine had so little effect as in France.”

The opinions of Kant are entitled to great respect, for he began his remarkable philosophical career with the metaphysics of mathematics. He investigated inorganic nature before he investigated mind, and his attitude is firm in reference to theism and the doctrine of creation ex nihilo. In his Critique of the Judgment (§§74-79), while maintaining that the inorganic world is explainable by mechanical forces and laws, he is explicit in saying that these forces and laws themselves have a teleological character. They imply a designing mind beyond them. He holds that theism and creation ex nihilo are the truth and rejects the hylozoism of Spinoza and of atheism. Respecting the possibility of the evolution of the organic from the inorganic, he remarks that “it is absurd even to think of explaining organized creatures and their potentialities by purely mechanical principles, or to expect that a Newton will one day arise who will be able to explain the production of a blade of grass, according to a law ordained by no designing intelligence.” “Give me,” he said, “inorganic matter, and I will explain the formation of an inorganic world.” But he denied that it can be said, “Give me inorganic matter, and I will explain the production of a caterpillar” (this latter remark is quoted by Strauss, Old Faith, 196). (See supplement 3.7.11.)

Physical science can perhaps explain the formation of the solar system by the nebular hypothesis, but not the creation of it. For this hypothesis supposes a nebulous matter with its inherent force of gravity and other forces to be already in existence. Unless this postulate of fire mist and the attraction of gravitation, cohesion, etc., is granted, it cannot account for the solar system. The question immediately arises: “Whence is this fire mist with its properties?” If this is the origin of the solar system, what is the origin of this origin? If this is the explanation of the material universe, what is the explanation of this explanation? The nebular hypothesis may be a correct generalization from observed facts and have its place in the system of physics, but it cannot be a substitute for the first cause. The words of Whewell, respecting the nebular hypothesis, are true and forcible:

Let it be supposed that the point to which this hypothesis leads us is the ultimate point of physical science; that the farthest glimpse we can obtain of the material universe by our natural faculties, shows it to us as occupied by a boundless abyss of luminous matter; still we ask, how space came to be thus occupied, how matter came to be thus luminous? If we establish by physical proofs that the first fact that can be traced in the history of the world is that “there was light,” we shall still be led, even by our natural reason, to suppose that before this could occur, “God said, Let there be light.” (Astronomy and General Physics 2.7)

Since there is no proof of the theory of pseudoevolution from the past results of scientific inquiry, its advocates when called upon for the demonstration betake themselves either to an a priori method or else to prophecy. Haeckel, for example (Creation 1.169), replies in the following manner to the assertion of the opponent that the theory is a hypothesis which is yet to be proved: “That this assertion is completely unfounded may be perceived even from the outlines of the doctrine of selection.” But the “outlines of a doctrine” are the doctrine itself; and the doctrine itself cannot be the proof of the doctrine unless it be a priori and axiomatic in its nature. And this characteristic Haeckel actually claims for his theory of evolution in the following terms: “The origin of new species by natural selection, by the interaction of inheritance and adaptation, is a mathematical necessity of nature which needs no further proof. Whoever, in spite of the present state of our knowledge, still seeks for proofs of the theory of selection, only shows that he does not thoroughly understand the theory.” Haeckel, here, makes short work with the whole subject, by claiming an a priori necessity for the theory of pseudoevolution. Of course, if this be so, experiment and observed facts are not to be demanded. But such a claim for a science that professes to rest upon experiment and observation and not upon a priori grounds is of a piece with Haeckel’s assertion (Creation, 2) that a posteriori knowledge, by means of use and habit, can be transmuted into a priori knowledge; in other words, that a truth of experience becomes axiomatic when the experience is long continued—a notion similar to that mentioned by Coleridge “that a weathercock may form a habit of turning to the east, from the wind having been a long time in that quarter” (Works 3.227).

Respecting spontaneous generation, Haeckel (Creation 1.340–41) remarks that

experiments on autogeny have furnished no certain and positive results. Yet we must protest against the notion that these experiments have proved the impossibility of spontaneous generation. The impossibility of such a process can, in fact, never be proved. For how can we know that in remote primeval times there did not exist conditions quite different from those at present obtaining, which may have rendered spontaneous generation possible?

By such reasoning as this, any hypothesis whatever may be proved. Haeckel (Creation 1.335) explains vital growth by chemical action thus: “A crystal grows by the apposition of particle upon particle; a plant grows by the intussusception of particle into particle. The fluidity of the albuminous carbon, in the instance of the plant, permits this penetration, so that the addition is not mere accretion upon the outside or addition of surface to surface.” But why does a chemical force act so differently from a vital one? A salt in solution is as much a fluid as the albumen; but it yields a crystal instead of a plant. If the chemical and the vital are really one and the same mechanical force, why this diversity? A really mechanical force acts in only one way. The force of gravity does not sometimes lift bodies and sometimes cause them to fall.

