IV. The Mosaic Account of Creation.1. Its twofold nature,—as uniting the ideas of creation and of development.(a) Creation is asserted.—The Mosaic narrative avoids the error of making the universe eternal or the result of an eternal process. The cosmogony of Genesis, unlike the cosmogonies of the heathen, is prefaced by the originating act of God, and is supplemented by successive manifestations of creative power in the introduction of brute and of human life.All nature-worship, whether it take the form of ancient polytheism or modern materialism, looks upon the universe only as a birth or growth. This view has a basis of truth, inasmuch as it regards natural forces as having a real existence. It is false in regarding these forces as needing no originator or upholder. Hesiod taught that in the beginning was formless matter. Genesis does not begin thus. God is not a demiurge, working on eternal matter. God antedates matter. He is the creator of matter at the first (Gen. 1:1—bara) and he subsequently created animal life (Gen. 1:21—“and God created”—bara) and the life of man (Gen. 1:27—“and God create man”—baraagain).Many statements of the doctrine of evolution err by regarding it as an eternal or self-originated process. But the process requires an originator, and the forces require an upholder. Each forward step implies increment of energy, and progress toward a rational end implies intelligence and foresight in the governing power. Schurman says well that Darwinism explains thesurvivalof the fittest, but cannot explain thearrivalof the fittest. Schurman, Agnosticism and Religion, 34—“A primitive chaos of star-dust which held in its womb not only the cosmos that fills space, not only the living creatures that teem upon it, but also the intellect that interprets it, the will that confronts it, and the conscience that transfigures it, must as certainly have God at the centre, as a universe mechanically arranged and periodically adjusted must have him at the circumference.... There is no real antagonism between creation and evolution. 59—Natural causation is the expression of a supernatural Mind in nature, and man—a being at once of sensibility and of rational and moral self-activity—is a signal and ever-present example of the interfusion of the natural with the supernatural in that part of universal existence nearest and best known to us.”Seebohm, quoted in J. J. Murphy, Nat. Selection and Spir. Freedom, 76—“When we admit that Darwin's argument in favor of the theory of evolution proves its truth, we doubt whether natural selection can be in any sense thecauseof the origin of species. It has probably played an important part in the history of evolution; its rôle has been that of increasing the rapidity with which the process of development has proceeded. Of itself it has probably been powerless to originate a species; the machinery by which species have been evolved has been completely independent of natural selection[pg 392]and could have produced all the results which we call the evolution of species without its aid; though the process would have been slow had there been no struggle of life to increase its pace.”New World, June, 1896:237-262, art. by Howison on the Limits of Evolution, finds limits in (1) the noumenal Reality; (2) the break between the organic and the inorganic; (3) break between physiological and logical genesis; (4) inability to explain the great fact on which its own movement rests; (5) thea prioriself-consciousness which is the essential being and true person of the mind.Evolution, according to Herbert Spencer, is“an integration of matter and concomitant dissipation of motion, during which the matter passes from an indefinite incoherent homogeneity to a definite coherent heterogeneity, and during which the retained motion goes through a parallel transformation.”D. W. Simon criticizes this definition as defective“because (1) it omits all mention both of energy and its differentiations; and (2) because it introduces into the definition of the process one of the phenomena thereof, namely, motion. As a matter of fact, both energy or force, and law, are subsequently and illicitly introduced as distinct factors of the process; they ought therefore to have found recognition in the definition or description.”Mark Hopkins, Life, 189—“God: what need of him? Have we not force, uniform force, and do not all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation, if it ever had a beginning? Have we not the τὸ πᾶν, the universal All, the Soul of the universe, working itself up from unconsciousness through molecules and maggots and mice and marmots and monkeys to its highest culmination in man?”(b) Development is recognized.—The Mosaic account represents the present order of things as the result, not simply of original creation, but also of subsequent arrangement and development. A fashioning of inorganic materials is described, and also a use of these materials in providing the conditions of organized existence. Life is described as reproducing itself, after its first introduction, according to its own laws and by virtue of its own inner energy.Martensen wrongly asserts that“Judaism represented the world exclusively ascreatura, notnatura; as κτίσις, not φύσις.”This is not true. Creation is represented as the bringing forth, not of something dead, but of something living and capable of self-development. Creation lays the foundation for cosmogony. Not only is there a fashioning and arrangement of the material which the original creative act has brought into being (see Gen. 1:2, 4, 6, 7, 9, 16, 17; 2:2, 6, 7, 8—Spirit brooding; dividing light from darkness, and waters from waters; dry land appearing; setting apart of sun, moon, and stars; mist watering; forming man's body; planting garden) but there is also an imparting and using of the productive powers of the things and beings created (Gen. 1:12, 22, 24, 28—earth brought forth grass; trees yielding fruit whose seed was in itself; earth brought forth the living creatures; man commanded to be fruitful and multiply).The tendency at present among men of science is to regard the whole history of life upon the planet as the result of evolution, thus excluding creation, both at the beginning of the history and along its course. On the progress from the Orohippus, the lowest member of the equine series, an animal with four toes, to Anchitherium with three, then to Hipparion, and finally to our common horse, see Huxley, in Nature for May 11, 1873:33, 34. He argues that, if a complicated animal like the horse has arisen by gradual modification of a lower and less specialized form, there is no reason to think that other animals have arisen in a different way. Clarence King, Address at Yale College, 1877, regards American geology as teaching the doctrine of sudden yet natural modification of species.“When catastrophic change burst in upon the ages of uniformity and sounded in the ear of every living thing the words:‘Change or die!’plasticity became the sole principle of action.”Nature proceeded then by leaps, and corresponding to the leaps of geology we find leaps of biology.We grant the probability that the great majority of what we call species were produced in some such ways. If science should render it certain that all the present species of living creatures were derived by natural descent from a few original germs, and that these germs were themselves an evolution of inorganic forces and materials, we should not therefore regard the Mosaic account as proved untrue. We should only be required to revise our interpretation of the wordbarainGen. 1:21, 27, and to give it there the meaning of mediate creation, or creation by law. Such a meaning might almost seem to be favored byGen. 1:11—“let the earth put forth grass”;20—“let the waters bring forth abundantly[pg 393]the moving creature that hath life”;2:7—“the Lord God formed man of the dust”;9—“out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree”;cf.Mark 4:28—αὐτομάτη ἣ γή καρποφορεῖ—“the earth brings forth fruit automatically.”Goethe, Sprüche in Reimen:“Was wär ein Gott der nur von aussen stiesse, Im Kreis das All am Finger laufen liesse? Ihm ziemt's die Welt im Innern zu bewegen, Sich in Natur, Natur in sich zu hegen, So dass, was in Ihm lebt und webt und ist, Nie seine Kraft, nie seinen Geist vermisst”—“No, such a God my worship may not win, Who lets the world about his finger spin, A thing eternal; God must dwell within.”All the growth of a tree takes place in from four to six weeks in May, June and July. The addition of woody fibre between the bark and the trunk results, not by impartation into it of a new force from without, but by the awakening of the life within. Environment changes and growth begins. We may even speak of an immanent transcendence of God—an unexhausted vitality which at times makes great movements forward. This is what the ancients were trying to express when they said that trees were inhabited by dryads and so groaned and bled when wounded. God's life is in all. In evolution we cannot say, with LeConte, that the higher form of energy is“derived from the lower.”Rather let us say that both the higher and the lower are constantly dependent for their being on the will of God. The lower is only God's preparation for his higher self-manifestation; see Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 165, 166.Even Haeckel, Hist. Creation, 1:38, can say that in the Mosaic narrative“two great and fundamental ideas meet us—the idea of separation or differentiation, and the idea of progressive development or perfecting. We can bestow our just and sincere admiration on the Jewish lawgiver's grand insight into nature, and his simple and natural hypothesis of creation, without discovering in it a divine revelation.”Henry Drummond, whose first book, Natural Law in the Spiritual World, he himself in his later days regretted as tending in a deterministic and materialistic direction, came to believe rather in“spiritual law in the natural world.”His Ascent of Man regards evolution and law as only the methods of a present Deity. Darwinism seemed at first to show that the past history of life upon the planet was a history of heartless and cruel slaughter. The survival of the fittest had for its obverse side the destruction of myriads. Nature was“red in tooth and claw with ravine.”But further thought has shown that this gloomy view results from a partial induction of facts. Palæontological life was not only a struggle for life, but a struggle for the life of others. The beginnings of altruism are to be seen in the instinct of reproduction and in the care of offspring. In every lion's den and tiger's lair, in every mother-eagle's feeding of her young, there is a self-sacrifice which faintly shadows forth man's subordination of personal interests to the interests of others.Dr. George Harris, in his Moral Evolution, has added to Drummond's doctrine the further consideration that the struggle for one's own life has its moral side as well as the struggle for the life of others. The instinct of self-preservation is the beginning of right, righteousness, justice and law upon earth. Every creature owes it to God to preserve its own being. So we can find an adumbration of morality even in the predatory and internecine warfare of the geologic ages. The immanent God was even then preparing the way for the rights, the dignity, the freedom of humanity. B. P. Bowne, in the Independent, April 19, 1900—“The Copernican system made men dizzy for a time, and they held on to the Ptolemaic system to escape vertigo. In like manner the conception of God, as revealing himself in a great historic movement and process, in the consciences and lives of holy men, in the unfolding life of the church, makes dizzy the believer in a dictated book, and he longs for some fixed word that shall be sure and stedfast.”God is not limited to creating from without: he can also create from within; and development is as much a part of creation as is the origination of the elements. For further discussion of man's origin, see section on Man a Creation of God, in our treatment of Anthropology.2. Its proper interpretation.We adopt neither (a) the allegorical, or mythical, (b) the hyperliteral, nor (c) the hyperscientific interpretation of the Mosaic narrative; but rather (d) the pictorial-summary interpretation,—which holds that the account is a rough sketch of the history of creation, true in all its essential features, but presented in a graphic form suited to the common mind and to earlier as well as to later ages. While conveying to primitive man as accurate an idea of God's work as man was able to comprehend, the revelation[pg 394]was yet given in pregnant language, so that it could expand to all the ascertained results of subsequent physical research. This general correspondence of the narrative with the teachings of science, and its power to adapt itself to every advance in human knowledge, differences it from every other cosmogony current among men.(a) Theallegorical, ormythical interpretation, represents the Mosaic account as embodying, like the Indian and Greek cosmogonies, the poetic speculations of an early race as to the origin of the present system. We object to this interpretation upon the ground that the narrative of creation is inseparably connected with the succeeding history, and is therefore most naturally regarded as itself historical. This connection of the narrative of creation with the subsequent history, moreover, prevents us from believing it to be the description of a vision granted to Moses. It is more probably the record of an original revelation to the first man, handed down to Moses' time, and used by Moses as a proper introduction to his history.We object also to the view of some higher critics that the book of Genesis contains two inconsistent stories. Marcus Dods, Book of Genesis, 2—“The compiler of this book ... lays side by side two accounts of man's creation which no ingenuity can reconcile.”Charles A. Briggs:“The doctrine of creation in Genesis 1 is altogether different from that taught in Genesis 2.”W. N. Clarke, Christian Theology, 199-201—“It has been commonly assumed that the two are parallel, and tell one and the same story; but examination shows that this is not the case.... We have here the record of a tradition, rather than a revelation.... It cannot be taken as literal history, and it does not tell by divine authority how man was created.”To these utterances we reply that the two accounts are not inconsistent but complementary, the first chapter of Genesis describing man's creation as the crown of God's general work, the second describing man's creation with greater particularity as the beginning of human history.Canon Rawlinson, in Aids to Faith, 275, compares the Mosaic account with the cosmogony of Berosus, the Chaldean. Pfleiderer, Philos. of Religion, 1:267-272, gives an account of heathen theories of the origin of the universe. Anaxagoras was the first who represented the chaotic first matter as formed through the ordering understanding (νοῦς) of God, and Aristotle for that reason called him“the first sober one among many drunken.”Schurman, Belief in God, 138—“In these cosmogonies the world and the gods grow up together; cosmogony is, at the same time, theogony.”Dr. E. G. Robinson:“The Bible writers believed and intended to state that the world was made in three literal days. But, on the principle that God may have meant more than they did, the doctrine of periods may not be inconsistent with their account.”For comparison of the Biblical with heathen cosmogonies, see Blackie in Theol. Eclectic, 1:77-87; Guyot, Creation, 58-63; Pope, Theology, 1:401, 402; Bible Commentary, 1:36, 48; McIlvaine, Wisdom of Holy Scripture, 1-54; J. F. Clarke, Ten Great Religions, 2:193-221. For the theory of“prophetic vision,”see Kurtz, Hist. of Old Covenant, Introd., i-xxxvii, civ-cxxx; and Hugh Miller, Testimony of the Rocks, 179-210; Hastings, Dict. Bible, art.: Cosmogony; Sayce, Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia, 372-397.(b) Thehyperliteral interpretationwould withdraw the narrative from all comparison with the conclusions of science, by putting the ages of geological history between the first and second verses ofGen. 1, and by making the remainder of the chapter an account of the fitting up of the earth, or of some limited portion of it, in six days of twenty-four hours each. Among the advocates of this view, now generally discarded, are Chalmers, Natural Theology, Works, 1:228-258, and John Pye Smith, Mosaic Account of Creation, and Scripture and Geology. To this view we object that there is no indication, in the Mosaic narrative, of so vast an interval between the first and the second verses; that there is no indication, in the geological history, of any such break between the ages of preparation and the present time (see Hugh Miller, Testimony of the Rocks, 141-178); and that there are indications in the Mosaic record itself that the word“day”is not used in its literal sense; while the other Scriptures unquestionably employ it to designate a period of indefinite duration (Gen. 1:5—“God called the light Day”—a day before there was a sun;8—“there was evening and there was morning, a second day”;2:2—God“rested on the seventh day”;cf.Heb. 4:3-10—where God's day of rest seems to continue, and his people are exhorted to enter into it;Gen. 2:4—“the day that Jehovah made earth and heaven”—“day”here covers all the seven days;cf.Is. 2:12—“a day of Jehovah of hosts”;Zech. 14:7—“it shall be one day which is known unto Jehovah; not day, and not night”;2 Pet. 3:8—“one day is with the Lord as[pg 395]a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day”). Guyot, Creation, 34, objects also to this interpretation, that the narrative purports to give a history of the making of the heavens as well as of the earth (Gen. 2:4—“these are the generations of the heaven and of the earth”), whereas this interpretation confines the history to the earth. On the meaning of the word“day,”as a period of indefinite duration, see Dana, Manual of Geology, 744; LeConte, Religion and Science, 262.(c) Thehyperscientific interpretationwould find in the narrative a minute and precise correspondence with the geological record. This is not to be expected, since it is foreign to the purpose of revelation to teach science. Although a general concord between the Mosaic and geological histories may be pointed out, it is a needless embarrassment to compel ourselves to find in every detail of the former an accurate statement of some scientific fact. Far more probable we hold to be(d) Thepictorial-summary interpretation. Before explaining this in detail, we would premise that we do not hold this or any future scheme of reconciling Genesis and geology to be a finality. Such a settlement of all the questions involved would presuppose not only a perfected science of the physical universe, but also a perfected science of hermeneutics. It is enough if we can offer tentative solutions which represent the present state of thought upon the subject. Remembering, then, that any such scheme of reconciliation may speedily be outgrown without prejudice to the truth of the Scripture narrative, we present the following as an approximate account of the coincidences between the Mosaic and the geological records. The scheme here given is a combination of the conclusions of Dana and Guyot, and assumes the substantial truth of the nebular hypothesis. It is interesting to observe that Augustine, who knew nothing of modern science, should have reached, by simple study of the text, some of the same results. See his Confessions, 12:8—“First God created a chaotic matter, which wasnexttonothing. This chaotic matter was made from nothing, before all days. Then this chaotic, amorphous matter was subsequently arranged, in the succeeding six days”; De Genes. ad Lit., 4:27—“The length of these days is not to be determined by the length of our week-days. There is a series in both cases, and that is all.”We proceed now to the scheme:1. The earth, if originally in the condition of a gaseous fluid, must have been void and formless as described inGenesis 1:2. Here the earth is not yet separated from the condensing nebula, and its fluid condition is indicated by the term“waters.”2. The beginning of activity in matter would manifest itself by the production of light, since light is a resultant of molecular activity. This corresponds to the statement inverse 3. As the result of condensation, the nebula becomes luminous, and this process from darkness to light is described as follows:“there was evening and there was morning, one day.”Here we have a day without a sun—a feature in the narrative quite consistent with two facts of science: first, that the nebula would naturally be self-luminous, and, secondly, that the earth proper, which reached its present form before the sun, would, when it was thrown off, be itself a self-luminous and molten mass. The day was therefore continuous—day without night.3. The development of the earth into an independent sphere and its separation from the fluid around it answers to the dividing of“the waters under the firmament from the waters above,”inverse 7. Here the word“waters”is used to designate the“primordial cosmic material”(Guyot, Creation, 35-37), or the molten mass of earth and sun united, from which the earth is thrown off. The term“waters”is the best which the Hebrew language affords to express this idea of a fluid mass.Ps. 148seems to have this meaning, where it speaks of the“waters that are above the heavens”(verse 4)—waters which are distinguished from the“deeps”below (verse 7), and the“vapor”above (verse 8).4. The production of the earth's physical features by the partial condensation of the vapors which enveloped the igneous sphere, and by the consequent outlining of the continents and oceans, is next described inverse 9as the gathering of the waters into one place and the appearing of the dry land.5. The expression of the idea of life in the lowest plants, since it was in type and effect the creation of the vegetable kingdom, is next described inverse 11as a bringing into existence of the characteristic forms of that kingdom. This precedes all mention of animal life, since the vegetable kingdom is the natural basis of the animal. If it be said that our earliest fossils are animal, we reply that the earliest vegetable forms, thealgæ, were easily dissolved, and might as easily disappear; that graphite and bog-iron ore, appearing lower down than any animal remains, are the result of preceding vegetation; that animal forms, whenever and wherever existing, must subsist upon and presuppose the vegetable. The Eozoön is of necessity preceded by the Eophyte. If it[pg 396]be said that fruit-trees could not have been created on the third day, we reply that since the creation of the vegetable kingdom was to be described at one stroke and no mention of it was to be made subsequently, this is the proper place to introduce it and to mention its main characteristic forms. See Bible Commentary, 1:36; LeConte, Elements of Geology, 136, 285.6. The vapors which have hitherto shrouded the planet are now cleared away as preliminary to the introduction of life in its higher animal forms. The consequent appearance of solar light is described inverses 16and17as a making of the sun, moon, and stars, and a giving of them as luminaries to the earth. CompareGen. 9:13—“I do set my bow in the cloud.”As the rainbow had existed in nature before, but was now appointed to serve a peculiar purpose, so in the record of creation sun, moon and stars, which existed before, were appointed as visible lights for the earth,—and that for the reason that the earth was no longer self-luminous, and the light of the sun struggling through the earth's encompassing clouds was not sufficient for the higher forms of life which were to come.7. The exhibition of the four grand types of the animal kingdom (radiate, molluscan, articulate, vertebrate), which characterizes the next stage of geological progress, is represented inverses 20and21as a creation of the lower animals—those that swarm in the waters, and the creeping and flying species of the land. Huxley, in his American Addresses, objects to this assigning of the origin of birds to the fifth day, and declares that terrestrial animals exist in lower strata than any form of bird,—birds appearing only in the Oölitic, or New Red Sandstone. But we reply that the fifth day is devoted to sea-productions, while land-productions belong to the sixth. Birds, according to the latest science, are sea-productions, not land-productions. They originated from Saurians, and were, at the first, flying lizards. There being but one mention of sea-productions, all these, birds included, are crowded into the fifth day. Thus Genesis anticipates the latest science. On the ancestry of birds, see Pop. Science Monthly, March, 1884:606; Baptist Magazine, 1877:505.8. The introduction of mammals—viviparous species, which are eminent above all other vertebrates for a quality prophetic of a high moral purpose, that of suckling their young—is indicated inverses 24and25by the creation, on the sixth day, of cattle and beasts of prey.9. Man, the first being of moral and intellectual qualities, and the first in whom the unity of the great design has full expression, forms in both the Mosaic and geologic record the last step of progress in creation (seeverses 26-31). With Prof. Dana, we may say that“in this succession we observe not merely an order of events like that deduced from science; there is a system in the arrangement, and a far-reaching prophecy, to which philosophy could not have attained, however instructed.”See Dana, Manual of Geology, 741-746, and Bib. Sac., April, 1885:201-224. Richard Owen:“Man from the beginning of organisms was ideally present upon the earth”; see Owen, Anatomy of Vertebrates, 3:796; Louis Agassiz:“Man is the purpose toward which the whole animal creation tends from the first appearance of the first palæozoic fish.”Prof. John M. Taylor:“Man is not merely a mortal but a moral being. If he sinks below this plane of life he misses the path marked out for him by all his past development. In order to progress, the higher vertebrate had to subordinate everything to mental development. In order to become human it had to develop the rational intelligence. In order to become higher man, present man must subordinate everything to moral development. This is the great law of animal and human development clearly revealed in the sequence of physical and psychical functions.”W. E. Gladstone in S. S. Times, April 26, 1890, calls the Mosaic days“chapters in the history of creation.”He objects to calling them epochs or periods, because they are not of equal length, and they sometimes overlap. But he defends the general correspondence of the Mosaic narrative with the latest conclusions of science, and remarks:“Any man whose labor and duty for several scores of years has included as their central point the study of the means of making himself intelligible to the mass of men, is in a far better position to judge what would be the forms and methods of speech proper for the Mosaic writer to adopt, than the most perfect Hebraist as such, or the most consummate votary of physical science as such.”On the whole subject, see Guyot, Creation; Review of Guyot, in N. Eng., July, 1884:591-594; Tayler Lewis, Six Days of Creation; Thompson, Man in Genesis and in Geology; Agassiz, in Atlantic Monthly, Jan. 1874; Dawson, Story of the Earth and Man, 82, and in Expositor, Apl. 1886; LeConte, Science and Religion, 264; Hill, in Bib. Sac., April, 1875; Peirce, Ideality in the Physical Sciences, 38-72; Boardman, The Creative Week;[pg 397]Godet, Bib. Studies of O. T., 65-138; Bell, in Nature, Nov. 24 and Dec. 1, 1882; W. E. Gladstone, in Nineteenth Century, Nov. 1885:685-707, Jan. 1886:1, 176; reply by Huxley, in Nineteenth Century, Dec. 1885, and Feb. 1886; Schmid, Theories of Darwin; Bartlett, Sources of History in the Pentateuch, 1-35; Cotterill, Does Science Aid Faith in Regard to Creation? Cox, Miracles, 1-39—chapter 1, on the Original Miracle—that of Creation; Zöckler, Theologie und Naturwissenschaft, and Urgeschichte, 1-77; Reusch, Bib. Schöpfungsgeschichte. On difficulties of the nebular hypothesis, see Stallo, Modern Physics, 277-293.