As an example of the employment of prophecy in support of the theory of pseudoevolution, consider the following remark of Haeckel (Creation 1.32) respecting the production of albumen by a chemical process—thus far found to be impossible: “At some future time, we shall succeed in discovering, in the composition of albuminous matter, certain molecular relations as the remoter causes of these phenomena of life.” There is no logic against prophecy. Seers and soothsayers have an advantage over ordinary investigators, who have nothing but their understandings to work with.⁴⁵

Second, the examples adduced by the advocate of pseudoevolution do not prove that species develops from species, but only that varieties develop from species—which no one denies.⁴⁶ Haeckel shows that many varieties of sponges spring from the one species olynthus. But the difference between sponge and sponge is not the same as that between mineral and plant or between plant and animal. When one kind of sponge is transformed into another kind of sponge, this is not the transmutation of a homogenous substance into a heterogeneous. This does not answer to Spencer’s definition of evolution, if the definition is to be taken as it reads. If the sponge should develop into the rose, or the rose into the worm, this would answer the definition. But nothing approaching to such a mortal leap as this is seen in nature. Darwin makes it seem probable that all varieties of pigeons may have sprung from one original pair of pigeons—say the blue rock pigeon; but this does not prove that the pigeon sprang from a fish, still less from a cabbage, and still less from a bit of granite.

Virchow, in an address at Munich, said that two doctrines are not yet proved, but are hypotheses still: (1) spontaneous generation of living from inorganic matter and (2) the descent of man from some nonhuman vertebrate animal. We may expect, he says, that these will hereafter be proved, but meanwhile must not teach them as scientific facts (Nineteenth Century, April 1878). Gray, though accepting the Darwinian theory of evolution as “fairly probable,” asserts that it is a “complex and loose hypothesis, less probable than the nebular hypothesis or the kinetic theory of gases” (New York Times, 6–7 Feb. 1880).

Third, if the doctrine of pseudoevolution be true, it should be supported, like that of gravitation, by a multitude of undisputed facts and phenomena. A law of nature—and this kind of evolution is claimed to be such, even the law of laws⁴⁷—is a uniform and universal thing. The hypothesis of gravitation is not supported by a few doubtful and disputed facts, like those which are cited in proof of spontaneous generation. If there were really such a transition by development from the inorganic to the organic, from the vegetable to the animal, and from the animal to the rational, as is asserted, the process ought to be going on all the time and all around us in nature and before the eyes of everyone. A real and actual law of nature cannot be put under a bushel. The theorist should have millions of examples to show. But as yet he has not a single example. Darwin’s pigeons, after all his efforts to transform them into another species, are pigeons still. Said Ambrose (Hexaemeron 3.10), “When wheat degenerates, it does not cease to be wheat; there is no alteration of species: ‘It would seem that it ought to be attributed to a certain degeneration of the seed, not to a transformation of kind.’ ”⁴⁸

Fourth, the well-known fact that hybrids between real species are infertile proves that there is no transmutation of species. A hybrid is an artificial, not a natural product. When man attempts to originate a new species by crossing breeds, as in the case of the horse and ass, he is working against nature and fails. “Domestication,” says Agassiz (Animal Life, 51), “never produces forms which are self-perpetuating and is therefore in no way an index of the process by which species are produced.” Quatrefages (Human Species 1.6–9) takes the same view. Haeckel (Creation 1.45) mentions as hybrids that can be propagated some between hares and rabbits and between different varieties of dog. Also of plants the willow, the thistle, and the mullein, he says, are hybrids. But hares and rabbits are varieties of the same species; and, as Macbeth says, “Hounds and greyhounds, mongrels, spaniels, curs, shoughs, waterrugs, and demiwolves are cleped all by the name of dogs.” A true species is self-perpetuating. Says Dana: “When individuals multiply from generation to generation, it is but a repetition of the primordial type-idea, and the true notion of the species is not in the resulting group, but in the idea or potential element which is the basis of every individual of the group” (Bibliotheca sacra 1857: 861).

Fifth, this theory of evolution, conflicting as it does with the invariability of nature in the several kingdoms, conflicts also with the certainty of natural science. There can be no fixed laws of operation upon this scheme. Anything may originate out of anything. There is no certainty that mineral substance will always be mineral, for it may become vegetable substance. It is not certain that a vegetable species will always remain vegetable, for it may be transmuted into an animal species. Chance rules in nature, not invariable law. And the transmutation of substance may descend as well as ascend. Man may evolve into ape, as well as ape into man. As an example of the haphazard that is introduced into physical science by this theory, take its explanation of the origin of the eye as an organ of vision. Once there was no such organ in existence. It came into being in the following manner. A certain piece of nervous tissue happened in the lapse of ages to become sensitive to light; then, after another lapse of time, a transparent tissue happened to be formed over it; then, after other ages, a fluid happened to be formed which increased in density and adaptedness to vision; and thus changes at haphazard take place; and finally we have the eye of an animal.⁴⁹ The Duke of Argyll exposes the capriciousness of this kind of physics in the following terms:

Under the modes of applying the theory of evolution which have become commonplace, it is very easy to account for everything. We have only to assume some condition opposite to that which now exists and then to explain the change by showing that the existing conditions are useful and adapted to existing needs. Do we wish, for example, to explain why the female pheasant is dull colored? We have only to assume that once she was gaily colored and became dull by the gaudier hens being killed off when setting on eggs, and by the duller hens being saved. Do we wish, on the contrary, to explain the brilliant coloring of the male pheasant? We have only to make the reverse assumption—that once they were all dull colored, and that accidental dandies were preserved by the admiration and the consequent selection of the ladies. In like manner, the migration of birds is explained by assuming at once upon a time there were no migratory birds, although there must always have been the same changing seasons. Then a few birds came to travel a little way, and then a little farther, and so at last they came to go a great way, and finally the habit, “organized in the race,” became the migratory instinct. It is curious that in this and all similar explanations of what are admitted to be now pure instincts, the theory demands that the earliest beginnings were more rational than the last developments; the commencements were more in the nature of intelligent perception than the final results, which have become the mere mechanical effect of hereditary habits.

According to the theory of pseudoevolution, there is no preconceived plan and design by which the origin of living and organized objects in nature is accounted for. They come wholly by chance. Those varieties from which new species are claimed to spring are denominated “accidental.” If a piece of nervous tissue happens to become sensitive to light, the first step toward the production of the eye of animal life is taken; otherwise not. And so with the second step, by which a film is drawn over the sensitive tissue; and so with all the steps. The processes of nature are entirely fortuitous upon this scheme, and there is nothing possible but the calculation of chances. No invariable and uniform order of nature is possible, and therefore no science of nature is possible. Haeckel (Creation 1.167) would parry this objection, by the following self-stultifying remark: “The difference between the two forms of selection is this: In artificial selection, the will of man makes the selection according to a plan, whereas in natural selection, the struggle for life (that universal interrelation of organisms) acts without a plan, but produces quite the same result, namely, a selection of a particular kind of individual for propagation.” This is saying that nature’s acting by chance will produce “the same result” that man’s acting by plan does; and that nature would have the same regularity and order by the method of chance as by the method of design. (See supplement 3.7.12.)

Sixth, some evolutionists, for example, Darwin, Wallace, and Huxley, try to adopt a middle theory. They say that a species may be originated either by selection or by creation. But the alternative is impossible. One idea necessarily excludes the other. If a particular being is intrinsically such that creation ex nihilo accounts for it, then molecular motion and natural selection cannot and vice versa. If a thing is intrinsically such that it may be equal to four, it must be. It may not be equal to five. The ideas of creation and evolution are as incompatible with each other, as four and five are. Both cannot be true.

Seventh, the abundant proof of design in nature overthrows the theory of evolution. This design is executed even in an extreme manner. The mammary glands on man’s breast and the webfeet of the upland goose and the frigate bird show that the plan of structure is carried out with persistence, even when in particular circumstances there is no use for the organ itself. The symmetry of the species is preserved. Nature is punctilious in respect to design. Even in the deformed and irregular products of nature, the same respect for plan is observed. There is design in these. In a misgrowth of a vegetable, matter is organized methodically. It is not thrown together at haphazard, as in a kaleidoscope. Holberg’s (Memoirs, 196) anecdote of the priest and the humpback will apply here. The priest had said in his sermon that everything which God makes is well made. “Look at me,” said a humpback, “Am I well made?” The priest looked at him, and replied that he was well made for a humpbacked man. The priest was wiser than he knew, and his answer had truth in it, as well as wit. The humpback was built upon the plan of a man, not of a dog. (See supplement 3.7.13.)

The theory of development is valid when properly applied. Take, for example, Linnaeus’s arrangement of the genus felis: felis domestica (common cat), felis catus (wild cat), felis pardus (leopard), felis onca (jaguar), felis tigris (tiger), felis leo (lion). These six species of the one genus, as Linnaeus uses terms, may be developed from one original type. The same may be said also of the seven species of the one genus pinus⁵⁰ in the vegetable kingdom. But according to Linnaeus, felis could not develop from equus;⁵¹ nor pinus from pirus.⁵²

Species should not be multiplied or the creative act be introduced extravagantly often. The biblical phrases let the earth bring forth and let the waters bring forth imply that within the several kingdoms, after they have been established by creative power, much may then have been done in the production of varieties (not species) by the law of evolution impressed upon each kingdom. There is no objection to tracing all varieties of pigeon to one original, say the blue rock pigeon, as Darwin does, or all varieties of rabbit to one original type. John Hunter held that “the true distinction between different species of animals must ultimately be gathered from their incapacity of propagating with each other an offspring capable again of continuing itself by subsequent propagation.” Hunter wrote a tract entitled “Observations Tending to Show That the Wolf, Jackal, and Dog are All of the Same Species.”

It should be understood, moreover, how terms are employed. If “genus” is the base, then “species” are the divisions. If “species” is the base, then “varieties” are the divisions. In the first case, species can come from species; in the second, not (Quatrefages, Human Species 1.3). Dana defines a species as the “unit” in the organic world. Morton defines it as a “primordial organic form.” The criteria of a species are (1) permanent fecundity; (2) sameness of external form (animals with teeth for eating flesh belong to a different species from those having teeth for eating vegetable food; animals with webbed feet are not of the same species with those having feet without a web); and (3) sameness of internal structure shown in habits and instincts. Of these three, the first is the surest criterion. The other two are less certain. Two animals of great similarity in external structure may be of wholly different species—for example, the ape and man. Hence all three criteria must be combined.

A plausible argument for the development of man from lower animals is derived from a comparison of the embryo of man at four weeks with that of the chick, or at eight weeks with that of the dog. There is a great similarity. The evolutionist asks: “Is it any more improbable that man should develop from the ape than that a Plato or a Shakespeare should develop from an embryo so like the dog’s embryo?” It certainly is not any more improbable, upon the supposition that the human embryo contains nothing but what is in that of the chick or the dog. But if the human embryo contains, over and above the physical elements, a rational and spiritual principle; if this embryo be a synthesis of mind and matter and not mere matter, then it is more probable that a Plato will come from it than from the canine embryo. This kind of argument proves too much. For not only the embryo, but the newborn babe itself has little more in its external appearance to suggest the career of a Newton or an Aristotle than a newborn dog has. The wailing unconsciousness of the one is as far from science and philosophy as the yelping unconsciousness of the other. But the babe possesses along with physical qualities the “image of God,” namely, a rational soul, while the dog has only an animal soul. There is an invisible rational principle in one that is not in the other. The maxim “judge not by the outward appearance” has full force here.