IV. The Mosaic Account of Creation.1. Its twofold nature,—as uniting the ideas of creation and of development.(a) Creation is asserted.—The Mosaic narrative avoids the error of making the universe eternal or the result of an eternal process. The cosmogony of Genesis, unlike the cosmogonies of the heathen, is prefaced by the originating act of God, and is supplemented by successive manifestations of creative power in the introduction of brute and of human life.All nature-worship, whether it take the form of ancient polytheism or modern materialism, looks upon the universe only as a birth or growth. This view has a basis of truth, inasmuch as it regards natural forces as having a real existence. It is false in regarding these forces as needing no originator or upholder. Hesiod taught that in the beginning was formless matter. Genesis does not begin thus. God is not a demiurge, working on eternal matter. God antedates matter. He is the creator of matter at the first (Gen. 1:1—bara) and he subsequently created animal life (Gen. 1:21—“and God created”—bara) and the life of man (Gen. 1:27—“and God create man”—baraagain).Many statements of the doctrine of evolution err by regarding it as an eternal or self-originated process. But the process requires an originator, and the forces require an upholder. Each forward step implies increment of energy, and progress toward a rational end implies intelligence and foresight in the governing power. Schurman says well that Darwinism explains thesurvivalof the fittest, but cannot explain thearrivalof the fittest. Schurman, Agnosticism and Religion, 34—“A primitive chaos of star-dust which held in its womb not only the cosmos that fills space, not only the living creatures that teem upon it, but also the intellect that interprets it, the will that confronts it, and the conscience that transfigures it, must as certainly have God at the centre, as a universe mechanically arranged and periodically adjusted must have him at the circumference.... There is no real antagonism between creation and evolution. 59—Natural causation is the expression of a supernatural Mind in nature, and man—a being at once of sensibility and of rational and moral self-activity—is a signal and ever-present example of the interfusion of the natural with the supernatural in that part of universal existence nearest and best known to us.”Seebohm, quoted in J. J. Murphy, Nat. Selection and Spir. Freedom, 76—“When we admit that Darwin's argument in favor of the theory of evolution proves its truth, we doubt whether natural selection can be in any sense thecauseof the origin of species. It has probably played an important part in the history of evolution; its rôle has been that of increasing the rapidity with which the process of development has proceeded. Of itself it has probably been powerless to originate a species; the machinery by which species have been evolved has been completely independent of natural selection[pg 392]and could have produced all the results which we call the evolution of species without its aid; though the process would have been slow had there been no struggle of life to increase its pace.”New World, June, 1896:237-262, art. by Howison on the Limits of Evolution, finds limits in (1) the noumenal Reality; (2) the break between the organic and the inorganic; (3) break between physiological and logical genesis; (4) inability to explain the great fact on which its own movement rests; (5) thea prioriself-consciousness which is the essential being and true person of the mind.Evolution, according to Herbert Spencer, is“an integration of matter and concomitant dissipation of motion, during which the matter passes from an indefinite incoherent homogeneity to a definite coherent heterogeneity, and during which the retained motion goes through a parallel transformation.”D. W. Simon criticizes this definition as defective“because (1) it omits all mention both of energy and its differentiations; and (2) because it introduces into the definition of the process one of the phenomena thereof, namely, motion. As a matter of fact, both energy or force, and law, are subsequently and illicitly introduced as distinct factors of the process; they ought therefore to have found recognition in the definition or description.”Mark Hopkins, Life, 189—“God: what need of him? Have we not force, uniform force, and do not all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation, if it ever had a beginning? Have we not the τὸ πᾶν, the universal All, the Soul of the universe, working itself up from unconsciousness through molecules and maggots and mice and marmots and monkeys to its highest culmination in man?”(b) Development is recognized.—The Mosaic account represents the present order of things as the result, not simply of original creation, but also of subsequent arrangement and development. A fashioning of inorganic materials is described, and also a use of these materials in providing the conditions of organized existence. Life is described as reproducing itself, after its first introduction, according to its own laws and by virtue of its own inner energy.Martensen wrongly asserts that“Judaism represented the world exclusively ascreatura, notnatura; as κτίσις, not φύσις.”This is not true. Creation is represented as the bringing forth, not of something dead, but of something living and capable of self-development. Creation lays the foundation for cosmogony. Not only is there a fashioning and arrangement of the material which the original creative act has brought into being (see Gen. 1:2, 4, 6, 7, 9, 16, 17; 2:2, 6, 7, 8—Spirit brooding; dividing light from darkness, and waters from waters; dry land appearing; setting apart of sun, moon, and stars; mist watering; forming man's body; planting garden) but there is also an imparting and using of the productive powers of the things and beings created (Gen. 1:12, 22, 24, 28—earth brought forth grass; trees yielding fruit whose seed was in itself; earth brought forth the living creatures; man commanded to be fruitful and multiply).The tendency at present among men of science is to regard the whole history of life upon the planet as the result of evolution, thus excluding creation, both at the beginning of the history and along its course. On the progress from the Orohippus, the lowest member of the equine series, an animal with four toes, to Anchitherium with three, then to Hipparion, and finally to our common horse, see Huxley, in Nature for May 11, 1873:33, 34. He argues that, if a complicated animal like the horse has arisen by gradual modification of a lower and less specialized form, there is no reason to think that other animals have arisen in a different way. Clarence King, Address at Yale College, 1877, regards American geology as teaching the doctrine of sudden yet natural modification of species.“When catastrophic change burst in upon the ages of uniformity and sounded in the ear of every living thing the words:‘Change or die!’plasticity became the sole principle of action.”Nature proceeded then by leaps, and corresponding to the leaps of geology we find leaps of biology.We grant the probability that the great majority of what we call species were produced in some such ways. If science should render it certain that all the present species of living creatures were derived by natural descent from a few original germs, and that these germs were themselves an evolution of inorganic forces and materials, we should not therefore regard the Mosaic account as proved untrue. We should only be required to revise our interpretation of the wordbarainGen. 1:21, 27, and to give it there the meaning of mediate creation, or creation by law. Such a meaning might almost seem to be favored byGen. 1:11—“let the earth put forth grass”;20—“let the waters bring forth abundantly[pg 393]the moving creature that hath life”;2:7—“the Lord God formed man of the dust”;9—“out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree”;cf.Mark 4:28—αὐτομάτη ἣ γή καρποφορεῖ—“the earth brings forth fruit automatically.”Goethe, Sprüche in Reimen:“Was wär ein Gott der nur von aussen stiesse, Im Kreis das All am Finger laufen liesse? Ihm ziemt's die Welt im Innern zu bewegen, Sich in Natur, Natur in sich zu hegen, So dass, was in Ihm lebt und webt und ist, Nie seine Kraft, nie seinen Geist vermisst”—“No, such a God my worship may not win, Who lets the world about his finger spin, A thing eternal; God must dwell within.”All the growth of a tree takes place in from four to six weeks in May, June and July. The addition of woody fibre between the bark and the trunk results, not by impartation into it of a new force from without, but by the awakening of the life within. Environment changes and growth begins. We may even speak of an immanent transcendence of God—an unexhausted vitality which at times makes great movements forward. This is what the ancients were trying to express when they said that trees were inhabited by dryads and so groaned and bled when wounded. God's life is in all. In evolution we cannot say, with LeConte, that the higher form of energy is“derived from the lower.”Rather let us say that both the higher and the lower are constantly dependent for their being on the will of God. The lower is only God's preparation for his higher self-manifestation; see Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 165, 166.Even Haeckel, Hist. Creation, 1:38, can say that in the Mosaic narrative“two great and fundamental ideas meet us—the idea of separation or differentiation, and the idea of progressive development or perfecting. We can bestow our just and sincere admiration on the Jewish lawgiver's grand insight into nature, and his simple and natural hypothesis of creation, without discovering in it a divine revelation.”Henry Drummond, whose first book, Natural Law in the Spiritual World, he himself in his later days regretted as tending in a deterministic and materialistic direction, came to believe rather in“spiritual law in the natural world.”His Ascent of Man regards evolution and law as only the methods of a present Deity. Darwinism seemed at first to show that the past history of life upon the planet was a history of heartless and cruel slaughter. The survival of the fittest had for its obverse side the destruction of myriads. Nature was“red in tooth and claw with ravine.”But further thought has shown that this gloomy view results from a partial induction of facts. Palæontological life was not only a struggle for life, but a struggle for the life of others. The beginnings of altruism are to be seen in the instinct of reproduction and in the care of offspring. In every lion's den and tiger's lair, in every mother-eagle's feeding of her young, there is a self-sacrifice which faintly shadows forth man's subordination of personal interests to the interests of others.Dr. George Harris, in his Moral Evolution, has added to Drummond's doctrine the further consideration that the struggle for one's own life has its moral side as well as the struggle for the life of others. The instinct of self-preservation is the beginning of right, righteousness, justice and law upon earth. Every creature owes it to God to preserve its own being. So we can find an adumbration of morality even in the predatory and internecine warfare of the geologic ages. The immanent God was even then preparing the way for the rights, the dignity, the freedom of humanity. B. P. Bowne, in the Independent, April 19, 1900—“The Copernican system made men dizzy for a time, and they held on to the Ptolemaic system to escape vertigo. In like manner the conception of God, as revealing himself in a great historic movement and process, in the consciences and lives of holy men, in the unfolding life of the church, makes dizzy the believer in a dictated book, and he longs for some fixed word that shall be sure and stedfast.”God is not limited to creating from without: he can also create from within; and development is as much a part of creation as is the origination of the elements. For further discussion of man's origin, see section on Man a Creation of God, in our treatment of Anthropology.2. Its proper interpretation.We adopt neither (a) the allegorical, or mythical, (b) the hyperliteral, nor (c) the hyperscientific interpretation of the Mosaic narrative; but rather (d) the pictorial-summary interpretation,—which holds that the account is a rough sketch of the history of creation, true in all its essential features, but presented in a graphic form suited to the common mind and to earlier as well as to later ages. While conveying to primitive man as accurate an idea of God's work as man was able to comprehend, the revelation[pg 394]was yet given in pregnant language, so that it could expand to all the ascertained results of subsequent physical research. This general correspondence of the narrative with the teachings of science, and its power to adapt itself to every advance in human knowledge, differences it from every other cosmogony current among men.(a) Theallegorical, ormythical interpretation, represents the Mosaic account as embodying, like the Indian and Greek cosmogonies, the poetic speculations of an early race as to the origin of the present system. We object to this interpretation upon the ground that the narrative of creation is inseparably connected with the succeeding history, and is therefore most naturally regarded as itself historical. This connection of the narrative of creation with the subsequent history, moreover, prevents us from believing it to be the description of a vision granted to Moses. It is more probably the record of an original revelation to the first man, handed down to Moses' time, and used by Moses as a proper introduction to his history.We object also to the view of some higher critics that the book of Genesis contains two inconsistent stories. Marcus Dods, Book of Genesis, 2—“The compiler of this book ... lays side by side two accounts of man's creation which no ingenuity can reconcile.”Charles A. Briggs:“The doctrine of creation in Genesis 1 is altogether different from that taught in Genesis 2.”W. N. Clarke, Christian Theology, 199-201—“It has been commonly assumed that the two are parallel, and tell one and the same story; but examination shows that this is not the case.... We have here the record of a tradition, rather than a revelation.... It cannot be taken as literal history, and it does not tell by divine authority how man was created.”To these utterances we reply that the two accounts are not inconsistent but complementary, the first chapter of Genesis describing man's creation as the crown of God's general work, the second describing man's creation with greater particularity as the beginning of human history.Canon Rawlinson, in Aids to Faith, 275, compares the Mosaic account with the cosmogony of Berosus, the Chaldean. Pfleiderer, Philos. of Religion, 1:267-272, gives an account of heathen theories of the origin of the universe. Anaxagoras was the first who represented the chaotic first matter as formed through the ordering understanding (νοῦς) of God, and Aristotle for that reason called him“the first sober one among many drunken.”Schurman, Belief in God, 138—“In these cosmogonies the world and the gods grow up together; cosmogony is, at the same time, theogony.”Dr. E. G. Robinson:“The Bible writers believed and intended to state that the world was made in three literal days. But, on the principle that God may have meant more than they did, the doctrine of periods may not be inconsistent with their account.”For comparison of the Biblical with heathen cosmogonies, see Blackie in Theol. Eclectic, 1:77-87; Guyot, Creation, 58-63; Pope, Theology, 1:401, 402; Bible Commentary, 1:36, 48; McIlvaine, Wisdom of Holy Scripture, 1-54; J. F. Clarke, Ten Great Religions, 2:193-221. For the theory of“prophetic vision,”see Kurtz, Hist. of Old Covenant, Introd., i-xxxvii, civ-cxxx; and Hugh Miller, Testimony of the Rocks, 179-210; Hastings, Dict. Bible, art.: Cosmogony; Sayce, Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia, 372-397.(b) Thehyperliteral interpretationwould withdraw the narrative from all comparison with the conclusions of science, by putting the ages of geological history between the first and second verses ofGen. 1, and by making the remainder of the chapter an account of the fitting up of the earth, or of some limited portion of it, in six days of twenty-four hours each. Among the advocates of this view, now generally discarded, are Chalmers, Natural Theology, Works, 1:228-258, and John Pye Smith, Mosaic Account of Creation, and Scripture and Geology. To this view we object that there is no indication, in the Mosaic narrative, of so vast an interval between the first and the second verses; that there is no indication, in the geological history, of any such break between the ages of preparation and the present time (see Hugh Miller, Testimony of the Rocks, 141-178); and that there are indications in the Mosaic record itself that the word“day”is not used in its literal sense; while the other Scriptures unquestionably employ it to designate a period of indefinite duration (Gen. 1:5—“God called the light Day”—a day before there was a sun;8—“there was evening and there was morning, a second day”;2:2—God“rested on the seventh day”;cf.Heb. 4:3-10—where God's day of rest seems to continue, and his people are exhorted to enter into it;Gen. 2:4—“the day that Jehovah made earth and heaven”—“day”here covers all the seven days;cf.Is. 2:12—“a day of Jehovah of hosts”;Zech. 14:7—“it shall be one day which is known unto Jehovah; not day, and not night”;2 Pet. 3:8—“one day is with the Lord as[pg 395]a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day”). Guyot, Creation, 34, objects also to this interpretation, that the narrative purports to give a history of the making of the heavens as well as of the earth (Gen. 2:4—“these are the generations of the heaven and of the earth”), whereas this interpretation confines the history to the earth. On the meaning of the word“day,”as a period of indefinite duration, see Dana, Manual of Geology, 744; LeConte, Religion and Science, 262.(c) Thehyperscientific interpretationwould find in the narrative a minute and precise correspondence with the geological record. This is not to be expected, since it is foreign to the purpose of revelation to teach science. Although a general concord between the Mosaic and geological histories may be pointed out, it is a needless embarrassment to compel ourselves to find in every detail of the former an accurate statement of some scientific fact. Far more probable we hold to be(d) Thepictorial-summary interpretation. Before explaining this in detail, we would premise that we do not hold this or any future scheme of reconciling Genesis and geology to be a finality. Such a settlement of all the questions involved would presuppose not only a perfected science of the physical universe, but also a perfected science of hermeneutics. It is enough if we can offer tentative solutions which represent the present state of thought upon the subject. Remembering, then, that any such scheme of reconciliation may speedily be outgrown without prejudice to the truth of the Scripture narrative, we present the following as an approximate account of the coincidences between the Mosaic and the geological records. The scheme here given is a combination of the conclusions of Dana and Guyot, and assumes the substantial truth of the nebular hypothesis. It is interesting to observe that Augustine, who knew nothing of modern science, should have reached, by simple study of the text, some of the same results. See his Confessions, 12:8—“First God created a chaotic matter, which wasnexttonothing. This chaotic matter was made from nothing, before all days. Then this chaotic, amorphous matter was subsequently arranged, in the succeeding six days”; De Genes. ad Lit., 4:27—“The length of these days is not to be determined by the length of our week-days. There is a series in both cases, and that is all.”We proceed now to the scheme:1. The earth, if originally in the condition of a gaseous fluid, must have been void and formless as described inGenesis 1:2. Here the earth is not yet separated from the condensing nebula, and its fluid condition is indicated by the term“waters.”2. The beginning of activity in matter would manifest itself by the production of light, since light is a resultant of molecular activity. This corresponds to the statement inverse 3. As the result of condensation, the nebula becomes luminous, and this process from darkness to light is described as follows:“there was evening and there was morning, one day.”Here we have a day without a sun—a feature in the narrative quite consistent with two facts of science: first, that the nebula would naturally be self-luminous, and, secondly, that the earth proper, which reached its present form before the sun, would, when it was thrown off, be itself a self-luminous and molten mass. The day was therefore continuous—day without night.3. The development of the earth into an independent sphere and its separation from the fluid around it answers to the dividing of“the waters under the firmament from the waters above,”inverse 7. Here the word“waters”is used to designate the“primordial cosmic material”(Guyot, Creation, 35-37), or the molten mass of earth and sun united, from which the earth is thrown off. The term“waters”is the best which the Hebrew language affords to express this idea of a fluid mass.Ps. 148seems to have this meaning, where it speaks of the“waters that are above the heavens”(verse 4)—waters which are distinguished from the“deeps”below (verse 7), and the“vapor”above (verse 8).4. The production of the earth's physical features by the partial condensation of the vapors which enveloped the igneous sphere, and by the consequent outlining of the continents and oceans, is next described inverse 9as the gathering of the waters into one place and the appearing of the dry land.5. The expression of the idea of life in the lowest plants, since it was in type and effect the creation of the vegetable kingdom, is next described inverse 11as a bringing into existence of the characteristic forms of that kingdom. This precedes all mention of animal life, since the vegetable kingdom is the natural basis of the animal. If it be said that our earliest fossils are animal, we reply that the earliest vegetable forms, thealgæ, were easily dissolved, and might as easily disappear; that graphite and bog-iron ore, appearing lower down than any animal remains, are the result of preceding vegetation; that animal forms, whenever and wherever existing, must subsist upon and presuppose the vegetable. The Eozoön is of necessity preceded by the Eophyte. If it[pg 396]be said that fruit-trees could not have been created on the third day, we reply that since the creation of the vegetable kingdom was to be described at one stroke and no mention of it was to be made subsequently, this is the proper place to introduce it and to mention its main characteristic forms. See Bible Commentary, 1:36; LeConte, Elements of Geology, 136, 285.6. The vapors which have hitherto shrouded the planet are now cleared away as preliminary to the introduction of life in its higher animal forms. The consequent appearance of solar light is described inverses 16and17as a making of the sun, moon, and stars, and a giving of them as luminaries to the earth. CompareGen. 9:13—“I do set my bow in the cloud.”As the rainbow had existed in nature before, but was now appointed to serve a peculiar purpose, so in the record of creation sun, moon and stars, which existed before, were appointed as visible lights for the earth,—and that for the reason that the earth was no longer self-luminous, and the light of the sun struggling through the earth's encompassing clouds was not sufficient for the higher forms of life which were to come.7. The exhibition of the four grand types of the animal kingdom (radiate, molluscan, articulate, vertebrate), which characterizes the next stage of geological progress, is represented inverses 20and21as a creation of the lower animals—those that swarm in the waters, and the creeping and flying species of the land. Huxley, in his American Addresses, objects to this assigning of the origin of birds to the fifth day, and declares that terrestrial animals exist in lower strata than any form of bird,—birds appearing only in the Oölitic, or New Red Sandstone. But we reply that the fifth day is devoted to sea-productions, while land-productions belong to the sixth. Birds, according to the latest science, are sea-productions, not land-productions. They originated from Saurians, and were, at the first, flying lizards. There being but one mention of sea-productions, all these, birds included, are crowded into the fifth day. Thus Genesis anticipates the latest science. On the ancestry of birds, see Pop. Science Monthly, March, 1884:606; Baptist Magazine, 1877:505.8. The introduction of mammals—viviparous species, which are eminent above all other vertebrates for a quality prophetic of a high moral purpose, that of suckling their young—is indicated inverses 24and25by the creation, on the sixth day, of cattle and beasts of prey.9. Man, the first being of moral and intellectual qualities, and the first in whom the unity of the great design has full expression, forms in both the Mosaic and geologic record the last step of progress in creation (seeverses 26-31). With Prof. Dana, we may say that“in this succession we observe not merely an order of events like that deduced from science; there is a system in the arrangement, and a far-reaching prophecy, to which philosophy could not have attained, however instructed.”See Dana, Manual of Geology, 741-746, and Bib. Sac., April, 1885:201-224. Richard Owen:“Man from the beginning of organisms was ideally present upon the earth”; see Owen, Anatomy of Vertebrates, 3:796; Louis Agassiz:“Man is the purpose toward which the whole animal creation tends from the first appearance of the first palæozoic fish.”Prof. John M. Taylor:“Man is not merely a mortal but a moral being. If he sinks below this plane of life he misses the path marked out for him by all his past development. In order to progress, the higher vertebrate had to subordinate everything to mental development. In order to become human it had to develop the rational intelligence. In order to become higher man, present man must subordinate everything to moral development. This is the great law of animal and human development clearly revealed in the sequence of physical and psychical functions.”W. E. Gladstone in S. S. Times, April 26, 1890, calls the Mosaic days“chapters in the history of creation.”He objects to calling them epochs or periods, because they are not of equal length, and they sometimes overlap. But he defends the general correspondence of the Mosaic narrative with the latest conclusions of science, and remarks:“Any man whose labor and duty for several scores of years has included as their central point the study of the means of making himself intelligible to the mass of men, is in a far better position to judge what would be the forms and methods of speech proper for the Mosaic writer to adopt, than the most perfect Hebraist as such, or the most consummate votary of physical science as such.”On the whole subject, see Guyot, Creation; Review of Guyot, in N. Eng., July, 1884:591-594; Tayler Lewis, Six Days of Creation; Thompson, Man in Genesis and in Geology; Agassiz, in Atlantic Monthly, Jan. 1874; Dawson, Story of the Earth and Man, 82, and in Expositor, Apl. 1886; LeConte, Science and Religion, 264; Hill, in Bib. Sac., April, 1875; Peirce, Ideality in the Physical Sciences, 38-72; Boardman, The Creative Week;[pg 397]Godet, Bib. Studies of O. T., 65-138; Bell, in Nature, Nov. 24 and Dec. 1, 1882; W. E. Gladstone, in Nineteenth Century, Nov. 1885:685-707, Jan. 1886:1, 176; reply by Huxley, in Nineteenth Century, Dec. 1885, and Feb. 1886; Schmid, Theories of Darwin; Bartlett, Sources of History in the Pentateuch, 1-35; Cotterill, Does Science Aid Faith in Regard to Creation? Cox, Miracles, 1-39—chapter 1, on the Original Miracle—that of Creation; Zöckler, Theologie und Naturwissenschaft, and Urgeschichte, 1-77; Reusch, Bib. Schöpfungsgeschichte. On difficulties of the nebular hypothesis, see Stallo, Modern Physics, 277-293.