Resemblance in corporeal form has been overestimated. Similarity in the visible and material structure does not necessarily prove similarity in the invisible and mental structure. It is conceivable that a creature might be produced whose anatomy might be entirely like that of man and yet have no human as distinguished from brutal traits. The idiot is an example. A human body with only an animal soul would look like a man, but would be as far from man as is an ox. The gorilla is nearer to man in physical structure than is a dog; but he is not so near to man in respect to sagacity, affection, and other manlike traits. The monkey species is not so intelligent as the canine species. The elephant is nearer to man in respect to mental traits than is the gorilla, but his anatomy is farther off. The ant and bee have more intelligence than many animals have, yet are entirely destitute of brain. Naturalists notice that the period of infancy in man is much longer than in the brute. This is because there is a rational soul in the one and not in the other, which unfolds more slowly than a physical organism does. The animal takes care of itself in infancy; but the infant man must be taken care of. For example, the young calf, of itself, finds its nourishment from the dam; but the babe must be put to the breast of the mother. The latter if left to itself would die; but the former would not.

Antiquity of Man

Respecting the time when man was created and his antiquity, the narrative in Genesis teaches that he is the last in the series of creations and that the Creator rested from creation ex nihilo after the origination of the human species.⁵³ While minerals, vegetables, and irrational animals, according to Genesis, may be referred back to a long duration in the first five days, man cannot be referred to any but the sixth day and to the “morning” or last part of that. From six to eight thousand years is the period during which the human species has existed. The Septuagint gives fifteen hundred years more from the creation of man than the Hebrew text. The Christian fathers generally adopted the Septuagint chronology. Theophilus of Antioch (To Autolycus 24–25, 28) makes the Scriptures to give 5,698 years from the creation of man to the death of the emperor Aurelius Verus in a.d. 69. Julius Africanus (230), the earliest Christian chronologist, dates the creation to 5499 b.c. Eusebius, Jerome, and Bede reckon 2,242 years between Adam and the deluge—following the Septuagint. The Hebrew text gives 1,656 years. Augustine (City of God 15.20) says: “From Adam to the deluge, there are reckoned according to our copies of the Scripture 2,262 years and according to the Hebrew text 1,656 years” (cf. City of God 20.7). Hales (Chronology 1.273–303) and Clinton (Fasti hellenici 1.283–301) defend the Septuagint chronology (see “Introduction to Jeremiah” in Speaker’s Commentary, 323–26, where Payne Smith favors the Septuagint recension). Murphy (On Genesis, 196) defends the Hebrew chronology. The Samaritan text gives only 1,307 years between the creation and the deluge. Desvignoles, in the preface to his Chronology, says that he has collected above two hundred calculations, of which the longest makes the time between the creation and the incarnation to have been 6,984 years and the shortest 3,483 years. (See supplement 3.7.14.)

Extravagant statements respecting the great antiquity of man are not found in the Greek and Roman literatures. Plato (Laws 2.656; 3.676) speaks of “ten thousand years ago” and “thousands and thousands of cities.” But this is indefinite description; and the first instance relates to Egypt. Mythical and fabulous representations appear in the Egyptian and Hindu traditions. The Egyptian priests told Herodotus that they possessed a history going back 11,340 years; and they also told him that during this period the sun had four times altered its regular course, having been twice observed to rise in the west and to set in the east (cf. Spenser’s Faery Queen 5). The zodiac of Denderah, according to Dupuis, went back 15,000 years. The astronomer Delambre thought it to be later than the time of Alexander; and Biot demonstrated that it represented the state of the heavens in 700 b.c. Furthermore, it was discovered in an Egyptian temple that proved to have been built during Roman rule (Pouchet, Universe, 610). The conclusions of Lepsius from the monuments of Egypt make that civilization 20,000 years old. But the dates on the Babylonian and Assyrian tablets disprove this chronology. Even if it be conceded that Egypt is older than Assyria, it cannot be so immensely older.

Smith (Assyrian Discoveries, 51) gives 1850 b.c. as the date for Assur, the first capital of Assyria, and 1350 b.c. for Nineveh, the second capital. He makes Babylon “the capital of the whole country” in the sixteenth century b.c. “The enormous reigns ascribed by Berosus of Babylon to his ten kings, making a total of 432,000 years, force us to discard the idea that the details are historical” (Smith, Chaldean Genesis, 307). This scholar thinks the representation of ancient authors that the walls of Babylon were from forty to sixty miles in circumference to be an exaggeration and infers from the ruins that they were “about eight miles around, making Babylon nearly the same size with Nineveh.” He believes that the Babylonian records “reach to the 24th century b.c.,” adding that “some scholars are of opinion that they stretch nearly 2,000 years beyond that time.” The oldest date assigned by Smith is 2500 b.c. He places the early Babylonian monarchy 2500–1500 b.c. and refers the Izdubar (Nimrod) legends to 2000 b.c. (Assyrian Discoveries, 166–67). By the Septuagint reckoning, according to Theophilus, there would be 887 years from the deluge to 2500 b.c. and from the creation to the deluge 2,242 years (“Introduction to Kings” §8 and “Hosea” in Speaker’s Commentary; Conder, Syrian Stone Lore).

The Vedas, according to Max Müller (Origin of Religion, 147), go back to 1000 b.c.; how much earlier is uncertain. Whitney (Oriental Studies, 21) places them between 1500 b.c. and 2000 b.c. The Brahmins asserted that the astronomical tables of India were compiled more than 20,000,000 years ago. But Laplace proved that the calculations had been made after the alleged events and moreover that they were incorrect (Pouchet, Universe, 610).

Had man existed 20,000 years upon the globe, its population would be immensely greater than it is. Remains of ancient cities would be found all over the planet. But there are only 1.2 billion or 1.4 billion men now on the globe, and remains of cities are found mostly around the Mediterranean and in Asia. If we go back to the beginning of profane history (say, to 1000 b.c.), we find most of the globe uninhabited by man. All of the Western hemisphere, all of middle and northern Europe, all of northern Asia, all of Africa south of Sahara, and all of Australia and the islands of the sea were without human population. At the time of the advent, the majority of the population of the globe was still gathered about the Mediterranean Sea. Probably there were not more than 100,000,000 people on the globe, at that date. Man is very recent upon the American continents. South America has only about 30,000,000 inhabitants. North America at the time of its discovery had but a handful of men, compared with the vast extent of territory. We cannot assume an extravagant antiquity for man, because by this time the globe would be overrunning with population; as we cannot assume an extravagant antiquity even for the material globe, because by this time it would have parted with all its caloric and would be stone-cold at the center. The small number of human bones that have been found, compared with the large number of the bones of animals, shows that man was of late origin. Were the earth now to be subjected to earthquake and deluge, human bones would be the most numerous of any in some of the strata that would be opened a thousand years hence. Few fossil human bones have been discovered; but there are multitudes of animal and vegetable fossils. (See supplement 3.7.15.)

Even if the shorter biblical chronology be adopted, Manetho’s Egyptian chronology might possibly be harmonized with it. The following is one explanation of it. Placing the flood in 2348 b.c., according to Ussher’s reckoning, there are 450 years between the flood and the call of Abraham in 1900 b.c. The first twelve dynasties of Manetho (280 b.c.) can be placed here, giving 37 years to each dynasty. This would be the Old Empire of Menes and his successors. The pyramids of Gizeh were built in this age. There is, however, great difference of opinion. Mariette Bey makes the Old Empire a period of 2,700 years; Brugsch Bey says 2,400 years; Bunsen 1,076 years (making its beginning 3059 b.c.); Wilkinson and Poole say 650 years, beginning 2700 b.c. The second period from Abraham to Joseph, 1900–1637 b.c., is that of the Middle Empire and the Shepherd kings, embracing five dynasties of 52 years each (Manetho’s dynasties 13–17). According to the Bible, Egypt during this period had a settled government. Abraham comes into contact with its pharaoh for the first time (Gen. 12). Rawlinson (Ancient Egypt 2.22) regards the Middle Empire as beginning about 1840 b.c. and terminating about 1640 b.c. The third period, 1637–1117 b.c., includes Egyptian history from Joseph downward, in which the remaining thirteen of Manetho’s thirty dynasties may be placed. This is the New Empire, commencing with the eighteenth dynasty. This period includes the ascendancy of Joseph and of all the pharaohs mentioned in Scripture, excepting the one contemporary with Abraham (Gen. 12). The 520 years of this period would give forty years to each dynasty.

The alleged great antiquity of Egypt must be found, if at all, in the first period of the Old Empire. The data here are in utter obscurity. “For times anterior to 700 b.c., Egypt has no fixed chronology” (“Manetho” in Kitto’s Encyclopedia). De Rougé says that “Manetho’s texts are significantly changed, and the series of monumental dates is very incomplete.”⁵⁴ Rawlinson (Ancient Egypt 2.9, 21) says that

the chronological riddle in respect to early Egypt is insoluble. Manetho’s general scheme, being so differently reported, is in reality unknown to us; its details, being frequently contradicted by the monuments, are untrustworthy; and the method of the scheme, the general principles upon which it was constructed, was so faulty, that even if we had it before us in its entirety, we could derive from it no exact or satisfactory chronology. (See supplement 3.7.16.)

The repopulation of the globe after the deluge presents no serious difficulty. Population is rapid. According to Malthus, the increase of the means of subsistence is in arithmetical proportion; that of population is in geometrical.⁵⁵ “Every man,” says Blackstone (Commentaries 2.14), “has above one million lineal ancestors, if he reckons back to the twentieth generation.” Blackstone’s table gives 1,048,576 descendants from a single pair in the twentieth generation, or 660 years, supposing only two children to each pair. But supposing four children to each pair, the twentieth generation would yield a vast population. Petavius, taking only seven hundred years of the sixteen hundred between the creation and the deluge and supposing that seven hundred years is the average of patriarchal life and that twenty children are born to a single pair in each century, makes the total product 1,347,368,420. The increase is very great in the last century. The sixth century has 64,000,000; the seventh has twenty times this: 1,347,368,420. But in every generation, this total number of descendants is diminished by death. Supposing, continues Petavius, that Noah and his wife and his three sons and their wives had six children (Gen. 10 mentions sixteen children of Shem, Ham, and Japhet) to each pair and that this ratio continues to give 12,937,284 descendants in fourteen generations of thirty-three years each or 462 years. But six children is a low estimate in view of the longevity of man in this period and the easiness of subsistence in the simplicity of the East and of early civilization. The United States census shows that in 250 years, the 20,000 Puritans who emigrated from England between 1620 and 1640 have now 13,000,000 descendants.