IV. The Mosaic Account of Creation.1. Its twofold nature,—as uniting the ideas of creation and of development.(a) Creation is asserted.—The Mosaic narrative avoids the error of making the universe eternal or the result of an eternal process. The cosmogony of Genesis, unlike the cosmogonies of the heathen, is prefaced by the originating act of God, and is supplemented by successive manifestations of creative power in the introduction of brute and of human life.All nature-worship, whether it take the form of ancient polytheism or modern materialism, looks upon the universe only as a birth or growth. This view has a basis of truth, inasmuch as it regards natural forces as having a real existence. It is false in regarding these forces as needing no originator or upholder. Hesiod taught that in the beginning was formless matter. Genesis does not begin thus. God is not a demiurge, working on eternal matter. God antedates matter. He is the creator of matter at the first (Gen. 1:1—bara) and he subsequently created animal life (Gen. 1:21—“and God created”—bara) and the life of man (Gen. 1:27—“and God create man”—baraagain).Many statements of the doctrine of evolution err by regarding it as an eternal or self-originated process. But the process requires an originator, and the forces require an upholder. Each forward step implies increment of energy, and progress toward a rational end implies intelligence and foresight in the governing power. Schurman says well that Darwinism explains thesurvivalof the fittest, but cannot explain thearrivalof the fittest. Schurman, Agnosticism and Religion, 34—“A primitive chaos of star-dust which held in its womb not only the cosmos that fills space, not only the living creatures that teem upon it, but also the intellect that interprets it, the will that confronts it, and the conscience that transfigures it, must as certainly have God at the centre, as a universe mechanically arranged and periodically adjusted must have him at the circumference.... There is no real antagonism between creation and evolution. 59—Natural causation is the expression of a supernatural Mind in nature, and man—a being at once of sensibility and of rational and moral self-activity—is a signal and ever-present example of the interfusion of the natural with the supernatural in that part of universal existence nearest and best known to us.”Seebohm, quoted in J. J. Murphy, Nat. Selection and Spir. Freedom, 76—“When we admit that Darwin's argument in favor of the theory of evolution proves its truth, we doubt whether natural selection can be in any sense thecauseof the origin of species. It has probably played an important part in the history of evolution; its rôle has been that of increasing the rapidity with which the process of development has proceeded. Of itself it has probably been powerless to originate a species; the machinery by which species have been evolved has been completely independent of natural selection[pg 392]and could have produced all the results which we call the evolution of species without its aid; though the process would have been slow had there been no struggle of life to increase its pace.”New World, June, 1896:237-262, art. by Howison on the Limits of Evolution, finds limits in (1) the noumenal Reality; (2) the break between the organic and the inorganic; (3) break between physiological and logical genesis; (4) inability to explain the great fact on which its own movement rests; (5) thea prioriself-consciousness which is the essential being and true person of the mind.Evolution, according to Herbert Spencer, is“an integration of matter and concomitant dissipation of motion, during which the matter passes from an indefinite incoherent homogeneity to a definite coherent heterogeneity, and during which the retained motion goes through a parallel transformation.”D. W. Simon criticizes this definition as defective“because (1) it omits all mention both of energy and its differentiations; and (2) because it introduces into the definition of the process one of the phenomena thereof, namely, motion. As a matter of fact, both energy or force, and law, are subsequently and illicitly introduced as distinct factors of the process; they ought therefore to have found recognition in the definition or description.”Mark Hopkins, Life, 189—“God: what need of him? Have we not force, uniform force, and do not all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation, if it ever had a beginning? Have we not the τὸ πᾶν, the universal All, the Soul of the universe, working itself up from unconsciousness through molecules and maggots and mice and marmots and monkeys to its highest culmination in man?”(b) Development is recognized.—The Mosaic account represents the present order of things as the result, not simply of original creation, but also of subsequent arrangement and development. A fashioning of inorganic materials is described, and also a use of these materials in providing the conditions of organized existence. Life is described as reproducing itself, after its first introduction, according to its own laws and by virtue of its own inner energy.Martensen wrongly asserts that“Judaism represented the world exclusively ascreatura, notnatura; as κτίσις, not φύσις.”This is not true. Creation is represented as the bringing forth, not of something dead, but of something living and capable of self-development. Creation lays the foundation for cosmogony. Not only is there a fashioning and arrangement of the material which the original creative act has brought into being (see Gen. 1:2, 4, 6, 7, 9, 16, 17; 2:2, 6, 7, 8—Spirit brooding; dividing light from darkness, and waters from waters; dry land appearing; setting apart of sun, moon, and stars; mist watering; forming man's body; planting garden) but there is also an imparting and using of the productive powers of the things and beings created (Gen. 1:12, 22, 24, 28—earth brought forth grass; trees yielding fruit whose seed was in itself; earth brought forth the living creatures; man commanded to be fruitful and multiply).The tendency at present among men of science is to regard the whole history of life upon the planet as the result of evolution, thus excluding creation, both at the beginning of the history and along its course. On the progress from the Orohippus, the lowest member of the equine series, an animal with four toes, to Anchitherium with three, then to Hipparion, and finally to our common horse, see Huxley, in Nature for May 11, 1873:33, 34. He argues that, if a complicated animal like the horse has arisen by gradual modification of a lower and less specialized form, there is no reason to think that other animals have arisen in a different way. Clarence King, Address at Yale College, 1877, regards American geology as teaching the doctrine of sudden yet natural modification of species.“When catastrophic change burst in upon the ages of uniformity and sounded in the ear of every living thing the words:‘Change or die!’plasticity became the sole principle of action.”Nature proceeded then by leaps, and corresponding to the leaps of geology we find leaps of biology.We grant the probability that the great majority of what we call species were produced in some such ways. If science should render it certain that all the present species of living creatures were derived by natural descent from a few original germs, and that these germs were themselves an evolution of inorganic forces and materials, we should not therefore regard the Mosaic account as proved untrue. We should only be required to revise our interpretation of the wordbarainGen. 1:21, 27, and to give it there the meaning of mediate creation, or creation by law. Such a meaning might almost seem to be favored byGen. 1:11—“let the earth put forth grass”;20—“let the waters bring forth abundantly[pg 393]the moving creature that hath life”;2:7—“the Lord God formed man of the dust”;9—“out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree”;cf.Mark 4:28—αὐτομάτη ἣ γή καρποφορεῖ—“the earth brings forth fruit automatically.”Goethe, Sprüche in Reimen:“Was wär ein Gott der nur von aussen stiesse, Im Kreis das All am Finger laufen liesse? Ihm ziemt's die Welt im Innern zu bewegen, Sich in Natur, Natur in sich zu hegen, So dass, was in Ihm lebt und webt und ist, Nie seine Kraft, nie seinen Geist vermisst”—“No, such a God my worship may not win, Who lets the world about his finger spin, A thing eternal; God must dwell within.”All the growth of a tree takes place in from four to six weeks in May, June and July. The addition of woody fibre between the bark and the trunk results, not by impartation into it of a new force from without, but by the awakening of the life within. Environment changes and growth begins. We may even speak of an immanent transcendence of God—an unexhausted vitality which at times makes great movements forward. This is what the ancients were trying to express when they said that trees were inhabited by dryads and so groaned and bled when wounded. God's life is in all. In evolution we cannot say, with LeConte, that the higher form of energy is“derived from the lower.”Rather let us say that both the higher and the lower are constantly dependent for their being on the will of God. The lower is only God's preparation for his higher self-manifestation; see Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 165, 166.Even Haeckel, Hist. Creation, 1:38, can say that in the Mosaic narrative“two great and fundamental ideas meet us—the idea of separation or differentiation, and the idea of progressive development or perfecting. We can bestow our just and sincere admiration on the Jewish lawgiver's grand insight into nature, and his simple and natural hypothesis of creation, without discovering in it a divine revelation.”Henry Drummond, whose first book, Natural Law in the Spiritual World, he himself in his later days regretted as tending in a deterministic and materialistic direction, came to believe rather in“spiritual law in the natural world.”His Ascent of Man regards evolution and law as only the methods of a present Deity. Darwinism seemed at first to show that the past history of life upon the planet was a history of heartless and cruel slaughter. The survival of the fittest had for its obverse side the destruction of myriads. Nature was“red in tooth and claw with ravine.”But further thought has shown that this gloomy view results from a partial induction of facts. Palæontological life was not only a struggle for life, but a struggle for the life of others. The beginnings of altruism are to be seen in the instinct of reproduction and in the care of offspring. In every lion's den and tiger's lair, in every mother-eagle's feeding of her young, there is a self-sacrifice which faintly shadows forth man's subordination of personal interests to the interests of others.Dr. George Harris, in his Moral Evolution, has added to Drummond's doctrine the further consideration that the struggle for one's own life has its moral side as well as the struggle for the life of others. The instinct of self-preservation is the beginning of right, righteousness, justice and law upon earth. Every creature owes it to God to preserve its own being. So we can find an adumbration of morality even in the predatory and internecine warfare of the geologic ages. The immanent God was even then preparing the way for the rights, the dignity, the freedom of humanity. B. P. Bowne, in the Independent, April 19, 1900—“The Copernican system made men dizzy for a time, and they held on to the Ptolemaic system to escape vertigo. In like manner the conception of God, as revealing himself in a great historic movement and process, in the consciences and lives of holy men, in the unfolding life of the church, makes dizzy the believer in a dictated book, and he longs for some fixed word that shall be sure and stedfast.”God is not limited to creating from without: he can also create from within; and development is as much a part of creation as is the origination of the elements. For further discussion of man's origin, see section on Man a Creation of God, in our treatment of Anthropology.2. Its proper interpretation.We adopt neither (a) the allegorical, or mythical, (b) the hyperliteral, nor (c) the hyperscientific interpretation of the Mosaic narrative; but rather (d) the pictorial-summary interpretation,—which holds that the account is a rough sketch of the history of creation, true in all its essential features, but presented in a graphic form suited to the common mind and to earlier as well as to later ages. While conveying to primitive man as accurate an idea of God's work as man was able to comprehend, the revelation[pg 394]was yet given in pregnant language, so that it could expand to all the ascertained results of subsequent physical research. This general correspondence of the narrative with the teachings of science, and its power to adapt itself to every advance in human knowledge, differences it from every other cosmogony current among men.(a) Theallegorical, ormythical interpretation, represents the Mosaic account as embodying, like the Indian and Greek cosmogonies, the poetic speculations of an early race as to the origin of the present system. We object to this interpretation upon the ground that the narrative of creation is inseparably connected with the succeeding history, and is therefore most naturally regarded as itself historical. This connection of the narrative of creation with the subsequent history, moreover, prevents us from believing it to be the description of a vision granted to Moses. It is more probably the record of an original revelation to the first man, handed down to Moses' time, and used by Moses as a proper introduction to his history.We object also to the view of some higher critics that the book of Genesis contains two inconsistent stories. Marcus Dods, Book of Genesis, 2—“The compiler of this book ... lays side by side two accounts of man's creation which no ingenuity can reconcile.”Charles A. Briggs:“The doctrine of creation in Genesis 1 is altogether different from that taught in Genesis 2.”W. N. Clarke, Christian Theology, 199-201—“It has been commonly assumed that the two are parallel, and tell one and the same story; but examination shows that this is not the case.... We have here the record of a tradition, rather than a revelation.... It cannot be taken as literal history, and it does not tell by divine authority how man was created.”To these utterances we reply that the two accounts are not inconsistent but complementary, the first chapter of Genesis describing man's creation as the crown of God's general work, the second describing man's creation with greater particularity as the beginning of human history.Canon Rawlinson, in Aids to Faith, 275, compares the Mosaic account with the cosmogony of Berosus, the Chaldean. Pfleiderer, Philos. of Religion, 1:267-272, gives an account of heathen theories of the origin of the universe. Anaxagoras was the first who represented the chaotic first matter as formed through the ordering understanding (νοῦς) of God, and Aristotle for that reason called him“the first sober one among many drunken.”Schurman, Belief in God, 138—“In these cosmogonies the world and the gods grow up together; cosmogony is, at the same time, theogony.”Dr. E. G. Robinson:“The Bible writers believed and intended to state that the world was made in three literal days. But, on the principle that God may have meant more than they did, the doctrine of periods may not be inconsistent with their account.”For comparison of the Biblical with heathen cosmogonies, see Blackie in Theol. Eclectic, 1:77-87; Guyot, Creation, 58-63; Pope, Theology, 1:401, 402; Bible Commentary, 1:36, 48; McIlvaine, Wisdom of Holy Scripture, 1-54; J. F. Clarke, Ten Great Religions, 2:193-221. For the theory of“prophetic vision,”see Kurtz, Hist. of Old Covenant, Introd., i-xxxvii, civ-cxxx; and Hugh Miller, Testimony of the Rocks, 179-210; Hastings, Dict. Bible, art.: Cosmogony; Sayce, Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia, 372-397.(b) Thehyperliteral interpretationwould withdraw the narrative from all comparison with the conclusions of science, by putting the ages of geological history between the first and second verses ofGen. 1, and by making the remainder of the chapter an account of the fitting up of the earth, or of some limited portion of it, in six days of twenty-four hours each. Among the advocates of this view, now generally discarded, are Chalmers, Natural Theology, Works, 1:228-258, and John Pye Smith, Mosaic Account of Creation, and Scripture and Geology. To this view we object that there is no indication, in the Mosaic narrative, of so vast an interval between the first and the second verses; that there is no indication, in the geological history, of any such break between the ages of preparation and the present time (see Hugh Miller, Testimony of the Rocks, 141-178); and that there are indications in the Mosaic record itself that the word“day”is not used in its literal sense; while the other Scriptures unquestionably employ it to designate a period of indefinite duration (Gen. 1:5—“God called the light Day”—a day before there was a sun;8—“there was evening and there was morning, a second day”;2:2—God“rested on the seventh day”;cf.Heb. 4:3-10—where God's day of rest seems to continue, and his people are exhorted to enter into it;Gen. 2:4—“the day that Jehovah made earth and heaven”—“day”here covers all the seven days;cf.Is. 2:12—“a day of Jehovah of hosts”;Zech. 14:7—“it shall be one day which is known unto Jehovah; not day, and not night”;2 Pet. 3:8—“one day is with the Lord as[pg 395]a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day”). Guyot, Creation, 34, objects also to this interpretation, that the narrative purports to give a history of the making of the heavens as well as of the earth (Gen. 2:4—“these are the generations of the heaven and of the earth”), whereas this interpretation confines the history to the earth. On the meaning of the word“day,”as a period of indefinite duration, see Dana, Manual of Geology, 744; LeConte, Religion and Science, 262.(c) Thehyperscientific interpretationwould find in the narrative a minute and precise correspondence with the geological record. This is not to be expected, since it is foreign to the purpose of revelation to teach science. Although a general concord between the Mosaic and geological histories may be pointed out, it is a needless embarrassment to compel ourselves to find in every detail of the former an accurate statement of some scientific fact. Far more probable we hold to be(d) Thepictorial-summary interpretation. Before explaining this in detail, we would premise that we do not hold this or any future scheme of reconciling Genesis and geology to be a finality. Such a settlement of all the questions involved would presuppose not only a perfected science of the physical universe, but also a perfected science of hermeneutics. It is enough if we can offer tentative solutions which represent the present state of thought upon the subject. Remembering, then, that any such scheme of reconciliation may speedily be outgrown without prejudice to the truth of the Scripture narrative, we present the following as an approximate account of the coincidences between the Mosaic and the geological records. The scheme here given is a combination of the conclusions of Dana and Guyot, and assumes the substantial truth of the nebular hypothesis. It is interesting to observe that Augustine, who knew nothing of modern science, should have reached, by simple study of the text, some of the same results. See his Confessions, 12:8—“First God created a chaotic matter, which wasnexttonothing. This chaotic matter was made from nothing, before all days. Then this chaotic, amorphous matter was subsequently arranged, in the succeeding six days”; De Genes. ad Lit., 4:27—“The length of these days is not to be determined by the length of our week-days. There is a series in both cases, and that is all.”We proceed now to the scheme:1. The earth, if originally in the condition of a gaseous fluid, must have been void and formless as described inGenesis 1:2. Here the earth is not yet separated from the condensing nebula, and its fluid condition is indicated by the term“waters.”2. The beginning of activity in matter would manifest itself by the production of light, since light is a resultant of molecular activity. This corresponds to the statement inverse 3. As the result of condensation, the nebula becomes luminous, and this process from darkness to light is described as follows:“there was evening and there was morning, one day.”Here we have a day without a sun—a feature in the narrative quite consistent with two facts of science: first, that the nebula would naturally be self-luminous, and, secondly, that the earth proper, which reached its present form before the sun, would, when it was thrown off, be itself a self-luminous and molten mass. The day was therefore continuous—day without night.3. The development of the earth into an independent sphere and its separation from the fluid around it answers to the dividing of“the waters under the firmament from the waters above,”inverse 7. Here the word“waters”is used to designate the“primordial cosmic material”(Guyot, Creation, 35-37), or the molten mass of earth and sun united, from which the earth is thrown off. The term“waters”is the best which the Hebrew language affords to express this idea of a fluid mass.Ps. 148seems to have this meaning, where it speaks of the“waters that are above the heavens”(verse 4)—waters which are distinguished from the“deeps”below (verse 7), and the“vapor”above (verse 8).4. The production of the earth's physical features by the partial condensation of the vapors which enveloped the igneous sphere, and by the consequent outlining of the continents and oceans, is next described inverse 9as the gathering of the waters into one place and the appearing of the dry land.5. The expression of the idea of life in the lowest plants, since it was in type and effect the creation of the vegetable kingdom, is next described inverse 11as a bringing into existence of the characteristic forms of that kingdom. This precedes all mention of animal life, since the vegetable kingdom is the natural basis of the animal. If it be said that our earliest fossils are animal, we reply that the earliest vegetable forms, thealgæ, were easily dissolved, and might as easily disappear; that graphite and bog-iron ore, appearing lower down than any animal remains, are the result of preceding vegetation; that animal forms, whenever and wherever existing, must subsist upon and presuppose the vegetable. The Eozoön is of necessity preceded by the Eophyte. If it[pg 396]be said that fruit-trees could not have been created on the third day, we reply that since the creation of the vegetable kingdom was to be described at one stroke and no mention of it was to be made subsequently, this is the proper place to introduce it and to mention its main characteristic forms. See Bible Commentary, 1:36; LeConte, Elements of Geology, 136, 285.6. The vapors which have hitherto shrouded the planet are now cleared away as preliminary to the introduction of life in its higher animal forms. The consequent appearance of solar light is described inverses 16and17as a making of the sun, moon, and stars, and a giving of them as luminaries to the earth. CompareGen. 9:13—“I do set my bow in the cloud.”As the rainbow had existed in nature before, but was now appointed to serve a peculiar purpose, so in the record of creation sun, moon and stars, which existed before, were appointed as visible lights for the earth,—and that for the reason that the earth was no longer self-luminous, and the light of the sun struggling through the earth's encompassing clouds was not sufficient for the higher forms of life which were to come.7. The exhibition of the four grand types of the animal kingdom (radiate, molluscan, articulate, vertebrate), which characterizes the next stage of geological progress, is represented inverses 20and21as a creation of the lower animals—those that swarm in the waters, and the creeping and flying species of the land. Huxley, in his American Addresses, objects to this assigning of the origin of birds to the fifth day, and declares that terrestrial animals exist in lower strata than any form of bird,—birds appearing only in the Oölitic, or New Red Sandstone. But we reply that the fifth day is devoted to sea-productions, while land-productions belong to the sixth. Birds, according to the latest science, are sea-productions, not land-productions. They originated from Saurians, and were, at the first, flying lizards. There being but one mention of sea-productions, all these, birds included, are crowded into the fifth day. Thus Genesis anticipates the latest science. On the ancestry of birds, see Pop. Science Monthly, March, 1884:606; Baptist Magazine, 1877:505.8. The introduction of mammals—viviparous species, which are eminent above all other vertebrates for a quality prophetic of a high moral purpose, that of suckling their young—is indicated inverses 24and25by the creation, on the sixth day, of cattle and beasts of prey.9. Man, the first being of moral and intellectual qualities, and the first in whom the unity of the great design has full expression, forms in both the Mosaic and geologic record the last step of progress in creation (seeverses 26-31). With Prof. Dana, we may say that“in this succession we observe not merely an order of events like that deduced from science; there is a system in the arrangement, and a far-reaching prophecy, to which philosophy could not have attained, however instructed.”See Dana, Manual of Geology, 741-746, and Bib. Sac., April, 1885:201-224. Richard Owen:“Man from the beginning of organisms was ideally present upon the earth”; see Owen, Anatomy of Vertebrates, 3:796; Louis Agassiz:“Man is the purpose toward which the whole animal creation tends from the first appearance of the first palæozoic fish.”Prof. John M. Taylor:“Man is not merely a mortal but a moral being. If he sinks below this plane of life he misses the path marked out for him by all his past development. In order to progress, the higher vertebrate had to subordinate everything to mental development. In order to become human it had to develop the rational intelligence. In order to become higher man, present man must subordinate everything to moral development. This is the great law of animal and human development clearly revealed in the sequence of physical and psychical functions.”W. E. Gladstone in S. S. Times, April 26, 1890, calls the Mosaic days“chapters in the history of creation.”He objects to calling them epochs or periods, because they are not of equal length, and they sometimes overlap. But he defends the general correspondence of the Mosaic narrative with the latest conclusions of science, and remarks:“Any man whose labor and duty for several scores of years has included as their central point the study of the means of making himself intelligible to the mass of men, is in a far better position to judge what would be the forms and methods of speech proper for the Mosaic writer to adopt, than the most perfect Hebraist as such, or the most consummate votary of physical science as such.”On the whole subject, see Guyot, Creation; Review of Guyot, in N. Eng., July, 1884:591-594; Tayler Lewis, Six Days of Creation; Thompson, Man in Genesis and in Geology; Agassiz, in Atlantic Monthly, Jan. 1874; Dawson, Story of the Earth and Man, 82, and in Expositor, Apl. 1886; LeConte, Science and Religion, 264; Hill, in Bib. Sac., April, 1875; Peirce, Ideality in the Physical Sciences, 38-72; Boardman, The Creative Week;[pg 397]Godet, Bib. Studies of O. T., 65-138; Bell, in Nature, Nov. 24 and Dec. 1, 1882; W. E. Gladstone, in Nineteenth Century, Nov. 1885:685-707, Jan. 1886:1, 176; reply by Huxley, in Nineteenth Century, Dec. 1885, and Feb. 1886; Schmid, Theories of Darwin; Bartlett, Sources of History in the Pentateuch, 1-35; Cotterill, Does Science Aid Faith in Regard to Creation? Cox, Miracles, 1-39—chapter 1, on the Original Miracle—that of Creation; Zöckler, Theologie und Naturwissenschaft, and Urgeschichte, 1-77; Reusch, Bib. Schöpfungsgeschichte. On difficulties of the nebular hypothesis, see Stallo, Modern Physics, 277-293.