The objections to the biblical account of the origin of man drawn from varieties of color and of race are not serious. Climatic influence is very great, especially in a state of barbarism. When man is not protected from the sun and the elements by the appliances of civilization, when he is a savage, changes go on very rapidly (see Quatrefages, Human Species, 7): “The Portuguese during a 300 years’ residence in India have become as black as Caffres, yet they form connections among themselves alone, or if they can, with Europeans” (Heber, Indian Journal, 53–55; Quarterly Review 37.100; see Carpenter, Physiology, 17). (See supplement 3.7.17.)

The argument from languages is strong for the unity of the race. The oldest form of Sanskrit, the Vedic, strikingly resembles its next neighbors to the westward: the language of the Avesta called the Zend and that of the Persian inscriptions. The later form of the Sanskrit has less resemblance (Whitney, Oriental Studies, 8): “The mutual agreement of the Indo-Germanic or Aryan languages is complete enough to justify the conclusion that all the nations of this family of languages are only branches of one great nation, which was settled in Upper Asia and included the ancestors of the Indians, Persians, Greeks, Italians, Germans, Slavs, and Celts” (Curtius, Greece 1.1).

The opinions of scientific zoologists favor the recent origin of man: “Cuvier does not date the appearance of man farther back than tradition. According to this illustrious zoologist, the history of the human race attests that man has not ruled over the surface of the globe for more than a limited number of years” (Pouchet, Universe, 609). “Man,” says Quatrefages (Human Species 2.12.13), “was most certainly in existence during the quaternary period; has in all probability seen Miocene (middle tertiary) times and, consequently, the entire Pliocene (later tertiary) epoch.” As to the question whether man was earlier than this, Quatrefages says it is possible: “Man is a mammal, and the conditions of existence sufficient for mammals ought to have been sufficient for him. Man is intelligent and can protect himself against cold. There is nothing then impossible in the idea that he should have survived other species of the same class. But this is a question to be proved by facts. Before we can even suppose it to be so, we must wait for information from observation” (152–53). “The discoveries of Bourgeois testify, in my opinion, to the existence of a tertiary man. But everything seems to show that, as yet, his representatives were few in number. The quaternary population, on the contrary, were, at least in distribution, quite as numerous as the life of the hunter permitted” (177). man is known to us only from a few faint traces of his industry. Of tertiary man himself, we know nothing. Portions of his skeleton have been discovered, it has been thought, in France, Switzerland, and especially in Italy. Closer study has, however, always forced us to refer to a comparatively much later period these human remains, which at first sight, were regarded as tertiary” (286). Arcelin makes the age of quaternary clay 6,750 years. Quatrefages thinks this rather too low and says that the present geological period goes much farther back than 7,000 to 8,000 years (140). “No facts have as yet been discovered which authorize us to place the cradle of the human race otherwise than in Asia” (178).

The discovery of human bones and implements in situations and connections that seem to imply a great antiquity for man is not a sufficient reason for rejecting the biblical account, owing to the uncertainty of the data. Human bones found in juxtaposition with the bones of the cave bear and the elephant are not conclusive. (a) They may not have been deposited contemporaneously. The action of floods and of violent convulsions makes it very difficult to say with certainty when deposits were made or to tell the order in which they occurred. The bear may have laid his bones in the cave hundreds of years before the man laid his, and yet the two now be found side by side. When the bones of extinct animals and stone implements are found together in a gravel bed, who can be certain whether the gravel was deposited upon them or whether they were deposited upon the gravel and subsequently mingled and buried under it by earthquakes and inundations? (b) The now extinct animal may not have been extinct four or five thousand years ago. He and early man may have been contemporaneous. The elephant has been found encased in ice in Siberia during the nineteenth century. It had long hair and was adapted to a cold climate. This specimen could not have been many thousands of years old (see Life of Agassiz, 708–10). (See supplement 3.7.18.)

Agassiz found in the deep waters of the West Indies “three characteristic genera of sponges from the secondary formation, till now supposed to be extinct.” He also caught in his dredge “three specimens of the genus micrestor of the cretaceous formation, of which no living species had been previously found.”

Antiquity is fabricated for things that are recent. The so-called lake dwellings are an instance. Gibbon (Rome, 42) relates that the Bulgarians in the time of Justinian (a.d. 525) lived in lacustrine structures. It is probable that no remains of them are earlier than the time of Julius Caesar. Herodotus (§5, beginning) speaks of lake dwellings among a people in Asia Minor in 450 b.c. Robert Gray, an English traveler, speaks of seeing them in 1794 on the borders of Lake Wallenstadt. The skeleton discovered at Mentone has all the characteristic marks of the Ligurian Gaul, who was a man of large skeleton according to Livy’s account of the Gauls. Livingstone (Last Journal, 442) says that he never found a single flint arrowhead or any other flint implement in Africa. No flint exists south of the equator, but quartz might have been used. Iron, he says, was smelted in the remotest ages in Africa. According to this, the iron age was the earliest.

There is great uncertainty in the conclusions drawn from the varieties of implements used by men in past ages. Three kinds have been discovered: (a) rude stone implements, (b) finished stone implements, and (c) bronze and iron implements. Some theorists give this as the natural order. Geikie, however (Ice Age, 405), remarks that the difference between the rude flint arrowheads and axes of Paleolithic men and the polished and finely finished tools of the Neolithic men is too great to have no intermediate. And yet, no intermediate, he says, has been found. But may not the bronze implements be this intermediate? In the history of arts, the cutting of gems did not begin until after much skill had been acquired in the use of metals; and the finish of the “elegantly shaped” stone implements is more like that of gem cutting than like that of the rude Paleolithic implements. May not the order, consequently, be (1) Paleolithic, (2) bronze, (3) Neolithic instead of, as the geologist claims, (1) Paleolithic, (2) Neolithic, (3) bronze. It is difficult to suppose that the polished stone implement could have been made by the rude stone implement. It requires iron tools. (See supplement 3.7.19.)