IV. The Mosaic Account of Creation.1. Its twofold nature,—as uniting the ideas of creation and of development.(a) Creation is asserted.—The Mosaic narrative avoids the error of making the universe eternal or the result of an eternal process. The cosmogony of Genesis, unlike the cosmogonies of the heathen, is prefaced by the originating act of God, and is supplemented by successive manifestations of creative power in the introduction of brute and of human life.All nature-worship, whether it take the form of ancient polytheism or modern materialism, looks upon the universe only as a birth or growth. This view has a basis of truth, inasmuch as it regards natural forces as having a real existence. It is false in regarding these forces as needing no originator or upholder. Hesiod taught that in the beginning was formless matter. Genesis does not begin thus. God is not a demiurge, working on eternal matter. God antedates matter. He is the creator of matter at the first (Gen. 1:1—bara) and he subsequently created animal life (Gen. 1:21—“and God created”—bara) and the life of man (Gen. 1:27—“and God create man”—baraagain).Many statements of the doctrine of evolution err by regarding it as an eternal or self-originated process. But the process requires an originator, and the forces require an upholder. Each forward step implies increment of energy, and progress toward a rational end implies intelligence and foresight in the governing power. Schurman says well that Darwinism explains thesurvivalof the fittest, but cannot explain thearrivalof the fittest. Schurman, Agnosticism and Religion, 34—“A primitive chaos of star-dust which held in its womb not only the cosmos that fills space, not only the living creatures that teem upon it, but also the intellect that interprets it, the will that confronts it, and the conscience that transfigures it, must as certainly have God at the centre, as a universe mechanically arranged and periodically adjusted must have him at the circumference.... There is no real antagonism between creation and evolution. 59—Natural causation is the expression of a supernatural Mind in nature, and man—a being at once of sensibility and of rational and moral self-activity—is a signal and ever-present example of the interfusion of the natural with the supernatural in that part of universal existence nearest and best known to us.”Seebohm, quoted in J. J. Murphy, Nat. Selection and Spir. Freedom, 76—“When we admit that Darwin's argument in favor of the theory of evolution proves its truth, we doubt whether natural selection can be in any sense thecauseof the origin of species. It has probably played an important part in the history of evolution; its rôle has been that of increasing the rapidity with which the process of development has proceeded. Of itself it has probably been powerless to originate a species; the machinery by which species have been evolved has been completely independent of natural selection[pg 392]and could have produced all the results which we call the evolution of species without its aid; though the process would have been slow had there been no struggle of life to increase its pace.”New World, June, 1896:237-262, art. by Howison on the Limits of Evolution, finds limits in (1) the noumenal Reality; (2) the break between the organic and the inorganic; (3) break between physiological and logical genesis; (4) inability to explain the great fact on which its own movement rests; (5) thea prioriself-consciousness which is the essential being and true person of the mind.Evolution, according to Herbert Spencer, is“an integration of matter and concomitant dissipation of motion, during which the matter passes from an indefinite incoherent homogeneity to a definite coherent heterogeneity, and during which the retained motion goes through a parallel transformation.”D. W. Simon criticizes this definition as defective“because (1) it omits all mention both of energy and its differentiations; and (2) because it introduces into the definition of the process one of the phenomena thereof, namely, motion. As a matter of fact, both energy or force, and law, are subsequently and illicitly introduced as distinct factors of the process; they ought therefore to have found recognition in the definition or description.”Mark Hopkins, Life, 189—“God: what need of him? Have we not force, uniform force, and do not all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation, if it ever had a beginning? Have we not the τὸ πᾶν, the universal All, the Soul of the universe, working itself up from unconsciousness through molecules and maggots and mice and marmots and monkeys to its highest culmination in man?”(b) Development is recognized.—The Mosaic account represents the present order of things as the result, not simply of original creation, but also of subsequent arrangement and development. A fashioning of inorganic materials is described, and also a use of these materials in providing the conditions of organized existence. Life is described as reproducing itself, after its first introduction, according to its own laws and by virtue of its own inner energy.Martensen wrongly asserts that“Judaism represented the world exclusively ascreatura, notnatura; as κτίσις, not φύσις.”This is not true. Creation is represented as the bringing forth, not of something dead, but of something living and capable of self-development. Creation lays the foundation for cosmogony. Not only is there a fashioning and arrangement of the material which the original creative act has brought into being (see Gen. 1:2, 4, 6, 7, 9, 16, 17; 2:2, 6, 7, 8—Spirit brooding; dividing light from darkness, and waters from waters; dry land appearing; setting apart of sun, moon, and stars; mist watering; forming man's body; planting garden) but there is also an imparting and using of the productive powers of the things and beings created (Gen. 1:12, 22, 24, 28—earth brought forth grass; trees yielding fruit whose seed was in itself; earth brought forth the living creatures; man commanded to be fruitful and multiply).The tendency at present among men of science is to regard the whole history of life upon the planet as the result of evolution, thus excluding creation, both at the beginning of the history and along its course. On the progress from the Orohippus, the lowest member of the equine series, an animal with four toes, to Anchitherium with three, then to Hipparion, and finally to our common horse, see Huxley, in Nature for May 11, 1873:33, 34. He argues that, if a complicated animal like the horse has arisen by gradual modification of a lower and less specialized form, there is no reason to think that other animals have arisen in a different way. Clarence King, Address at Yale College, 1877, regards American geology as teaching the doctrine of sudden yet natural modification of species.“When catastrophic change burst in upon the ages of uniformity and sounded in the ear of every living thing the words:‘Change or die!’plasticity became the sole principle of action.”Nature proceeded then by leaps, and corresponding to the leaps of geology we find leaps of biology.We grant the probability that the great majority of what we call species were produced in some such ways. If science should render it certain that all the present species of living creatures were derived by natural descent from a few original germs, and that these germs were themselves an evolution of inorganic forces and materials, we should not therefore regard the Mosaic account as proved untrue. We should only be required to revise our interpretation of the wordbarainGen. 1:21, 27, and to give it there the meaning of mediate creation, or creation by law. Such a meaning might almost seem to be favored byGen. 1:11—“let the earth put forth grass”;20—“let the waters bring forth abundantly[pg 393]the moving creature that hath life”;2:7—“the Lord God formed man of the dust”;9—“out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree”;cf.Mark 4:28—αὐτομάτη ἣ γή καρποφορεῖ—“the earth brings forth fruit automatically.”Goethe, Sprüche in Reimen:“Was wär ein Gott der nur von aussen stiesse, Im Kreis das All am Finger laufen liesse? Ihm ziemt's die Welt im Innern zu bewegen, Sich in Natur, Natur in sich zu hegen, So dass, was in Ihm lebt und webt und ist, Nie seine Kraft, nie seinen Geist vermisst”—“No, such a God my worship may not win, Who lets the world about his finger spin, A thing eternal; God must dwell within.”All the growth of a tree takes place in from four to six weeks in May, June and July. The addition of woody fibre between the bark and the trunk results, not by impartation into it of a new force from without, but by the awakening of the life within. Environment changes and growth begins. We may even speak of an immanent transcendence of God—an unexhausted vitality which at times makes great movements forward. This is what the ancients were trying to express when they said that trees were inhabited by dryads and so groaned and bled when wounded. God's life is in all. In evolution we cannot say, with LeConte, that the higher form of energy is“derived from the lower.”Rather let us say that both the higher and the lower are constantly dependent for their being on the will of God. The lower is only God's preparation for his higher self-manifestation; see Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 165, 166.Even Haeckel, Hist. Creation, 1:38, can say that in the Mosaic narrative“two great and fundamental ideas meet us—the idea of separation or differentiation, and the idea of progressive development or perfecting. We can bestow our just and sincere admiration on the Jewish lawgiver's grand insight into nature, and his simple and natural hypothesis of creation, without discovering in it a divine revelation.”Henry Drummond, whose first book, Natural Law in the Spiritual World, he himself in his later days regretted as tending in a deterministic and materialistic direction, came to believe rather in“spiritual law in the natural world.”His Ascent of Man regards evolution and law as only the methods of a present Deity. Darwinism seemed at first to show that the past history of life upon the planet was a history of heartless and cruel slaughter. The survival of the fittest had for its obverse side the destruction of myriads. Nature was“red in tooth and claw with ravine.”But further thought has shown that this gloomy view results from a partial induction of facts. Palæontological life was not only a struggle for life, but a struggle for the life of others. The beginnings of altruism are to be seen in the instinct of reproduction and in the care of offspring. In every lion's den and tiger's lair, in every mother-eagle's feeding of her young, there is a self-sacrifice which faintly shadows forth man's subordination of personal interests to the interests of others.Dr. George Harris, in his Moral Evolution, has added to Drummond's doctrine the further consideration that the struggle for one's own life has its moral side as well as the struggle for the life of others. The instinct of self-preservation is the beginning of right, righteousness, justice and law upon earth. Every creature owes it to God to preserve its own being. So we can find an adumbration of morality even in the predatory and internecine warfare of the geologic ages. The immanent God was even then preparing the way for the rights, the dignity, the freedom of humanity. B. P. Bowne, in the Independent, April 19, 1900—“The Copernican system made men dizzy for a time, and they held on to the Ptolemaic system to escape vertigo. In like manner the conception of God, as revealing himself in a great historic movement and process, in the consciences and lives of holy men, in the unfolding life of the church, makes dizzy the believer in a dictated book, and he longs for some fixed word that shall be sure and stedfast.”God is not limited to creating from without: he can also create from within; and development is as much a part of creation as is the origination of the elements. For further discussion of man's origin, see section on Man a Creation of God, in our treatment of Anthropology.2. Its proper interpretation.We adopt neither (a) the allegorical, or mythical, (b) the hyperliteral, nor (c) the hyperscientific interpretation of the Mosaic narrative; but rather (d) the pictorial-summary interpretation,—which holds that the account is a rough sketch of the history of creation, true in all its essential features, but presented in a graphic form suited to the common mind and to earlier as well as to later ages. While conveying to primitive man as accurate an idea of God's work as man was able to comprehend, the revelation[pg 394]was yet given in pregnant language, so that it could expand to all the ascertained results of subsequent physical research. This general correspondence of the narrative with the teachings of science, and its power to adapt itself to every advance in human knowledge, differences it from every other cosmogony current among men.(a) Theallegorical, ormythical interpretation, represents the Mosaic account as embodying, like the Indian and Greek cosmogonies, the poetic speculations of an early race as to the origin of the present system. We object to this interpretation upon the ground that the narrative of creation is inseparably connected with the succeeding history, and is therefore most naturally regarded as itself historical. This connection of the narrative of creation with the subsequent history, moreover, prevents us from believing it to be the description of a vision granted to Moses. It is more probably the record of an original revelation to the first man, handed down to Moses' time, and used by Moses as a proper introduction to his history.We object also to the view of some higher critics that the book of Genesis contains two inconsistent stories. Marcus Dods, Book of Genesis, 2—“The compiler of this book ... lays side by side two accounts of man's creation which no ingenuity can reconcile.”Charles A. Briggs:“The doctrine of creation in Genesis 1 is altogether different from that taught in Genesis 2.”W. N. Clarke, Christian Theology, 199-201—“It has been commonly assumed that the two are parallel, and tell one and the same story; but examination shows that this is not the case.... We have here the record of a tradition, rather than a revelation.... It cannot be taken as literal history, and it does not tell by divine authority how man was created.”To these utterances we reply that the two accounts are not inconsistent but complementary, the first chapter of Genesis describing man's creation as the crown of God's general work, the second describing man's creation with greater particularity as the beginning of human history.Canon Rawlinson, in Aids to Faith, 275, compares the Mosaic account with the cosmogony of Berosus, the Chaldean. Pfleiderer, Philos. of Religion, 1:267-272, gives an account of heathen theories of the origin of the universe. Anaxagoras was the first who represented the chaotic first matter as formed through the ordering understanding (νοῦς) of God, and Aristotle for that reason called him“the first sober one among many drunken.”Schurman, Belief in God, 138—“In these cosmogonies the world and the gods grow up together; cosmogony is, at the same time, theogony.”Dr. E. G. Robinson:“The Bible writers believed and intended to state that the world was made in three literal days. But, on the principle that God may have meant more than they did, the doctrine of periods may not be inconsistent with their account.”For comparison of the Biblical with heathen cosmogonies, see Blackie in Theol. Eclectic, 1:77-87; Guyot, Creation, 58-63; Pope, Theology, 1:401, 402; Bible Commentary, 1:36, 48; McIlvaine, Wisdom of Holy Scripture, 1-54; J. F. Clarke, Ten Great Religions, 2:193-221. For the theory of“prophetic vision,”see Kurtz, Hist. of Old Covenant, Introd., i-xxxvii, civ-cxxx; and Hugh Miller, Testimony of the Rocks, 179-210; Hastings, Dict. Bible, art.: Cosmogony; Sayce, Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia, 372-397.(b) Thehyperliteral interpretationwould withdraw the narrative from all comparison with the conclusions of science, by putting the ages of geological history between the first and second verses ofGen. 1, and by making the remainder of the chapter an account of the fitting up of the earth, or of some limited portion of it, in six days of twenty-four hours each. Among the advocates of this view, now generally discarded, are Chalmers, Natural Theology, Works, 1:228-258, and John Pye Smith, Mosaic Account of Creation, and Scripture and Geology. To this view we object that there is no indication, in the Mosaic narrative, of so vast an interval between the first and the second verses; that there is no indication, in the geological history, of any such break between the ages of preparation and the present time (see Hugh Miller, Testimony of the Rocks, 141-178); and that there are indications in the Mosaic record itself that the word“day”is not used in its literal sense; while the other Scriptures unquestionably employ it to designate a period of indefinite duration (Gen. 1:5—“God called the light Day”—a day before there was a sun;8—“there was evening and there was morning, a second day”;2:2—God“rested on the seventh day”;cf.Heb. 4:3-10—where God's day of rest seems to continue, and his people are exhorted to enter into it;Gen. 2:4—“the day that Jehovah made earth and heaven”—“day”here covers all the seven days;cf.Is. 2:12—“a day of Jehovah of hosts”;Zech. 14:7—“it shall be one day which is known unto Jehovah; not day, and not night”;2 Pet. 3:8—“one day is with the Lord as[pg 395]a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day”). Guyot, Creation, 34, objects also to this interpretation, that the narrative purports to give a history of the making of the heavens as well as of the earth (Gen. 2:4—“these are the generations of the heaven and of the earth”), whereas this interpretation confines the history to the earth. On the meaning of the word“day,”as a period of indefinite duration, see Dana, Manual of Geology, 744; LeConte, Religion and Science, 262.(c) Thehyperscientific interpretationwould find in the narrative a minute and precise correspondence with the geological record. This is not to be expected, since it is foreign to the purpose of revelation to teach science. Although a general concord between the Mosaic and geological histories may be pointed out, it is a needless embarrassment to compel ourselves to find in every detail of the former an accurate statement of some scientific fact. Far more probable we hold to be(d) Thepictorial-summary interpretation. Before explaining this in detail, we would premise that we do not hold this or any future scheme of reconciling Genesis and geology to be a finality. Such a settlement of all the questions involved would presuppose not only a perfected science of the physical universe, but also a perfected science of hermeneutics. It is enough if we can offer tentative solutions which represent the present state of thought upon the subject. Remembering, then, that any such scheme of reconciliation may speedily be outgrown without prejudice to the truth of the Scripture narrative, we present the following as an approximate account of the coincidences between the Mosaic and the geological records. The scheme here given is a combination of the conclusions of Dana and Guyot, and assumes the substantial truth of the nebular hypothesis. It is interesting to observe that Augustine, who knew nothing of modern science, should have reached, by simple study of the text, some of the same results. See his Confessions, 12:8—“First God created a chaotic matter, which wasnexttonothing. This chaotic matter was made from nothing, before all days. Then this chaotic, amorphous matter was subsequently arranged, in the succeeding six days”; De Genes. ad Lit., 4:27—“The length of these days is not to be determined by the length of our week-days. There is a series in both cases, and that is all.”We proceed now to the scheme:1. The earth, if originally in the condition of a gaseous fluid, must have been void and formless as described inGenesis 1:2. Here the earth is not yet separated from the condensing nebula, and its fluid condition is indicated by the term“waters.”2. The beginning of activity in matter would manifest itself by the production of light, since light is a resultant of molecular activity. This corresponds to the statement inverse 3. As the result of condensation, the nebula becomes luminous, and this process from darkness to light is described as follows:“there was evening and there was morning, one day.”Here we have a day without a sun—a feature in the narrative quite consistent with two facts of science: first, that the nebula would naturally be self-luminous, and, secondly, that the earth proper, which reached its present form before the sun, would, when it was thrown off, be itself a self-luminous and molten mass. The day was therefore continuous—day without night.3. The development of the earth into an independent sphere and its separation from the fluid around it answers to the dividing of“the waters under the firmament from the waters above,”inverse 7. Here the word“waters”is used to designate the“primordial cosmic material”(Guyot, Creation, 35-37), or the molten mass of earth and sun united, from which the earth is thrown off. The term“waters”is the best which the Hebrew language affords to express this idea of a fluid mass.Ps. 148seems to have this meaning, where it speaks of the“waters that are above the heavens”(verse 4)—waters which are distinguished from the“deeps”below (verse 7), and the“vapor”above (verse 8).4. The production of the earth's physical features by the partial condensation of the vapors which enveloped the igneous sphere, and by the consequent outlining of the continents and oceans, is next described inverse 9as the gathering of the waters into one place and the appearing of the dry land.5. The expression of the idea of life in the lowest plants, since it was in type and effect the creation of the vegetable kingdom, is next described inverse 11as a bringing into existence of the characteristic forms of that kingdom. This precedes all mention of animal life, since the vegetable kingdom is the natural basis of the animal. If it be said that our earliest fossils are animal, we reply that the earliest vegetable forms, thealgæ, were easily dissolved, and might as easily disappear; that graphite and bog-iron ore, appearing lower down than any animal remains, are the result of preceding vegetation; that animal forms, whenever and wherever existing, must subsist upon and presuppose the vegetable. The Eozoön is of necessity preceded by the Eophyte. If it[pg 396]be said that fruit-trees could not have been created on the third day, we reply that since the creation of the vegetable kingdom was to be described at one stroke and no mention of it was to be made subsequently, this is the proper place to introduce it and to mention its main characteristic forms. See Bible Commentary, 1:36; LeConte, Elements of Geology, 136, 285.6. The vapors which have hitherto shrouded the planet are now cleared away as preliminary to the introduction of life in its higher animal forms. The consequent appearance of solar light is described inverses 16and17as a making of the sun, moon, and stars, and a giving of them as luminaries to the earth. CompareGen. 