Again, the use of rude stone implements is no proof of the great antiquity of a people. There are tribes of men now on the globe who are using them. Should these tribes become extinct and their implements be discovered one thousand years hence, it would be a false inference to assert that they belonged to a race that lived before Adam. The stone implement is an index of a particular period in the history of a nation’s civilization, rather than of its antiquity. A nation may be in its barbarous state and its stone age at almost any time in the history of the world. “Neobarbarism,” says Mahaffy (Greece, 16), “means the occurrence in later times of the manners and customs which generally mark very old and primitive times. Some few things of the kind survive everywhere; thus in the Irish Island of Arran, a group of famous savants mistook a stone donkey shed of two years’ standing for the building of an extinct race of great antiquity. As a matter of fact, the construction had not changed from the oldest type.” Says Turner (Anglo-Saxons 1.10), “we even now, at this late age, see the Eskimo, the wild Indian, the Backsettler, and the cultivated Philadelphian existing at the same time in North America; so did the Egyptian, the Scythian, and the Greek; so did high polish and rude barbarism at all times appear in disparted but coeval existence.” A contributor to the public press remarks that

scientific teachers who hold to the succession of stone, bronze, and iron ages, in the development of early civilization, have found a peculiarly incorrigible scholar in Dr. Schliemann. From a very careful study of the store of stone and bronze weapons and implements treasured in the prehistoric portion of the museum in Leiden, he has become convinced that the distinction between the different stone, bronze, and iron ages is purely artificial and imaginary and concludes that there never was a time, when the earliest inhabitants of Denmark (from whence the proofs were derived), were totally unacquainted with bronze or used only unpolished, rude stone weapons and implements.

S U P P L E M E N T S

3.7.1 (see p. 367). Creation ex nihilo more than any other metaphysical idea differences and separates the Bible from all human cosmogonies. All of these latter exclude this idea by their postulate of an eternal, amorphous, and chaotic matter, which is formed by the operation of its own intrinsic properties and forces into the universe. Scripture refers all chaotic matter, with its properties and laws, to a personal deity who is other than it and before it. The creative power of God, according to the biblical conception, is as much needed to account for the forces and laws of material nature as the voluntary power of the watchmaker is needed to account for the watch. In the case of an artificial product like a watch, both the working force and the intelligent art by which it is made are in the artificer. In the case of a natural product like a tree, both the working force and the formative art by which it is constructed are in the tree; the watch is manufactured; the tree grows. But in both cases a Creator other than the watchmaker and the informing vegetable life is requisite. The watch cannot make the watchmaker; and the principle of vegetable life cannot make itself. Both artificial and natural products must therefore ultimately be referred to a first cause, who from nothing, by an absolutely originating act, creates the artificer who makes the watch and the vital principle which builds up the tree.

Augustine (Faith and Creed 2) teaches the creation of matter ex nihilo and of matter in its visible and invisible modes: “You did make the world out of ‘matter unseen,’ or also ‘without form,’ as some copies give it; yet we are not to believe that this material of which the universe was made, although it might be ‘without form’ [chaotic], although it might be ‘unseen,’ whatever might be the mode of its subsistence, could possibly have subsisted of itself, as if it were coeternal and coeval with God. For even although the world was made of some sort of material, this self-same material itself was made of nothing.”

Neander (History 1.372) directs attention to the radical difference between creation and evolution or emanation as constituting the difference in kind between the Christian cosmogony and the pagan or ethic: “Christianity separated entirely what belongs to the province of religion from what belongs to speculation and a merely speculative interest. And just by so doing Christianity preserved religion from the danger of confounding things divine with the things of this world; the idea of God with that of nature. It directed the eye of the mind beyond that whole series of the phenomena of the world, where, in the chain of causes and effects, one thing ever evolves out of another, to that almighty creative word of God by which the worlds were framed; so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear (Heb. 11:3). The creation was here apprehended as an incomprehensible fact by the upward gaze of faith, which rose above the position of the understanding, the faculty which would derive all things from one another, which would explain everything [sensuously] and hence denies all immediate [or intuitive] truth. This one practically important truth the church was for holding fast in the doctrine of creation from nothing; taking her stand in opposition to the ancient view, which would condition God’s act of creation by a previously existing matter; and which, in an anthropopathic manner conceived of him, not as the free, self-sufficient author of all existence, but as the fashioner of a material already extent. Gnosticism would not acknowledge any such limits to speculation. It would explain, clear up to the mental vision, how God is the source and ground of all existence. It was thus compelled to place in the essence of God himself a process of development, through which God is the source and ground of all existence. From overlooking the negative sense of the doctrine concerning creation from nothing, it was led to oppose against it the old principle ‘nothing can come out of nothing.’ It substituted in place of this doctrine the sensuous imageable idea of an efflux of all existence out of the Supreme Being of the deity. This idea of an emanation admits being presented under a great variety of images; of an irradiation of light from an original light; of a development of spiritual powers or ideas acquiring self-subsistence; of an expression in a series of syllables and tones, dying away gradually to an echo.”