9:13—“I do set my bow in the cloud.”As the rainbow had existed in nature before, but was now appointed to serve a peculiar purpose, so in the record of creation sun, moon and stars, which existed before, were appointed as visible lights for the earth,—and that for the reason that the earth was no longer self-luminous, and the light of the sun struggling through the earth's encompassing clouds was not sufficient for the higher forms of life which were to come.7. The exhibition of the four grand types of the animal kingdom (radiate, molluscan, articulate, vertebrate), which characterizes the next stage of geological progress, is represented inverses 20and21as a creation of the lower animals—those that swarm in the waters, and the creeping and flying species of the land. Huxley, in his American Addresses, objects to this assigning of the origin of birds to the fifth day, and declares that terrestrial animals exist in lower strata than any form of bird,—birds appearing only in the Oölitic, or New Red Sandstone. But we reply that the fifth day is devoted to sea-productions, while land-productions belong to the sixth. Birds, according to the latest science, are sea-productions, not land-productions. They originated from Saurians, and were, at the first, flying lizards. There being but one mention of sea-productions, all these, birds included, are crowded into the fifth day. Thus Genesis anticipates the latest science. On the ancestry of birds, see Pop. Science Monthly, March, 1884:606; Baptist Magazine, 1877:505.8. The introduction of mammals—viviparous species, which are eminent above all other vertebrates for a quality prophetic of a high moral purpose, that of suckling their young—is indicated inverses 24and25by the creation, on the sixth day, of cattle and beasts of prey.9. Man, the first being of moral and intellectual qualities, and the first in whom the unity of the great design has full expression, forms in both the Mosaic and geologic record the last step of progress in creation (seeverses 26-31). With Prof. Dana, we may say that“in this succession we observe not merely an order of events like that deduced from science; there is a system in the arrangement, and a far-reaching prophecy, to which philosophy could not have attained, however instructed.”See Dana, Manual of Geology, 741-746, and Bib. Sac., April, 1885:201-224. Richard Owen:“Man from the beginning of organisms was ideally present upon the earth”; see Owen, Anatomy of Vertebrates, 3:796; Louis Agassiz:“Man is the purpose toward which the whole animal creation tends from the first appearance of the first palæozoic fish.”Prof. John M. Taylor:“Man is not merely a mortal but a moral being. If he sinks below this plane of life he misses the path marked out for him by all his past development. In order to progress, the higher vertebrate had to subordinate everything to mental development. In order to become human it had to develop the rational intelligence. In order to become higher man, present man must subordinate everything to moral development. This is the great law of animal and human development clearly revealed in the sequence of physical and psychical functions.”W. E. Gladstone in S. S. Times, April 26, 1890, calls the Mosaic days“chapters in the history of creation.”He objects to calling them epochs or periods, because they are not of equal length, and they sometimes overlap. But he defends the general correspondence of the Mosaic narrative with the latest conclusions of science, and remarks:“Any man whose labor and duty for several scores of years has included as their central point the study of the means of making himself intelligible to the mass of men, is in a far better position to judge what would be the forms and methods of speech proper for the Mosaic writer to adopt, than the most perfect Hebraist as such, or the most consummate votary of physical science as such.”On the whole subject, see Guyot, Creation; Review of Guyot, in N. Eng., July, 1884:591-594; Tayler Lewis, Six Days of Creation; Thompson, Man in Genesis and in Geology; Agassiz, in Atlantic Monthly, Jan. 1874; Dawson, Story of the Earth and Man, 82, and in Expositor, Apl. 1886; LeConte, Science and Religion, 264; Hill, in Bib. Sac., April, 1875; Peirce, Ideality in the Physical Sciences, 38-72; Boardman, The Creative Week;[pg 397]Godet, Bib. Studies of O. T., 65-138; Bell, in Nature, Nov. 24 and Dec. 1, 1882; W. E. Gladstone, in Nineteenth Century, Nov. 1885:685-707, Jan. 1886:1, 176; reply by Huxley, in Nineteenth Century, Dec. 1885, and Feb. 1886; Schmid, Theories of Darwin; Bartlett, Sources of History in the Pentateuch, 1-35; Cotterill, Does Science Aid Faith in Regard to Creation? Cox, Miracles, 1-39—chapter 1, on the Original Miracle—that of Creation; Zöckler, Theologie und Naturwissenschaft, and Urgeschichte, 1-77; Reusch, Bib. Schöpfungsgeschichte. On difficulties of the nebular hypothesis, see Stallo, Modern Physics, 277-293.
IV. The Mosaic Account of Creation.1. Its twofold nature,—as uniting the ideas of creation and of development.(a) Creation is asserted.—The Mosaic narrative avoids the error of making the universe eternal or the result of an eternal process. The cosmogony of Genesis, unlike the cosmogonies of the heathen, is prefaced by the originating act of God, and is supplemented by successive manifestations of creative power in the introduction of brute and of human life.All nature-worship, whether it take the form of ancient polytheism or modern materialism, looks upon the universe only as a birth or growth. This view has a basis of truth, inasmuch as it regards natural forces as having a real existence. It is false in regarding these forces as needing no originator or upholder. Hesiod taught that in the beginning was formless matter. Genesis does not begin thus. God is not a demiurge, working on eternal matter. God antedates matter. He is the creator of matter at the first (Gen. 1:1—bara) and he subsequently created animal life (Gen. 1:21—“and God created”—bara) and the life of man (Gen. 1:27—“and God create man”—baraagain).Many statements of the doctrine of evolution err by regarding it as an eternal or self-originated process. But the process requires an originator, and the forces require an upholder. Each forward step implies increment of energy, and progress toward a rational end implies intelligence and foresight in the governing power. Schurman says well that Darwinism explains thesurvivalof the fittest, but cannot explain thearrivalof the fittest. Schurman, Agnosticism and Religion, 34—“A primitive chaos of star-dust which held in its womb not only the cosmos that fills space, not only the living creatures that teem upon it, but also the intellect that interprets it, the will that confronts it, and the conscience that transfigures it, must as certainly have God at the centre, as a universe mechanically arranged and periodically adjusted must have him at the circumference.... There is no real antagonism between creation and evolution. 59—Natural causation is the expression of a supernatural Mind in nature, and man—a being at once of sensibility and of rational and moral self-activity—is a signal and ever-present example of the interfusion of the natural with the supernatural in that part of universal existence nearest and best known to us.”Seebohm, quoted in J. J. Murphy, Nat. Selection and Spir. Freedom, 76—“When we admit that Darwin's argument in favor of the theory of evolution proves its truth, we doubt whether natural selection can be in any sense thecauseof the origin of species. It has probably played an important part in the history of evolution; its rôle has been that of increasing the rapidity with which the process of development has proceeded. Of itself it has probably been powerless to originate a species; the machinery by which species have been evolved has been completely independent of natural selection[pg 392]and could have produced all the results which we call the evolution of species without its aid; though the process would have been slow had there been no struggle of life to increase its pace.”New World, June, 1896:237-262, art. by Howison on the Limits of Evolution, finds limits in (1) the noumenal Reality; (2) the break between the organic and the inorganic; (3) break between physiological and logical genesis; (4) inability to explain the great fact on which its own movement rests; (5) thea prioriself-consciousness which is the essential being and true person of the mind.Evolution, according to Herbert Spencer, is“an integration of matter and concomitant dissipation of motion, during which the matter passes from an indefinite incoherent homogeneity to a definite coherent heterogeneity, and during which the retained motion goes through a parallel transformation.”D. W. Simon criticizes this definition as defective“because (1) it omits all mention both of energy and its differentiations; and (2) because it introduces into the definition of the process one of the phenomena thereof, namely, motion. As a matter of fact, both energy or force, and law, are subsequently and illicitly introduced as distinct factors of the process; they ought therefore to have found recognition in the definition or description.”Mark Hopkins, Life, 189—“God: what need of him? Have we not force, uniform force, and do not all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation, if it ever had a beginning? Have we not the τὸ πᾶν, the universal All, the Soul of the universe, working itself up from unconsciousness through molecules and maggots and mice and marmots and monkeys to its highest culmination in man?”(b) Development is recognized.—The Mosaic account represents the present order of things as the result, not simply of original creation, but also of subsequent arrangement and development. A fashioning of inorganic materials is described, and also a use of these materials in providing the conditions of organized existence. Life is described as reproducing itself, after its first introduction, according to its own laws and by virtue of its own inner energy.Martensen wrongly asserts that“Judaism represented the world exclusively ascreatura, notnatura; as κτίσις, not φύσις.”This is not true. Creation is represented as the bringing forth, not of something dead, but of something living and capable of self-development. Creation lays the foundation for cosmogony. Not only is there a fashioning and arrangement of the material which the original creative act has brought into being (see Gen. 1:2, 4, 6, 7, 9, 16, 17; 2:2, 6, 7, 8—Spirit brooding; dividing light from darkness, and waters from waters; dry land appearing; setting apart of sun, moon, and stars; mist watering; forming man's body; planting garden) but there is also an imparting and using of the productive powers of the things and beings created (Gen. 1:12, 22, 24, 28—earth brought forth grass; trees yielding fruit whose seed was in itself; earth brought forth the living creatures; man commanded to be fruitful and multiply).The tendency at present among men of science is to regard the whole history of life upon the planet as the result of evolution, thus excluding creation, both at the beginning of the history and along its course. On the progress from the Orohippus, the lowest member of the equine series, an animal with four toes, to Anchitherium with three, then to Hipparion, and finally to our common horse, see Huxley, in Nature for May 11, 1873:33, 34. He argues that, if a complicated animal like the horse has arisen by gradual modification of a lower and less specialized form, there is no reason to think that other animals have arisen in a different way. Clarence King, Address at Yale College, 1877, regards American geology as teaching the doctrine of sudden yet natural modification of species.“When catastrophic change burst in upon the ages of uniformity and sounded in the ear of every living thing the words:‘Change or die!’plasticity became the sole principle of action.”Nature proceeded then by leaps, and corresponding to the leaps of geology we find leaps of biology.We grant the probability that the great majority of what we call species were produced in some such ways. If science should render it certain that all the present species of living creatures were derived by natural descent from a few original germs, and that these germs were themselves an evolution of inorganic forces and materials, we should not therefore regard the Mosaic account as proved untrue. We should only be required to revise our interpretation of the wordbarainGen. 1:21, 27, and to give it there the meaning of mediate creation, or creation by law. Such a meaning might almost seem to be favored byGen. 1:11—“let the earth put forth grass”;20—“let the waters bring forth abundantly[pg 393]the moving creature that hath life”;2:7—“the Lord God formed man of the dust”;9—“out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree”;cf.Mark 4:28—αὐτομάτη ἣ γή καρποφορεῖ—“the earth brings forth fruit automatically.”Goethe, Sprüche in Reimen:“Was wär ein Gott der nur von aussen stiesse, Im Kreis das All am Finger laufen liesse? Ihm ziemt's die Welt im Innern zu bewegen, Sich in Natur, Natur in sich zu hegen, So dass, was in Ihm lebt und webt und ist, Nie seine Kraft, nie seinen Geist vermisst”—“No, such a God my worship may not win, Who lets the world about his finger spin, A thing eternal; God must dwell within.”All the growth of a tree takes place in from four to six weeks in May, June and July. The addition of woody fibre between the bark and the trunk results, not by impartation into it of a new force from without, but by the awakening of the life within. Environment changes and growth begins. We may even speak of an immanent transcendence of God—an unexhausted vitality which at times makes great movements forward. This is what the ancients were trying to express when they said that trees were inhabited by dryads and so groaned and bled when wounded. God's life is in all. In evolution we cannot say, with LeConte, that the higher form of energy is“derived from the lower.”Rather let us say that both the higher and the lower are constantly dependent for their being on the will of God. The lower is only God's preparation for his higher self-manifestation; see Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 165, 166.Even Haeckel, Hist. Creation, 1:38, can say that in the Mosaic narrative“two great and fundamental ideas meet us—the idea of separation or differentiation, and the idea of progressive development or perfecting. We can bestow our just and sincere admiration on the Jewish lawgiver's grand insight into nature, and his simple and natural hypothesis of creation, without discovering in it a divine revelation.”Henry Drummond, whose first book, Natural Law in the Spiritual World, he himself in his later days regretted as tending in a deterministic and materialistic direction, came to believe rather in“spiritual law in the natural world.”His Ascent of Man regards evolution and law as only the methods of a present Deity. Darwinism seemed at first to show that the past history of life upon the planet was a history of heartless and cruel slaughter. The survival of the fittest had for its obverse side the destruction of myriads. Nature was“red in tooth and claw with ravine.”But further thought has shown that this gloomy view results from a partial induction of facts. Palæontological life was not only a struggle for life, but a struggle for the life of others. The beginnings of altruism are to be seen in the instinct of reproduction and in the care of offspring. In every lion's den and tiger's lair, in every mother-eagle's feeding of her young, there is a self-sacrifice which faintly shadows forth man's subordination of personal interests to the interests of others.Dr. George Harris, in his Moral Evolution, has added to Drummond's doctrine the further consideration that the struggle for one's own life has its moral side as well as the struggle for the life of others. The instinct of self-preservation is the beginning of right, righteousness, justice and law upon earth. Every creature owes it to God to preserve its own being. So we can find an adumbration of morality even in the predatory and internecine warfare of the geologic ages. The immanent God was even then preparing the way for the rights, the dignity, the freedom of humanity. B. P. Bowne, in the Independent, April 19, 1900—“The Copernican system made men dizzy for a time, and they held on to the Ptolemaic system to escape vertigo. In like manner the conception of God, as revealing himself in a great historic movement and process, in the consciences and lives of holy men, in the unfolding life of the church, makes dizzy the believer in a dictated book, and he longs for some fixed word that shall be sure and stedfast.”God is not limited to creating from without: he can also create from within; and development is as much a part of creation as is the origination of the elements. For further discussion of man's origin, see section on Man a Creation of God, in our treatment of Anthropology.2. Its proper interpretation.We adopt neither (a) the allegorical, or mythical, (b) the hyperliteral, nor (c) the hyperscientific interpretation of the Mosaic narrative; but rather (d) the pictorial-summary interpretation,—which holds that the account is a rough sketch of the history of creation, true in all its essential features, but presented in a graphic form suited to the common mind and to earlier as well as to later ages. While conveying to primitive man as accurate an idea of God's work as man was able to comprehend, the revelation[pg 394]was yet given in pregnant language, so that it could expand to all the ascertained results of subsequent physical research. This general correspondence of the narrative with the teachings of science, and its power to adapt itself to every advance in human knowledge, differences it from every other cosmogony current among men.(a) Theallegorical, ormythical interpretation, represents the Mosaic account as embodying, like the Indian and Greek cosmogonies, the poetic speculations of an early race as to the origin of the present system. We object to this interpretation upon the ground that the narrative of creation is inseparably connected with the succeeding history, and is therefore most naturally regarded as itself historical. This connection of the narrative of creation with the subsequent history, moreover, prevents us from believing it to be the description of a vision granted to Moses. It is more probably the record of an original revelation to the first man, handed down to Moses' time, and used by Moses as a proper introduction to his history.We object also to the view of some higher critics that the book of Genesis contains two inconsistent stories. Marcus Dods, Book of Genesis, 2—“The compiler of this book ... lays side by side two accounts of man's creation which no ingenuity can reconcile.”Charles A. Briggs:“The doctrine of creation in Genesis 1 is altogether different from that taught in Genesis 2.”W. N. Clarke, Christian Theology, 199-201—“It has been commonly assumed that the two are parallel, and tell one and the same story; but examination shows that this is not the case.... We have here the record of a tradition, rather than a revelation.... It cannot be taken as literal history, and it does not tell by divine authority how man was created.”To these utterances we reply that the two accounts are not inconsistent but complementary, the first chapter of Genesis describing man's creation as the crown of God's general work, the second describing man's creation with greater particularity as the beginning of human history.Canon Rawlinson, in Aids to Faith, 275, compares the Mosaic account with the cosmogony of Berosus, the Chaldean. Pfleiderer, Philos. of Religion, 1:267-272, gives an account of heathen theories of the origin of the universe. Anaxagoras was the first who represented the chaotic first matter as formed through the ordering understanding (νοῦς) of God, and Aristotle for that reason called him“the first sober one among many drunken.”Schurman, Belief in God, 138—“In these cosmogonies the world and the gods grow up together; cosmogony is, at the same time, theogony.”Dr. E. G. Robinson:“The Bible writers believed and intended to state that the world was made in three literal days. But, on the principle that God may have meant more than they did, the doctrine of periods may not be inconsistent with their account.”For comparison of the Biblical with heathen cosmogonies, see Blackie in Theol. Eclectic, 1:77-87; Guyot, Creation, 58-63; Pope, Theology, 1:401, 402; Bible Commentary, 1:36, 48; McIlvaine, Wisdom of Holy Scripture, 1-54; J. F. Clarke, Ten Great Religions, 2:193-221. For the theory of“prophetic vision,”see Kurtz, Hist. of Old Covenant, Introd., i-xxxvii, civ-cxxx; and Hugh Miller, Testimony of the Rocks, 179-210; Hastings, Dict. Bible, art.: Cosmogony; Sayce, Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia, 372-397.(b) Thehyperliteral interpretationwould withdraw the narrative from all comparison with the conclusions of science, by putting the ages of geological history between the first and second verses ofGen. 1, and by making the remainder of the chapter an account of the fitting up of the earth, or of some limited portion of it, in six days of twenty-four hours each. Among the advocates of this view, now generally discarded, are Chalmers, Natural Theology, Works, 1:228-258, and John Pye Smith, Mosaic Account of Creation, and Scripture and Geology. To this view we object that there is no indication, in the Mosaic narrative, of so vast an interval between the first and the second verses; that there is no indication, in the geological history, of any such break between the ages of preparation and the present time (see Hugh Miller, Testimony of the Rocks, 141-178); and that there are indications in the Mosaic record itself that the word“day”is not used in its literal sense; while the other Scriptures unquestionably employ it to designate a period of indefinite duration (Gen. 1:5—“God called the light Day”—a day before there was a sun;8—“there was evening and there was morning, a second day”;2:2—God“rested on the seventh day”;cf.Heb. 4:3-10—where God's day of rest seems to continue, and his people are exhorted to enter into it;Gen. 2:4—“the day that Jehovah made earth and heaven”—“day”here covers all the seven days;cf.Is. 2:12—“a day of Jehovah of hosts”;Zech. 14:7—“it shall be one day which is known unto Jehovah; not day, and not night”;2 Pet. 3:8—“one day is with the Lord as[pg 395]a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day”). Guyot, Creation, 34, objects also to this interpretation, that the narrative purports to give a history of the making of the heavens as well as of the earth (Gen. 2:4—“these are the generations of the heaven and of the earth”), whereas this interpretation confines the history to the earth. On the meaning of the word“day,”as a period of indefinite duration, see Dana, Manual of Geology, 744; LeConte, Religion and Science, 262.(c) Thehyperscientific interpretationwould find in the narrative a minute and precise correspondence with the geological record. This is not to be expected, since it is foreign to the purpose of revelation to teach science. Although a general concord between the Mosaic and geological histories may be pointed out, it is a needless embarrassment to compel ourselves to find in every detail of the former an accurate statement of some scientific fact. Far more probable we hold to be(d) Thepictorial-summary interpretation. Before explaining this in detail, we would premise that we do not hold this or any future scheme of reconciling Genesis and geology to be a finality. Such a settlement of all the questions involved would presuppose not only a perfected science of the physical universe, but also a perfected science of hermeneutics. It is enough if we can offer tentative solutions which represent the present state of thought upon the subject. Remembering, then, that any such scheme of reconciliation may speedily be outgrown without prejudice to the truth of the Scripture narrative, we present the following as an approximate account of the coincidences between the Mosaic and the geological records. The scheme here given is a combination of the conclusions of Dana and Guyot, and assumes the substantial truth of the nebular hypothesis. It is interesting to observe that Augustine, who knew nothing of modern science, should have reached, by simple study of the text, some of the same results. See his Confessions, 12:8—“First God created a chaotic matter, which wasnexttonothing. This chaotic matter was made from nothing, before all days. Then this chaotic, amorphous matter was subsequently arranged, in the succeeding six days”; De Genes. ad Lit., 4:27—“The length of these days is not to be determined by the length of our week-days. There is a series in both cases, and that is all.”We proceed now to the scheme:1. The earth, if originally in the condition of a gaseous fluid, must have been void and formless as described inGenesis 1:2. Here the earth is not yet separated from the condensing nebula, and its fluid condition is indicated by the term“waters.”2. The beginning of activity in matter would manifest itself by the production of light, since light is a resultant of molecular activity. This corresponds to the statement inverse 3. As the result of condensation, the nebula becomes luminous, and this process from darkness to light is described as follows:“there was evening and there was morning, one day.”Here we have a day without a sun—a feature in the narrative quite consistent with two facts of science: first, that the nebula would naturally be self-luminous, and, secondly, that the earth proper, which reached its present form before the sun, would, when it was thrown off, be itself a self-luminous and molten mass. The day was therefore continuous—day without night.3. The development of the earth into an independent sphere and its separation from the fluid around it answers to the dividing of“the waters under the firmament from the waters above,”inverse 7. Here the word“waters”is used to designate the“primordial cosmic material”(Guyot, Creation, 35-37), or the molten mass of earth and sun united, from which the earth is thrown off. The term“waters”is the best which the Hebrew language affords to express this idea of a fluid mass.Ps. 148seems to have this meaning, where it speaks of the“waters that are above the heavens”(verse 4)—waters which are distinguished from the“deeps”below (verse 7), and the“vapor”above (verse 8).4. The production of the earth's physical features by the partial condensation of the vapors which enveloped the igneous sphere, and by the consequent outlining of the continents and oceans, is next described inverse 9as the gathering of the waters into one place and the appearing of the dry land.5. The expression of the idea of life in the lowest plants, since it was in type and effect the creation of the vegetable kingdom, is next described inverse 11as a bringing into existence of the characteristic forms of that kingdom. This precedes all mention of animal life, since the vegetable kingdom is the natural basis of the animal. If it be said that our earliest fossils are animal, we reply that the earliest vegetable forms, thealgæ, were easily dissolved, and might as easily disappear; that graphite and bog-iron ore, appearing lower down than any animal remains, are the result of preceding vegetation; that animal forms, whenever and wherever existing, must subsist upon and presuppose the vegetable. The Eozoön is of necessity preceded by the Eophyte. If it[pg 396]be said that fruit-trees could not have been created on the third day, we reply that since the creation of the vegetable kingdom was to be described at one stroke and no mention of it was to be made subsequently, this is the proper place to introduce it and to mention its main characteristic forms. See Bible Commentary, 1:36; LeConte, Elements of Geology, 136, 285.6. The vapors which have hitherto shrouded the planet are now cleared away as preliminary to the introduction of life in its higher animal forms. The consequent appearance of solar light is described inverses 16and17as a making of the sun, moon, and stars, and a giving of them as luminaries to the earth. CompareGen. 9:13—“I do set my bow in the cloud.”As the rainbow had existed in nature before, but was now appointed to serve a peculiar purpose, so in the record of creation sun, moon and stars, which existed before, were appointed as visible lights for the earth,—and that for the reason that the earth was no longer self-luminous, and the light of the sun struggling through the earth's encompassing clouds was not sufficient for the higher forms of life which were to come.7. The exhibition of the four grand types of the animal kingdom (radiate, molluscan, articulate, vertebrate), which characterizes the next stage of geological progress, is represented inverses 20and21as a creation of the lower animals—those that swarm in the waters, and the creeping and flying species of the land. Huxley, in his American Addresses, objects to this assigning of the origin of birds to the fifth day, and declares that terrestrial animals exist in lower strata than any form of bird,—birds appearing only in the Oölitic, or New Red Sandstone. But we reply that the fifth day is devoted to sea-productions, while land-productions belong to the sixth. Birds, according to the latest science, are sea-productions, not land-productions. They originated from Saurians, and were, at the first, flying lizards. There being but one mention of sea-productions, all these, birds included, are crowded into the fifth day. Thus Genesis anticipates the latest science. On the ancestry of birds, see Pop. Science Monthly, March, 1884:606; Baptist Magazine, 1877:505.8. The introduction of mammals—viviparous species, which are eminent above all other vertebrates for a quality prophetic of a high moral purpose, that of suckling their young—is indicated inverses 24and25by the creation, on the sixth day, of cattle and beasts of prey.9. Man, the first being of moral and intellectual qualities, and the first in whom the unity of the great design has full expression, forms in both the Mosaic and geologic record the last step of progress in creation (seeverses 26-31). With Prof. Dana, we may say that“in this succession we observe not merely an order of events like that deduced from science; there is a system in the arrangement, and a far-reaching prophecy, to which philosophy could not have attained, however instructed.”See Dana, Manual of Geology, 741-746, and Bib. Sac., April, 1885:201-224. Richard Owen:“Man from the beginning of organisms was ideally present upon the earth”; see Owen, Anatomy of Vertebrates, 3:796; Louis Agassiz:“Man is the purpose toward which the whole animal creation tends from the first appearance of the first palæozoic fish.”Prof. John M. Taylor:“Man is not merely a mortal but a moral being. If he sinks below this plane of life he misses the path marked out for him by all his past development. In order to progress, the higher vertebrate had to subordinate everything to mental development. In order to become human it had to develop the rational intelligence. In order to become higher man, present man must subordinate everything to moral development. This is the great law of animal and human development clearly revealed in the sequence of physical and psychical functions.”W. E. Gladstone in S. S. Times, April 26, 1890, calls the Mosaic days“chapters in the history of creation.”He objects to calling them epochs or periods, because they are not of equal length, and they sometimes overlap. But he defends the general correspondence of the Mosaic narrative with the latest conclusions of science, and remarks:“Any man whose labor and duty for several scores of years has included as their central point the study of the means of making himself intelligible to the mass of men, is in a far better position to judge what would be the forms and methods of speech proper for the Mosaic writer to adopt, than the most perfect Hebraist as such, or the most consummate votary of physical science as such.”On the whole subject, see Guyot, Creation; Review of Guyot, in N. Eng., July, 1884:591-594; Tayler Lewis, Six Days of Creation; Thompson, Man in Genesis and in Geology; Agassiz, in Atlantic Monthly, Jan. 1874; Dawson, Story of the Earth and Man, 82, and in Expositor, Apl. 1886; LeConte, Science and Religion, 264; Hill, in Bib. Sac., April, 1875; Peirce, Ideality in the Physical Sciences, 38-72; Boardman, The Creative Week;[pg 397]Godet, Bib. Studies of O. T., 65-138; Bell, in Nature, Nov. 24 and Dec. 1, 1882; W. E. Gladstone, in Nineteenth Century, Nov. 1885:685-707, Jan. 1886:1, 176; reply by Huxley, in Nineteenth Century, Dec. 1885, and Feb. 1886; Schmid, Theories of Darwin; Bartlett, Sources of History in the Pentateuch, 1-35; Cotterill, Does Science Aid Faith in Regard to Creation? Cox, Miracles, 1-39—chapter 1, on the Original Miracle—that of Creation; Zöckler, Theologie und Naturwissenschaft, and Urgeschichte, 1-77; Reusch, Bib. Schöpfungsgeschichte. On difficulties of the nebular hypothesis, see Stallo, Modern Physics, 277-293.
IV. The Mosaic Account of Creation.1. Its twofold nature,—as uniting the ideas of creation and of development.(a) Creation is asserted.—The Mosaic narrative avoids the error of making the universe eternal or the result of an eternal process. The cosmogony of Genesis, unlike the cosmogonies of the heathen, is prefaced by the originating act of God, and is supplemented by successive manifestations of creative power in the introduction of brute and of human life.All nature-worship, whether it take the form of ancient polytheism or modern materialism, looks upon the universe only as a birth or growth. This view has a basis of truth, inasmuch as it regards natural forces as having a real existence. It is false in regarding these forces as needing no originator or upholder. Hesiod taught that in the beginning was formless matter. Genesis does not begin thus. God is not a demiurge, working on eternal matter. God antedates matter. He is the creator of matter at the first (Gen. 1:1—bara) and he subsequently created animal life (Gen. 1:21—“and God created”—bara) and the life of man (Gen. 1:27—“and God create man”—baraagain).Many statements of the doctrine of evolution err by regarding it as an eternal or self-originated process. But the process requires an originator, and the forces require an upholder. Each forward step implies increment of energy, and progress toward a rational end implies intelligence and foresight in the governing power. Schurman says well that Darwinism explains thesurvivalof the fittest, but cannot explain thearrivalof the fittest. Schurman, Agnosticism and Religion, 34—“A primitive chaos of star-dust which held in its womb not only the cosmos that fills space, not only the living creatures that teem upon it, but also the intellect that interprets it, the will that confronts it, and the conscience that transfigures it, must as certainly have God at the centre, as a universe mechanically arranged and periodically adjusted must have him at the circumference.... There is no real antagonism between creation and evolution. 59—Natural causation is the expression of a supernatural Mind in nature, and man—a being at once of sensibility and of rational and moral self-activity—is a signal and ever-present example of the interfusion of the natural with the supernatural in that part of universal existence nearest and best known to us.”Seebohm, quoted in J. J. Murphy, Nat. Selection and Spir. Freedom, 76—“When we admit that Darwin's argument in favor of the theory of evolution proves its truth, we doubt whether natural selection can be in any sense thecauseof the origin of species. It has probably played an important part in the history of evolution; its rôle has been that of increasing the rapidity with which the process of development has proceeded. Of itself it has probably been powerless to originate a species; the machinery by which species have been evolved has been completely independent of natural selection[pg 392]and could have produced all the results which we call the evolution of species without its aid; though the process would have been slow had there been no struggle of life to increase its pace.”New World, June, 1896:237-262, art. by Howison on the Limits of Evolution, finds limits in (1) the noumenal Reality; (2) the break between the organic and the inorganic; (3) break between physiological and logical genesis; (4) inability to explain the great fact on which its own movement rests; (5) thea prioriself-consciousness which is the essential being and true person of the mind.Evolution, according to Herbert Spencer, is“an integration of matter and concomitant dissipation of motion, during which the matter passes from an indefinite incoherent homogeneity to a definite coherent heterogeneity, and during which the retained motion goes through a parallel transformation.”D. W. Simon criticizes this definition as defective“because (1) it omits all mention both of energy and its differentiations; and (2) because it introduces into the definition of the process one of the phenomena thereof, namely, motion. As a matter of fact, both energy or force, and law, are subsequently and illicitly introduced as distinct factors of the process; they ought therefore to have found recognition in the definition or description.”Mark Hopkins, Life, 189—“God: what need of him? Have we not force, uniform force, and do not all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation, if it ever had a beginning? Have we not the τὸ πᾶν, the universal All, the Soul of the universe, working itself up from unconsciousness through molecules and maggots and mice and marmots and monkeys to its highest culmination in man?”(b) Development is recognized.—The Mosaic account represents the present order of things as the result, not simply of original creation, but also of subsequent arrangement and development. A fashioning of inorganic materials is described, and also a use of these materials in providing the conditions of organized existence. Life is described as reproducing itself, after its first introduction, according to its own laws and by virtue of its own inner energy.Martensen wrongly asserts that“Judaism represented the world exclusively ascreatura, notnatura; as κτίσις, not φύσις.”This is not true. Creation is represented as the bringing forth, not of something dead, but of something living and capable of self-development. Creation lays the foundation for cosmogony. Not only is there a fashioning and arrangement of the material which the original creative act has brought into being (see Gen. 1:2, 4, 6, 7, 9, 16, 17; 2:2, 6, 7, 8—Spirit brooding; dividing light from darkness, and waters from waters; dry land appearing; setting apart of sun, moon, and stars; mist watering; forming man's body; planting garden) but there is also an imparting and using of the productive powers of the things and beings created (Gen. 1:12, 22, 24, 28—earth brought forth grass; trees yielding fruit whose seed was in itself; earth brought forth the living creatures; man commanded to be fruitful and multiply).The tendency at present among men of science is to regard the whole history of life upon the planet as the result of evolution, thus excluding creation, both at the beginning of the history and along its course. On the progress from the Orohippus, the lowest member of the equine series, an animal with four toes, to Anchitherium with three, then to Hipparion, and finally to our common horse, see Huxley, in Nature for May 11, 1873:33, 34. He argues that, if a complicated animal like the horse has arisen by gradual modification of a lower and less specialized form, there is no reason to think that other animals have arisen in a different way. Clarence King, Address at Yale College, 1877, regards American geology as teaching the doctrine of sudden yet natural modification of species.“When catastrophic change burst in upon the ages of uniformity and sounded in the ear of every living thing the words:‘Change or die!’plasticity became the sole principle of action.”Nature proceeded then by leaps, and corresponding to the leaps of geology we find leaps of biology.We grant the probability that the great majority of what we call species were produced in some such ways. If science should render it certain that all the present species of living creatures were derived by natural descent from a few original germs, and that these germs were themselves an evolution of inorganic forces and materials, we should not therefore regard the Mosaic account as proved untrue. We should only be required to revise our interpretation of the wordbarainGen. 1:21, 27, and to give it there the meaning of mediate creation, or creation by law. Such a meaning might almost seem to be favored byGen. 1:11—“let the earth put forth grass”;20—“let the waters bring forth abundantly[pg 393]the moving creature that hath life”;2:7—“the Lord God formed man of the dust”;9—“out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree”;cf.Mark 4:28—αὐτομάτη ἣ γή καρποφορεῖ—“the earth brings forth fruit automatically.”Goethe, Sprüche in Reimen:“Was wär ein Gott der nur von aussen stiesse, Im Kreis das All am Finger laufen liesse? Ihm ziemt's die Welt im Innern zu bewegen, Sich in Natur, Natur in sich zu hegen, So dass, was in Ihm lebt und webt und ist, Nie seine Kraft, nie seinen Geist vermisst”—“No, such a God my worship may not win, Who lets the world about his finger spin, A thing eternal; God must dwell within.”All the growth of a tree takes place in from four to six weeks in May, June and July. The addition of woody fibre between the bark and the trunk results, not by impartation into it of a new force from without, but by the awakening of the life within. Environment changes and growth begins. We may even speak of an immanent transcendence of God—an unexhausted vitality which at times makes great movements forward. This is what the ancients were trying to express when they said that trees were inhabited by dryads and so groaned and bled when wounded. God's life is in all. In evolution we cannot say, with LeConte, that the higher form of energy is“derived from the lower.”Rather let us say that both the higher and the lower are constantly dependent for their being on the will of God. The lower is only God's preparation for his higher self-manifestation; see Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 165, 166.Even Haeckel, Hist. Creation, 1:38, can say that in the Mosaic narrative“two great and fundamental ideas meet us—the idea of separation or differentiation, and the idea of progressive development or perfecting. We can bestow our just and sincere admiration on the Jewish lawgiver's grand insight into nature, and his simple and natural hypothesis of creation, without discovering in it a divine revelation.”Henry Drummond, whose first book, Natural Law in the Spiritual World, he himself in his later days regretted as tending in a deterministic and materialistic direction, came to believe rather in“spiritual law in the natural world.”His Ascent of Man regards evolution and law as only the methods of a present Deity. Darwinism seemed at first to show that the past history of life upon the planet was a history of heartless and cruel slaughter. The survival of the fittest had for its obverse side the destruction of myriads. Nature was“red in tooth and claw with ravine.”But further thought has shown that this gloomy view results from a partial induction of facts. Palæontological life was not only a struggle for life, but a struggle for the life of others. The beginnings of altruism are to be seen in the instinct of reproduction and in the care of offspring. In every lion's den and tiger's lair, in every mother-eagle's feeding of her young, there is a self-sacrifice which faintly shadows forth man's subordination of personal interests to the interests of others.Dr. George Harris, in his Moral Evolution, has added to Drummond's doctrine the further consideration that the struggle for one's own life has its moral side as well as the struggle for the life of others. The instinct of self-preservation is the beginning of right, righteousness, justice and law upon earth. Every creature owes it to God to preserve its own being. So we can find an adumbration of morality even in the predatory and internecine warfare of the geologic ages. The immanent God was even then preparing the way for the rights, the dignity, the freedom of humanity. B. P. Bowne, in the Independent, April 19, 1900—“The Copernican system made men dizzy for a time, and they held on to the Ptolemaic system to escape vertigo. In like manner the conception of God, as revealing himself in a great historic movement and process, in the consciences and lives of holy men, in the unfolding life of the church, makes dizzy the believer in a dictated book, and he longs for some fixed word that shall be sure and stedfast.”God is not limited to creating from without: he can also create from within; and development is as much a part of creation as is the origination of the elements. For further discussion of man's origin, see section on Man a Creation of God, in our treatment of Anthropology.2. Its proper interpretation.We adopt neither (a) the allegorical, or mythical, (b) the hyperliteral, nor (c) the hyperscientific interpretation of the Mosaic narrative; but rather (d) the pictorial-summary interpretation,—which holds that the account is a rough sketch of the history of creation, true in all its essential features, but presented in a graphic form suited to the common mind and to earlier as well as to later ages. While conveying to primitive man as accurate an idea of God's work as man was able to comprehend, the revelation[pg 394]was yet given in pregnant language, so that it could expand to all the ascertained results of subsequent physical research. This general correspondence of the narrative with the teachings of science, and its power to adapt itself to every advance in human knowledge, differences it from every other cosmogony current among men.(a) Theallegorical, ormythical interpretation, represents the Mosaic account as embodying, like the Indian and Greek cosmogonies, the poetic speculations of an early race as to the origin of the present system. We object to this interpretation upon the ground that the narrative of creation is inseparably connected with the succeeding history, and is therefore most naturally regarded as itself historical. This connection of the narrative of creation with the subsequent history, moreover, prevents us from believing it to be the description of a vision granted to Moses. It is more probably the record of an original revelation to the first man, handed down to Moses' time, and used by Moses as a proper introduction to his history.We object also to the view of some higher critics that the book of Genesis contains two inconsistent stories. Marcus Dods, Book of Genesis, 2—“The compiler of this book ... lays side by side two accounts of man's creation which no ingenuity can reconcile.”Charles A. Briggs:“The doctrine of creation in Genesis 1 is altogether different from that taught in Genesis 2.”W. N. Clarke, Christian Theology, 199-201—“It has been commonly assumed that the two are parallel, and tell one and the same story; but examination shows that this is not the case.... We have here the record of a tradition, rather than a revelation.... It cannot be taken as literal history, and it does not tell by divine authority how man was created.”To these utterances we reply that the two accounts are not inconsistent but complementary, the first chapter of Genesis describing man's creation as the crown of God's general work, the second describing man's creation with greater particularity as the beginning of human history.Canon Rawlinson, in Aids to Faith, 275, compares the Mosaic account with the cosmogony of Berosus, the Chaldean. Pfleiderer, Philos. of Religion, 1:267-272, gives an account of heathen theories of the origin of the universe. Anaxagoras was the first who represented the chaotic first matter as formed through the ordering understanding (νοῦς) of God, and Aristotle for that reason called him“the first sober one among many drunken.”Schurman, Belief in God, 138—“In these cosmogonies the world and the gods grow up together; cosmogony is, at the same time, theogony.”Dr. E. G. Robinson:“The Bible writers believed and intended to state that the world was made in three literal days. But, on the principle that God may have meant more than they did, the doctrine of periods may not be inconsistent with their account.”For comparison of the Biblical with heathen cosmogonies, see Blackie in Theol. Eclectic, 1:77-87; Guyot, Creation, 58-63; Pope, Theology, 1:401, 402; Bible Commentary, 1:36, 48; McIlvaine, Wisdom of Holy Scripture, 1-54; J. F. Clarke, Ten Great Religions, 2:193-221. For the theory of“prophetic vision,”see Kurtz, Hist. of Old Covenant, Introd., i-xxxvii, civ-cxxx; and Hugh Miller, Testimony of the Rocks, 179-210; Hastings, Dict. Bible, art.: Cosmogony; Sayce, Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia, 372-397.(b) Thehyperliteral interpretationwould withdraw the narrative from all comparison with the conclusions of science, by putting the ages of geological history between the first and second verses ofGen. 