Pagan cosmogonies postulate a germ or egg when they explain “creation.” Absolute origination of entity from nonentity is not only denied, but asserted to be impossible. On this scheme there is nothing but second causes. The eternal germ is operated upon by secondary agents and agencies, and the so-called creation is merely the emanation and evolution of an existing substance. There is no first cause originating substance itself. Charnock (Power of God, 419) thus notices the need of a Creator in order to such an evolution: “Nature, or the order of second causes, has a vast power; and the sun and the earth bring forth harvests of corn, but from seed first sown in the earth; were there no seed in the earth, the power of the earth would be idle and the influence of the sun insignificant. All the united strength of nature cannot produce the least thing out of nothing. It may multiply and increase things by the powerful blessing God gave it at the first erecting of the world, but it cannot create.” Pagan cosmogonies which account for the universe by emanation reappear in the modern materialism which accounts for it by evolution.

3.7.2 (see p. 369). Spinoza, often and with emphasis, denies that substance can be created. In a letter to Oldenburg (Letter 2) he says: “In the universe there cannot exist two substances without their differing utterly in essence. Substance cannot be created. All substance must be infinite or supremely perfect.” The assertion that “there cannot be two substances without their differing utterly in essence” is true. One must be infinite, and the other finite. But as Spinoza assumes that the postulate upon which his whole system depends, namely, that there is only one substance and that infinite, is axiomatic and needs no proof, it follows from his assumption that there cannot be two substances. Two infinites are impossible.

3.7.3 (see p. 371). Howe (Oracles 2.9) thus explains the phrase heaven and earth in Gen. 1:1: “The first and most obvious distribution of the created universe is into these two heads, matter and mind. This is the distribution in Col. 1:16: ‘By him were all things made that are in heaven or that are in earth, visible and invisible.’ We may well enough suppose all matter to be, some way or other, visible, though there be indeed a finer sort of matter than is visible to us. [Howe refers here to the invisible material forces—gravitation, electricity, attraction, etc.—and the invisible physical principles, namely, vegetable and animal life; see p.157 n.16.] But then there is the other head of things that are absolutely invisible; as it is altogether impossible that any sense can perceive a mind or a thought which is the immediate product of that mind. Some, indeed, will have by ‘heavens’ all intellectual beings that are created to be comprehended and meant; and by ‘earth,’ all matter whatsoever. We shall not dispute the propriety of that conjecture or what probability it has or has not; but take what is more obvious to ourselves. And so, by ‘heaven’ must be understood not only all the several superior orbs, but all their inhabitants, unto which our own minds and spirits do originally appertain, as being nearer of kin and more allied to the world of spirits than they are to this world of flesh and earth. And then, by ‘earth’ is meant this lower orb, which is replenished with numerous sorts of creatures with one or another sort of lives; either that do live an intellectual life or from an intelligent soul as we live; or else that live a merely sensitive life as all the brutes do; or else that live a merely vegetable life as the plants do; and then there are inanimate things that have no proper life at all. Of such extent is this created universe; it takes in all these several sorts of things.” Pearson (On the Creed, art. 1) explains similarly, “The two terms heaven and earth taken together signify the universe or that which is called the world, in which are contained all things material and immaterial, visible and invisible. Under the name of ‘heaven and earth’ are comprehended all things contained in them, which are of two classes. Some were made immediately out of nothing by a proper creation; and some only mediately, as out of something formerly made out of nothing by an improper kind of creation. By the first were made all immaterial substances, all the orders of angels, and the souls of men, the heavens, and the simple or elemental bodies, as the earth, the water, and the air. By the second were made all the ‘hosts of earth’ (Gen. 2:1), the grass and herb yielding seed, the fowls of the air, and the fishes of the sea: ‘Let the earth bring forth grass; let the waters bring forth the moving creature that has life and fowl that may fly above the earth.’ As well may we grant these plants and animals to have their origination from such principles [namely, earth, water, and air] when we read, ‘God formed man out of the dust of the ground’ and said unto him whom he created in his own image, ‘Dust you are.’ ” This statement needs qualification. Plants and animals and the body of man did not “originate” from earth, water, and air in the strict sense of the term; for a vital principle was required to vitalize and organize these nonvital and inorganic elements. “Nothing is satisfactory,” says Bell (Hand, chap. 2), “until it is declared that it has been the will of God to create life; and that it was he who gave the animating principle to produce organization.” This animating principle was as much an immediate creation from nothing as the spirits of angels and men or the simple elements of matter. When it is said, “Let the earth bring forth grass; let the waters bring forth the moving creature,” the meaning is that the earth and waters furnish the nonvital material elements that constitute the visibility of a plant or animal, which are vivified and assimilated by an invisible principle of vegetable or animal life created ex nihilo (p. 377). The vegetable and animal kingdoms fall into Pearson’s first class.

Augustine (City of God 11.33) sums up as follows: “Under these names heaven and earth the whole creation is signified, either as divided into spiritual and material, which seems the more likely, or into the two great parts of the world [universe] in which all created things are contained, so that, first of all, the creation is presented in sum and then its parts are enumerated, according to the mystic number of the days.”

3.7.4 (see p. 374). Grabe, in his Spicilegium patrum⁵⁶ (2.195), gives a fragment from the commentary of Anastasius upon the six days’ work, in which the latter remarks that “Justin Martyr says that all things which were made by God are sextuply divided: Into immortal and intelligent things such as angels; into mortal