1, and by making the remainder of the chapter an account of the fitting up of the earth, or of some limited portion of it, in six days of twenty-four hours each. Among the advocates of this view, now generally discarded, are Chalmers, Natural Theology, Works, 1:228-258, and John Pye Smith, Mosaic Account of Creation, and Scripture and Geology. To this view we object that there is no indication, in the Mosaic narrative, of so vast an interval between the first and the second verses; that there is no indication, in the geological history, of any such break between the ages of preparation and the present time (see Hugh Miller, Testimony of the Rocks, 141-178); and that there are indications in the Mosaic record itself that the word“day”is not used in its literal sense; while the other Scriptures unquestionably employ it to designate a period of indefinite duration (Gen. 1:5—“God called the light Day”—a day before there was a sun;8—“there was evening and there was morning, a second day”;2:2—God“rested on the seventh day”;cf.Heb. 4:3-10—where God's day of rest seems to continue, and his people are exhorted to enter into it;Gen. 2:4—“the day that Jehovah made earth and heaven”—“day”here covers all the seven days;cf.Is. 2:12—“a day of Jehovah of hosts”;Zech. 14:7—“it shall be one day which is known unto Jehovah; not day, and not night”;2 Pet. 3:8—“one day is with the Lord as[pg 395]a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day”). Guyot, Creation, 34, objects also to this interpretation, that the narrative purports to give a history of the making of the heavens as well as of the earth (Gen. 2:4—“these are the generations of the heaven and of the earth”), whereas this interpretation confines the history to the earth. On the meaning of the word“day,”as a period of indefinite duration, see Dana, Manual of Geology, 744; LeConte, Religion and Science, 262.(c) Thehyperscientific interpretationwould find in the narrative a minute and precise correspondence with the geological record. This is not to be expected, since it is foreign to the purpose of revelation to teach science. Although a general concord between the Mosaic and geological histories may be pointed out, it is a needless embarrassment to compel ourselves to find in every detail of the former an accurate statement of some scientific fact. Far more probable we hold to be(d) Thepictorial-summary interpretation. Before explaining this in detail, we would premise that we do not hold this or any future scheme of reconciling Genesis and geology to be a finality. Such a settlement of all the questions involved would presuppose not only a perfected science of the physical universe, but also a perfected science of hermeneutics. It is enough if we can offer tentative solutions which represent the present state of thought upon the subject. Remembering, then, that any such scheme of reconciliation may speedily be outgrown without prejudice to the truth of the Scripture narrative, we present the following as an approximate account of the coincidences between the Mosaic and the geological records. The scheme here given is a combination of the conclusions of Dana and Guyot, and assumes the substantial truth of the nebular hypothesis. It is interesting to observe that Augustine, who knew nothing of modern science, should have reached, by simple study of the text, some of the same results. See his Confessions, 12:8—“First God created a chaotic matter, which wasnexttonothing. This chaotic matter was made from nothing, before all days. Then this chaotic, amorphous matter was subsequently arranged, in the succeeding six days”; De Genes. ad Lit., 4:27—“The length of these days is not to be determined by the length of our week-days. There is a series in both cases, and that is all.”We proceed now to the scheme:1. The earth, if originally in the condition of a gaseous fluid, must have been void and formless as described inGenesis 1:2. Here the earth is not yet separated from the condensing nebula, and its fluid condition is indicated by the term“waters.”2. The beginning of activity in matter would manifest itself by the production of light, since light is a resultant of molecular activity. This corresponds to the statement inverse 3. As the result of condensation, the nebula becomes luminous, and this process from darkness to light is described as follows:“there was evening and there was morning, one day.”Here we have a day without a sun—a feature in the narrative quite consistent with two facts of science: first, that the nebula would naturally be self-luminous, and, secondly, that the earth proper, which reached its present form before the sun, would, when it was thrown off, be itself a self-luminous and molten mass. The day was therefore continuous—day without night.3. The development of the earth into an independent sphere and its separation from the fluid around it answers to the dividing of“the waters under the firmament from the waters above,”inverse 7. Here the word“waters”is used to designate the“primordial cosmic material”(Guyot, Creation, 35-37), or the molten mass of earth and sun united, from which the earth is thrown off. The term“waters”is the best which the Hebrew language affords to express this idea of a fluid mass.Ps. 148seems to have this meaning, where it speaks of the“waters that are above the heavens”(verse 4)—waters which are distinguished from the“deeps”below (verse 7), and the“vapor”above (verse 8).4. The production of the earth's physical features by the partial condensation of the vapors which enveloped the igneous sphere, and by the consequent outlining of the continents and oceans, is next described inverse 9as the gathering of the waters into one place and the appearing of the dry land.5. The expression of the idea of life in the lowest plants, since it was in type and effect the creation of the vegetable kingdom, is next described inverse 11as a bringing into existence of the characteristic forms of that kingdom. This precedes all mention of animal life, since the vegetable kingdom is the natural basis of the animal. If it be said that our earliest fossils are animal, we reply that the earliest vegetable forms, thealgæ, were easily dissolved, and might as easily disappear; that graphite and bog-iron ore, appearing lower down than any animal remains, are the result of preceding vegetation; that animal forms, whenever and wherever existing, must subsist upon and presuppose the vegetable. The Eozoön is of necessity preceded by the Eophyte. If it[pg 396]be said that fruit-trees could not have been created on the third day, we reply that since the creation of the vegetable kingdom was to be described at one stroke and no mention of it was to be made subsequently, this is the proper place to introduce it and to mention its main characteristic forms. See Bible Commentary, 1:36; LeConte, Elements of Geology, 136, 285.6. The vapors which have hitherto shrouded the planet are now cleared away as preliminary to the introduction of life in its higher animal forms. The consequent appearance of solar light is described inverses 16and17as a making of the sun, moon, and stars, and a giving of them as luminaries to the earth. CompareGen. 9:13—“I do set my bow in the cloud.”As the rainbow had existed in nature before, but was now appointed to serve a peculiar purpose, so in the record of creation sun, moon and stars, which existed before, were appointed as visible lights for the earth,—and that for the reason that the earth was no longer self-luminous, and the light of the sun struggling through the earth's encompassing clouds was not sufficient for the higher forms of life which were to come.7. The exhibition of the four grand types of the animal kingdom (radiate, molluscan, articulate, vertebrate), which characterizes the next stage of geological progress, is represented inverses 20and21as a creation of the lower animals—those that swarm in the waters, and the creeping and flying species of the land. Huxley, in his American Addresses, objects to this assigning of the origin of birds to the fifth day, and declares that terrestrial animals exist in lower strata than any form of bird,—birds appearing only in the Oölitic, or New Red Sandstone. But we reply that the fifth day is devoted to sea-productions, while land-productions belong to the sixth. Birds, according to the latest science, are sea-productions, not land-productions. They originated from Saurians, and were, at the first, flying lizards. There being but one mention of sea-productions, all these, birds included, are crowded into the fifth day. Thus Genesis anticipates the latest science. On the ancestry of birds, see Pop. Science Monthly, March, 1884:606; Baptist Magazine, 1877:505.8. The introduction of mammals—viviparous species, which are eminent above all other vertebrates for a quality prophetic of a high moral purpose, that of suckling their young—is indicated inverses 24and25by the creation, on the sixth day, of cattle and beasts of prey.9. Man, the first being of moral and intellectual qualities, and the first in whom the unity of the great design has full expression, forms in both the Mosaic and geologic record the last step of progress in creation (seeverses 26-31). With Prof. Dana, we may say that“in this succession we observe not merely an order of events like that deduced from science; there is a system in the arrangement, and a far-reaching prophecy, to which philosophy could not have attained, however instructed.”See Dana, Manual of Geology, 741-746, and Bib. Sac., April, 1885:201-224. Richard Owen:“Man from the beginning of organisms was ideally present upon the earth”; see Owen, Anatomy of Vertebrates, 3:796; Louis Agassiz:“Man is the purpose toward which the whole animal creation tends from the first appearance of the first palæozoic fish.”Prof. John M. Taylor:“Man is not merely a mortal but a moral being. If he sinks below this plane of life he misses the path marked out for him by all his past development. In order to progress, the higher vertebrate had to subordinate everything to mental development. In order to become human it had to develop the rational intelligence. In order to become higher man, present man must subordinate everything to moral development. This is the great law of animal and human development clearly revealed in the sequence of physical and psychical functions.”W. E. Gladstone in S. S. Times, April 26, 1890, calls the Mosaic days“chapters in the history of creation.”He objects to calling them epochs or periods, because they are not of equal length, and they sometimes overlap. But he defends the general correspondence of the Mosaic narrative with the latest conclusions of science, and remarks:“Any man whose labor and duty for several scores of years has included as their central point the study of the means of making himself intelligible to the mass of men, is in a far better position to judge what would be the forms and methods of speech proper for the Mosaic writer to adopt, than the most perfect Hebraist as such, or the most consummate votary of physical science as such.”On the whole subject, see Guyot, Creation; Review of Guyot, in N. Eng., July, 1884:591-594; Tayler Lewis, Six Days of Creation; Thompson, Man in Genesis and in Geology; Agassiz, in Atlantic Monthly, Jan. 1874; Dawson, Story of the Earth and Man, 82, and in Expositor, Apl. 1886; LeConte, Science and Religion, 264; Hill, in Bib. Sac., April, 1875; Peirce, Ideality in the Physical Sciences, 38-72; Boardman, The Creative Week;[pg 397]Godet, Bib. Studies of O. T., 65-138; Bell, in Nature, Nov. 24 and Dec. 1, 1882; W. E. Gladstone, in Nineteenth Century, Nov. 1885:685-707, Jan. 1886:1, 176; reply by Huxley, in Nineteenth Century, Dec. 1885, and Feb. 1886; Schmid, Theories of Darwin; Bartlett, Sources of History in the Pentateuch, 1-35; Cotterill, Does Science Aid Faith in Regard to Creation? Cox, Miracles, 1-39—chapter 1, on the Original Miracle—that of Creation; Zöckler, Theologie und Naturwissenschaft, and Urgeschichte, 1-77; Reusch, Bib. Schöpfungsgeschichte. On difficulties of the nebular hypothesis, see Stallo, Modern Physics, 277-293.
1. Its twofold nature,—as uniting the ideas of creation and of development.(a) Creation is asserted.—The Mosaic narrative avoids the error of making the universe eternal or the result of an eternal process. The cosmogony of Genesis, unlike the cosmogonies of the heathen, is prefaced by the originating act of God, and is supplemented by successive manifestations of creative power in the introduction of brute and of human life.All nature-worship, whether it take the form of ancient polytheism or modern materialism, looks upon the universe only as a birth or growth. This view has a basis of truth, inasmuch as it regards natural forces as having a real existence. It is false in regarding these forces as needing no originator or upholder. Hesiod taught that in the beginning was formless matter. Genesis does not begin thus. God is not a demiurge, working on eternal matter. God antedates matter. He is the creator of matter at the first (Gen. 1:1—bara) and he subsequently created animal life (Gen. 1:21—“and God created”—bara) and the life of man (Gen. 1:27—“and God create man”—baraagain).Many statements of the doctrine of evolution err by regarding it as an eternal or self-originated process. But the process requires an originator, and the forces require an upholder. Each forward step implies increment of energy, and progress toward a rational end implies intelligence and foresight in the governing power. Schurman says well that Darwinism explains thesurvivalof the fittest, but cannot explain thearrivalof the fittest. Schurman, Agnosticism and Religion, 34—“A primitive chaos of star-dust which held in its womb not only the cosmos that fills space, not only the living creatures that teem upon it, but also the intellect that interprets it, the will that confronts it, and the conscience that transfigures it, must as certainly have God at the centre, as a universe mechanically arranged and periodically adjusted must have him at the circumference.... There is no real antagonism between creation and evolution. 59—Natural causation is the expression of a supernatural Mind in nature, and man—a being at once of sensibility and of rational and moral self-activity—is a signal and ever-present example of the interfusion of the natural with the supernatural in that part of universal existence nearest and best known to us.”Seebohm, quoted in J. J. Murphy, Nat. Selection and Spir. Freedom, 76—“When we admit that Darwin's argument in favor of the theory of evolution proves its truth, we doubt whether natural selection can be in any sense thecauseof the origin of species. It has probably played an important part in the history of evolution; its rôle has been that of increasing the rapidity with which the process of development has proceeded. Of itself it has probably been powerless to originate a species; the machinery by which species have been evolved has been completely independent of natural selection[pg 392]and could have produced all the results which we call the evolution of species without its aid; though the process would have been slow had there been no struggle of life to increase its pace.”New World, June, 1896:237-262, art. by Howison on the Limits of Evolution, finds limits in (1) the noumenal Reality; (2) the break between the organic and the inorganic; (3) break between physiological and logical genesis; (4) inability to explain the great fact on which its own movement rests; (5) thea prioriself-consciousness which is the essential being and true person of the mind.Evolution, according to Herbert Spencer, is“an integration of matter and concomitant dissipation of motion, during which the matter passes from an indefinite incoherent homogeneity to a definite coherent heterogeneity, and during which the retained motion goes through a parallel transformation.”D. W. Simon criticizes this definition as defective“because (1) it omits all mention both of energy and its differentiations; and (2) because it introduces into the definition of the process one of the phenomena thereof, namely, motion. As a matter of fact, both energy or force, and law, are subsequently and illicitly introduced as distinct factors of the process; they ought therefore to have found recognition in the definition or description.”Mark Hopkins, Life, 189—“God: what need of him? Have we not force, uniform force, and do not all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation, if it ever had a beginning? Have we not the τὸ πᾶν, the universal All, the Soul of the universe, working itself up from unconsciousness through molecules and maggots and mice and marmots and monkeys to its highest culmination in man?”(b) Development is recognized.—The Mosaic account represents the present order of things as the result, not simply of original creation, but also of subsequent arrangement and development. A fashioning of inorganic materials is described, and also a use of these materials in providing the conditions of organized existence. Life is described as reproducing itself, after its first introduction, according to its own laws and by virtue of its own inner energy.Martensen wrongly asserts that“Judaism represented the world exclusively ascreatura, notnatura; as κτίσις, not φύσις.”This is not true. Creation is represented as the bringing forth, not of something dead, but of something living and capable of self-development. Creation lays the foundation for cosmogony. Not only is there a fashioning and arrangement of the material which the original creative act has brought into being (see Gen. 1:2, 4, 6, 7, 9, 16, 17; 2:2, 6, 7, 8—Spirit brooding; dividing light from darkness, and waters from waters; dry land appearing; setting apart of sun, moon, and stars; mist watering; forming man's body; planting garden) but there is also an imparting and using of the productive powers of the things and beings created (Gen. 1:12, 22, 24, 28—earth brought forth grass; trees yielding fruit whose seed was in itself; earth brought forth the living creatures; man commanded to be fruitful and multiply).The tendency at present among men of science is to regard the whole history of life upon the planet as the result of evolution, thus excluding creation, both at the beginning of the history and along its course. On the progress from the Orohippus, the lowest member of the equine series, an animal with four toes, to Anchitherium with three, then to Hipparion, and finally to our common horse, see Huxley, in Nature for May 11, 1873:33, 34. He argues that, if a complicated animal like the horse has arisen by gradual modification of a lower and less specialized form, there is no reason to think that other animals have arisen in a different way. Clarence King, Address at Yale College, 1877, regards American geology as teaching the doctrine of sudden yet natural modification of species.“When catastrophic change burst in upon the ages of uniformity and sounded in the ear of every living thing the words:‘Change or die!’plasticity became the sole principle of action.”Nature proceeded then by leaps, and corresponding to the leaps of geology we find leaps of biology.We grant the probability that the great majority of what we call species were produced in some such ways. If science should render it certain that all the present species of living creatures were derived by natural descent from a few original germs, and that these germs were themselves an evolution of inorganic forces and materials, we should not therefore regard the Mosaic account as proved untrue. We should only be required to revise our interpretation of the wordbarainGen. 1:21, 27, and to give it there the meaning of mediate creation, or creation by law. Such a meaning might almost seem to be favored byGen. 1:11—“let the earth put forth grass”;20—“let the waters bring forth abundantly[pg 393]the moving creature that hath life”;2:7—“the Lord God formed man of the dust”;9—“out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree”;cf.Mark 4:28—αὐτομάτη ἣ γή καρποφορεῖ—“the earth brings forth fruit automatically.”Goethe, Sprüche in Reimen:“Was wär ein Gott der nur von aussen stiesse, Im Kreis das All am Finger laufen liesse? Ihm ziemt's die Welt im Innern zu bewegen, Sich in Natur, Natur in sich zu hegen, So dass, was in Ihm lebt und webt und ist, Nie seine Kraft, nie seinen Geist vermisst”—“No, such a God my worship may not win, Who lets the world about his finger spin, A thing eternal; God must dwell within.”All the growth of a tree takes place in from four to six weeks in May, June and July. The addition of woody fibre between the bark and the trunk results, not by impartation into it of a new force from without, but by the awakening of the life within. Environment changes and growth begins. We may even speak of an immanent transcendence of God—an unexhausted vitality which at times makes great movements forward. This is what the ancients were trying to express when they said that trees were inhabited by dryads and so groaned and bled when wounded. God's life is in all. In evolution we cannot say, with LeConte, that the higher form of energy is“derived from the lower.”Rather let us say that both the higher and the lower are constantly dependent for their being on the will of God. The lower is only God's preparation for his higher self-manifestation; see Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 165, 166.Even Haeckel, Hist. Creation, 1:38, can say that in the Mosaic narrative“two great and fundamental ideas meet us—the idea of separation or differentiation, and the idea of progressive development or perfecting. We can bestow our just and sincere admiration on the Jewish lawgiver's grand insight into nature, and his simple and natural hypothesis of creation, without discovering in it a divine revelation.”Henry Drummond, whose first book, Natural Law in the Spiritual World, he himself in his later days regretted as tending in a deterministic and materialistic direction, came to believe rather in“spiritual law in the natural world.”His Ascent of Man regards evolution and law as only the methods of a present Deity. Darwinism seemed at first to show that the past history of life upon the planet was a history of heartless and cruel slaughter. The survival of the fittest had for its obverse side the destruction of myriads. Nature was“red in tooth and claw with ravine.”But further thought has shown that this gloomy view results from a partial induction of facts. Palæontological life was not only a struggle for life, but a struggle for the life of others. The beginnings of altruism are to be seen in the instinct of reproduction and in the care of offspring. In every lion's den and tiger's lair, in every mother-eagle's feeding of her young, there is a self-sacrifice which faintly shadows forth man's subordination of personal interests to the interests of others.Dr. George Harris, in his Moral Evolution, has added to Drummond's doctrine the further consideration that the struggle for one's own life has its moral side as well as the struggle for the life of others. The instinct of self-preservation is the beginning of right, righteousness, justice and law upon earth. Every creature owes it to God to preserve its own being. So we can find an adumbration of morality even in the predatory and internecine warfare of the geologic ages. The immanent God was even then preparing the way for the rights, the dignity, the freedom of humanity. B. P. Bowne, in the Independent, April 19, 1900—“The Copernican system made men dizzy for a time, and they held on to the Ptolemaic system to escape vertigo. In like manner the conception of God, as revealing himself in a great historic movement and process, in the consciences and lives of holy men, in the unfolding life of the church, makes dizzy the believer in a dictated book, and he longs for some fixed word that shall be sure and stedfast.”God is not limited to creating from without: he can also create from within; and development is as much a part of creation as is the origination of the elements. For further discussion of man's origin, see section on Man a Creation of God, in our treatment of Anthropology.
(a) Creation is asserted.—The Mosaic narrative avoids the error of making the universe eternal or the result of an eternal process. The cosmogony of Genesis, unlike the cosmogonies of the heathen, is prefaced by the originating act of God, and is supplemented by successive manifestations of creative power in the introduction of brute and of human life.
All nature-worship, whether it take the form of ancient polytheism or modern materialism, looks upon the universe only as a birth or growth. This view has a basis of truth, inasmuch as it regards natural forces as having a real existence. It is false in regarding these forces as needing no originator or upholder. Hesiod taught that in the beginning was formless matter. Genesis does not begin thus. God is not a demiurge, working on eternal matter. God antedates matter. He is the creator of matter at the first (Gen. 1:1—bara) and he subsequently created animal life (Gen. 1:21—“and God created”—bara) and the life of man (Gen. 1:27—“and God create man”—baraagain).Many statements of the doctrine of evolution err by regarding it as an eternal or self-originated process. But the process requires an originator, and the forces require an upholder. Each forward step implies increment of energy, and progress toward a rational end implies intelligence and foresight in the governing power. Schurman says well that Darwinism explains thesurvivalof the fittest, but cannot explain thearrivalof the fittest. Schurman, Agnosticism and Religion, 34—“A primitive chaos of star-dust which held in its womb not only the cosmos that fills space, not only the living creatures that teem upon it, but also the intellect that interprets it, the will that confronts it, and the conscience that transfigures it, must as certainly have God at the centre, as a universe mechanically arranged and periodically adjusted must have him at the circumference.... There is no real antagonism between creation and evolution. 59—Natural causation is the expression of a supernatural Mind in nature, and man—a being at once of sensibility and of rational and moral self-activity—is a signal and ever-present example of the interfusion of the natural with the supernatural in that part of universal existence nearest and best known to us.”Seebohm, quoted in J. J. Murphy, Nat. Selection and Spir. Freedom, 76—“When we admit that Darwin's argument in favor of the theory of evolution proves its truth, we doubt whether natural selection can be in any sense thecauseof the origin of species. It has probably played an important part in the history of evolution; its rôle has been that of increasing the rapidity with which the process of development has proceeded. Of itself it has probably been powerless to originate a species; the machinery by which species have been evolved has been completely independent of natural selection[pg 392]and could have produced all the results which we call the evolution of species without its aid; though the process would have been slow had there been no struggle of life to increase its pace.”New World, June, 1896:237-262, art. by Howison on the Limits of Evolution, finds limits in (1) the noumenal Reality; (2) the break between the organic and the inorganic; (3) break between physiological and logical genesis; (4) inability to explain the great fact on which its own movement rests; (5) thea prioriself-consciousness which is the essential being and true person of the mind.Evolution, according to Herbert Spencer, is“an integration of matter and concomitant dissipation of motion, during which the matter passes from an indefinite incoherent homogeneity to a definite coherent heterogeneity, and during which the retained motion goes through a parallel transformation.”D. W. Simon criticizes this definition as defective“because (1) it omits all mention both of energy and its differentiations; and (2) because it introduces into the definition of the process one of the phenomena thereof, namely, motion. As a matter of fact, both energy or force, and law, are subsequently and illicitly introduced as distinct factors of the process; they ought therefore to have found recognition in the definition or description.”Mark Hopkins, Life, 189—“God: what need of him? Have we not force, uniform force, and do not all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation, if it ever had a beginning? Have we not the τὸ πᾶν, the universal All, the Soul of the universe, working itself up from unconsciousness through molecules and maggots and mice and marmots and monkeys to its highest culmination in man?”
All nature-worship, whether it take the form of ancient polytheism or modern materialism, looks upon the universe only as a birth or growth. This view has a basis of truth, inasmuch as it regards natural forces as having a real existence. It is false in regarding these forces as needing no originator or upholder. Hesiod taught that in the beginning was formless matter. Genesis does not begin thus. God is not a demiurge, working on eternal matter. God antedates matter. He is the creator of matter at the first (Gen. 1:1—bara) and he subsequently created animal life (Gen. 1:21—“and God created”—bara) and the life of man (Gen. 1:27—“and God create man”—baraagain).
Many statements of the doctrine of evolution err by regarding it as an eternal or self-originated process. But the process requires an originator, and the forces require an upholder. Each forward step implies increment of energy, and progress toward a rational end implies intelligence and foresight in the governing power. Schurman says well that Darwinism explains thesurvivalof the fittest, but cannot explain thearrivalof the fittest. Schurman, Agnosticism and Religion, 34—“A primitive chaos of star-dust which held in its womb not only the cosmos that fills space, not only the living creatures that teem upon it, but also the intellect that interprets it, the will that confronts it, and the conscience that transfigures it, must as certainly have God at the centre, as a universe mechanically arranged and periodically adjusted must have him at the circumference.... There is no real antagonism between creation and evolution. 59—Natural causation is the expression of a supernatural Mind in nature, and man—a being at once of sensibility and of rational and moral self-activity—is a signal and ever-present example of the interfusion of the natural with the supernatural in that part of universal existence nearest and best known to us.”
Seebohm, quoted in J. J. Murphy, Nat. Selection and Spir. Freedom, 76—“When we admit that Darwin's argument in favor of the theory of evolution proves its truth, we doubt whether natural selection can be in any sense thecauseof the origin of species. It has probably played an important part in the history of evolution; its rôle has been that of increasing the rapidity with which the process of development has proceeded. Of itself it has probably been powerless to originate a species; the machinery by which species have been evolved has been completely independent of natural selection[pg 392]and could have produced all the results which we call the evolution of species without its aid; though the process would have been slow had there been no struggle of life to increase its pace.”New World, June, 1896:237-262, art. by Howison on the Limits of Evolution, finds limits in (1) the noumenal Reality; (2) the break between the organic and the inorganic; (3) break between physiological and logical genesis; (4) inability to explain the great fact on which its own movement rests; (5) thea prioriself-consciousness which is the essential being and true person of the mind.
Evolution, according to Herbert Spencer, is“an integration of matter and concomitant dissipation of motion, during which the matter passes from an indefinite incoherent homogeneity to a definite coherent heterogeneity, and during which the retained motion goes through a parallel transformation.”D. W. Simon criticizes this definition as defective“because (1) it omits all mention both of energy and its differentiations; and (2) because it introduces into the definition of the process one of the phenomena thereof, namely, motion. As a matter of fact, both energy or force, and law, are subsequently and illicitly introduced as distinct factors of the process; they ought therefore to have found recognition in the definition or description.”Mark Hopkins, Life, 189—“God: what need of him? Have we not force, uniform force, and do not all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation, if it ever had a beginning? Have we not the τὸ πᾶν, the universal All, the Soul of the universe, working itself up from unconsciousness through molecules and maggots and mice and marmots and monkeys to its highest culmination in man?”
(b) Development is recognized.—The Mosaic account represents the present order of things as the result, not simply of original creation, but also of subsequent arrangement and development. A fashioning of inorganic materials is described, and also a use of these materials in providing the conditions of organized existence. Life is described as reproducing itself, after its first introduction, according to its own laws and by virtue of its own inner energy.
Martensen wrongly asserts that“Judaism represented the world exclusively ascreatura, notnatura; as κτίσις, not φύσις.”This is not true. Creation is represented as the bringing forth, not of something dead, but of something living and capable of self-development. Creation lays the foundation for cosmogony. Not only is there a fashioning and arrangement of the material which the original creative act has brought into being (see Gen. 1:2, 4, 6, 7, 9, 16, 17; 2:2, 6, 7, 8—Spirit brooding; dividing light from darkness, and waters from waters; dry land appearing; setting apart of sun, moon, and stars; mist watering; forming man's body; planting garden) but there is also an imparting and using of the productive powers of the things and beings created (Gen. 1:12, 22, 24, 28—earth brought forth grass; trees yielding fruit whose seed was in itself; earth brought forth the living creatures; man commanded to be fruitful and multiply).The tendency at present among men of science is to regard the whole history of life upon the planet as the result of evolution, thus excluding creation, both at the beginning of the history and along its course. On the progress from the Orohippus, the lowest member of the equine series, an animal with four toes, to Anchitherium with three, then to Hipparion, and finally to our common horse, see Huxley, in Nature for May 11, 1873:33, 34. He argues that, if a complicated animal like the horse has arisen by gradual modification of a lower and less specialized form, there is no reason to think that other animals have arisen in a different way. Clarence King, Address at Yale College, 1877, regards American geology as teaching the doctrine of sudden yet natural modification of species.“When catastrophic change burst in upon the ages of uniformity and sounded in the ear of every living thing the words:‘Change or die!’plasticity became the sole principle of action.”Nature proceeded then by leaps, and corresponding to the leaps of geology we find leaps of biology.We grant the probability that the great majority of what we call species were produced in some such ways. If science should render it certain that all the present species of living creatures were derived by natural descent from a few original germs, and that these germs were themselves an evolution of inorganic forces and materials, we should not therefore regard the Mosaic account as proved untrue. We should only be required to revise our interpretation of the wordbarainGen. 1:21, 27, and to give it there the meaning of mediate creation, or creation by law. Such a meaning might almost seem to be favored byGen. 1:11—“let the earth put forth grass”;20—“let the waters bring forth abundantly[pg 393]the moving creature that hath life”;2:7—“the Lord God formed man of the dust”;9—“out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree”;cf.Mark 4:28—αὐτομάτη ἣ γή καρποφορεῖ—“the earth brings forth fruit automatically.”Goethe, Sprüche in Reimen:“Was wär ein Gott der nur von aussen stiesse, Im Kreis das All am Finger laufen liesse? Ihm ziemt's die Welt im Innern zu bewegen, Sich in Natur, Natur in sich zu hegen, So dass, was in Ihm lebt und webt und ist, Nie seine Kraft, nie seinen Geist vermisst”—“No, such a God my worship may not win, Who lets the world about his finger spin, A thing eternal; God must dwell within.”All the growth of a tree takes place in from four to six weeks in May, June and July. The addition of woody fibre between the bark and the trunk results, not by impartation into it of a new force from without, but by the awakening of the life within. Environment changes and growth begins. We may even speak of an immanent transcendence of God—an unexhausted vitality which at times makes great movements forward. This is what the ancients were trying to express when they said that trees were inhabited by dryads and so groaned and bled when wounded. God's life is in all. In evolution we cannot say, with LeConte, that the higher form of energy is“derived from the lower.”Rather let us say that both the higher and the lower are constantly dependent for their being on the will of God. The lower is only God's preparation for his higher self-manifestation; see Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 165, 166.Even Haeckel, Hist. Creation, 1:38, can say that in the Mosaic narrative“two great and fundamental ideas meet us—the idea of separation or differentiation, and the idea of progressive development or perfecting. We can bestow our just and sincere admiration on the Jewish lawgiver's grand insight into nature, and his simple and natural hypothesis of creation, without discovering in it a divine revelation.”Henry Drummond, whose first book, Natural Law in the Spiritual World, he himself in his later days regretted as tending in a deterministic and materialistic direction, came to believe rather in“spiritual law in the natural world.”His Ascent of Man regards evolution and law as only the methods of a present Deity. Darwinism seemed at first to show that the past history of life upon the planet was a history of heartless and cruel slaughter. The survival of the fittest had for its obverse side the destruction of myriads. Nature was“red in tooth and claw with ravine.”But further thought has shown that this gloomy view results from a partial induction of facts. Palæontological life was not only a struggle for life, but a struggle for the life of others. The beginnings of altruism are to be seen in the instinct of reproduction and in the care of offspring. In every lion's den and tiger's lair, in every mother-eagle's feeding of her young, there is a self-sacrifice which faintly shadows forth man's subordination of personal interests to the interests of others.Dr. George Harris, in his Moral Evolution, has added to Drummond's doctrine the further consideration that the struggle for one's own life has its moral side as well as the struggle for the life of others. The instinct of self-preservation is the beginning of right, righteousness, justice and law upon earth. Every creature owes it to God to preserve its own being. So we can find an adumbration of morality even in the predatory and internecine warfare of the geologic ages. The immanent God was even then preparing the way for the rights, the dignity, the freedom of humanity. B. P. Bowne, in the Independent, April 19, 1900—“The Copernican system made men dizzy for a time, and they held on to the Ptolemaic system to escape vertigo. In like manner the conception of God, as revealing himself in a great historic movement and process, in the consciences and lives of holy men, in the unfolding life of the church, makes dizzy the believer in a dictated book, and he longs for some fixed word that shall be sure and stedfast.”God is not limited to creating from without: he can also create from within; and development is as much a part of creation as is the origination of the elements. For further discussion of man's origin, see section on Man a Creation of God, in our treatment of Anthropology.
Martensen wrongly asserts that“Judaism represented the world exclusively ascreatura, notnatura; as κτίσις, not φύσις.”This is not true. Creation is represented as the bringing forth, not of something dead, but of something living and capable of self-development. Creation lays the foundation for cosmogony. Not only is there a fashioning and arrangement of the material which the original creative act has brought into being (see Gen. 1:2, 4, 6, 7, 9, 16, 17; 2:2, 6, 7, 8—Spirit brooding; dividing light from darkness, and waters from waters; dry land appearing; setting apart of sun, moon, and stars; mist watering; forming man's body; planting garden) but there is also an imparting and using of the productive powers of the things and beings created (Gen. 1:12, 22, 24, 28—earth brought forth grass; trees yielding fruit whose seed was in itself; earth brought forth the living creatures; man commanded to be fruitful and multiply).
The tendency at present among men of science is to regard the whole history of life upon the planet as the result of evolution, thus excluding creation, both at the beginning of the history and along its course. On the progress from the Orohippus, the lowest member of the equine series, an animal with four toes, to Anchitherium with three, then to Hipparion, and finally to our common horse, see Huxley, in Nature for May 11, 1873:33, 34. He argues that, if a complicated animal like the horse has arisen by gradual modification of a lower and less specialized form, there is no reason to think that other animals have arisen in a different way. Clarence King, Address at Yale College, 1877, regards American geology as teaching the doctrine of sudden yet natural modification of species.“When catastrophic change burst in upon the ages of uniformity and sounded in the ear of every living thing the words:‘Change or die!’plasticity became the sole principle of action.”Nature proceeded then by leaps, and corresponding to the leaps of geology we find leaps of biology.
We grant the probability that the great majority of what we call species were produced in some such ways. If science should render it certain that all the present species of living creatures were derived by natural descent from a few original germs, and that these germs were themselves an evolution of inorganic forces and materials, we should not therefore regard the Mosaic account as proved untrue. We should only be required to revise our interpretation of the wordbarainGen. 1:21, 27, and to give it there the meaning of mediate creation, or creation by law. Such a meaning might almost seem to be favored byGen. 1:11—“let the earth put forth grass”;20—“let the waters bring forth abundantly[pg 393]the moving creature that hath life”;2:7—“the Lord God formed man of the dust”;9—“out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree”;cf.Mark 4:28—αὐτομάτη ἣ γή καρποφορεῖ—“the earth brings forth fruit automatically.”Goethe, Sprüche in Reimen:“Was wär ein Gott der nur von aussen stiesse, Im Kreis das All am Finger laufen liesse? Ihm ziemt's die Welt im Innern zu bewegen, Sich in Natur, Natur in sich zu hegen, So dass, was in Ihm lebt und webt und ist, Nie seine Kraft, nie seinen Geist vermisst”—“No, such a God my worship may not win, Who lets the world about his finger spin, A thing eternal; God must dwell within.”
All the growth of a tree takes place in from four to six weeks in May, June and July. The addition of woody fibre between the bark and the trunk results, not by impartation into it of a new force from without, but by the awakening of the life within. Environment changes and growth begins. We may even speak of an immanent transcendence of God—an unexhausted vitality which at times makes great movements forward. This is what the ancients were trying to express when they said that trees were inhabited by dryads and so groaned and bled when wounded. God's life is in all. In evolution we cannot say, with LeConte, that the higher form of energy is“derived from the lower.”Rather let us say that both the higher and the lower are constantly dependent for their being on the will of God. The lower is only God's preparation for his higher self-manifestation; see Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 165, 166.
Even Haeckel, Hist. Creation, 1:38, can say that in the Mosaic narrative“two great and fundamental ideas meet us—the idea of separation or differentiation, and the idea of progressive development or perfecting. We can bestow our just and sincere admiration on the Jewish lawgiver's grand insight into nature, and his simple and natural hypothesis of creation, without discovering in it a divine revelation.”Henry Drummond, whose first book, Natural Law in the Spiritual World, he himself in his later days regretted as tending in a deterministic and materialistic direction, came to believe rather in“spiritual law in the natural world.”His Ascent of Man regards evolution and law as only the methods of a present Deity. Darwinism seemed at first to show that the past history of life upon the planet was a history of heartless and cruel slaughter. The survival of the fittest had for its obverse side the destruction of myriads. Nature was“red in tooth and claw with ravine.”But further thought has shown that this gloomy view results from a partial induction of facts. Palæontological life was not only a struggle for life, but a struggle for the life of others. The beginnings of altruism are to be seen in the instinct of reproduction and in the care of offspring. In every lion's den and tiger's lair, in every mother-eagle's feeding of her young, there is a self-sacrifice which faintly shadows forth man's subordination of personal interests to the interests of others.
Dr. George Harris, in his Moral Evolution, has added to Drummond's doctrine the further consideration that the struggle for one's own life has its moral side as well as the struggle for the life of others. The instinct of self-preservation is the beginning of right, righteousness, justice and law upon earth. Every creature owes it to God to preserve its own being. So we can find an adumbration of morality even in the predatory and internecine warfare of the geologic ages. The immanent God was even then preparing the way for the rights, the dignity, the freedom of humanity. B. P. Bowne, in the Independent, April 19, 1900—“The Copernican system made men dizzy for a time, and they held on to the Ptolemaic system to escape vertigo. In like manner the conception of God, as revealing himself in a great historic movement and process, in the consciences and lives of holy men, in the unfolding life of the church, makes dizzy the believer in a dictated book, and he longs for some fixed word that shall be sure and stedfast.”God is not limited to creating from without: he can also create from within; and development is as much a part of creation as is the origination of the elements. For further discussion of man's origin, see section on Man a Creation of God, in our treatment of Anthropology.
2. Its proper interpretation.We adopt neither (a) the allegorical, or mythical, (b) the hyperliteral, nor (c) the hyperscientific interpretation of the Mosaic narrative; but rather (d) the pictorial-summary interpretation,—which holds that the account is a rough sketch of the history of creation, true in all its essential features, but presented in a graphic form suited to the common mind and to earlier as well as to later ages. While conveying to primitive man as accurate an idea of God's work as man was able to comprehend, the revelation[pg 394]was yet given in pregnant language, so that it could expand to all the ascertained results of subsequent physical research. This general correspondence of the narrative with the teachings of science, and its power to adapt itself to every advance in human knowledge, differences it from every other cosmogony current among men.(a) Theallegorical, ormythical interpretation, represents the Mosaic account as embodying, like the Indian and Greek cosmogonies, the poetic speculations of an early race as to the origin of the present system. We object to this interpretation upon the ground that the narrative of creation is inseparably connected with the succeeding history, and is therefore most naturally regarded as itself historical. This connection of the narrative of creation with the subsequent history, moreover, prevents us from believing it to be the description of a vision granted to Moses. It is more probably the record of an original revelation to the first man, handed down to Moses' time, and used by Moses as a proper introduction to his history.We object also to the view of some higher critics that the book of Genesis contains two inconsistent stories. Marcus Dods, Book of Genesis, 2—“The compiler of this book ... lays side by side two accounts of man's creation which no ingenuity can reconcile.”Charles A. Briggs:“The doctrine of creation in Genesis 1 is altogether different from that taught in Genesis 2.”W. N. Clarke, Christian Theology, 199-201—“It has been commonly assumed that the two are parallel, and tell one and the same story; but examination shows that this is not the case.... We have here the record of a tradition, rather than a revelation.... It cannot be taken as literal history, and it does not tell by divine authority how man was created.”To these utterances we reply that the two accounts are not inconsistent but complementary, the first chapter of Genesis describing man's creation as the crown of God's general work, the second describing man's creation with greater particularity as the beginning of human history.Canon Rawlinson, in Aids to Faith, 275, compares the Mosaic account with the cosmogony of Berosus, the Chaldean. Pfleiderer, Philos. of Religion, 1:267-272, gives an account of heathen theories of the origin of the universe. Anaxagoras was the first who represented the chaotic first matter as formed through the ordering understanding (νοῦς) of God, and Aristotle for that reason called him“the first sober one among many drunken.”Schurman, Belief in God, 138—“In these cosmogonies the world and the gods grow up together; cosmogony is, at the same time, theogony.”Dr. E. G. Robinson:“The Bible writers believed and intended to state that the world was made in three literal days. But, on the principle that God may have meant more than they did, the doctrine of periods may not be inconsistent with their account.”For comparison of the Biblical with heathen cosmogonies, see Blackie in Theol. Eclectic, 1:77-87; Guyot, Creation, 58-63; Pope, Theology, 1:401, 402; Bible Commentary, 1:36, 48; McIlvaine, Wisdom of Holy Scripture, 1-54; J. F. Clarke, Ten Great Religions, 2:193-221. For the theory of“prophetic vision,”see Kurtz, Hist. of Old Covenant, Introd., i-xxxvii, civ-cxxx; and Hugh Miller, Testimony of the Rocks, 179-210; Hastings, Dict. Bible, art.: Cosmogony; Sayce, Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia, 372-397.(b) Thehyperliteral interpretationwould withdraw the narrative from all comparison with the conclusions of science, by putting the ages of geological history between the first and second verses ofGen. 1, and by making the remainder of the chapter an account of the fitting up of the earth, or of some limited portion of it, in six days of twenty-four hours each. Among the advocates of this view, now generally discarded, are Chalmers, Natural Theology, Works, 1:228-258, and John Pye Smith, Mosaic Account of Creation, and Scripture and Geology. To this view we object that there is no indication, in the Mosaic narrative, of so vast an interval between the first and the second verses; that there is no indication, in the geological history, of any such break between the ages of preparation and the present time (see Hugh Miller, Testimony of the Rocks, 141-178); and that there are indications in the Mosaic record itself that the word“day”is not used in its literal sense; while the other Scriptures unquestionably employ it to designate a period of indefinite duration (Gen. 1:5—“God called the light Day”—a day before there was a sun;8—“there was evening and there was morning, a second day”;2:2—God“rested on the seventh day”;cf.Heb. 4:3-10—where God's day of rest seems to continue, and his people are exhorted to enter into it;Gen. 2:4—“the day that Jehovah made earth and heaven”—“day”here covers all the seven days;cf.Is. 2:12—“a day of Jehovah of hosts”;Zech. 14:7—“it shall be one day which is known unto Jehovah; not day, and not night”;2 Pet. 3:8—“one day is with the Lord as[pg 395]a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day”). Guyot, Creation, 34, objects also to this interpretation, that the narrative purports to give a history of the making of the heavens as well as of the earth (Gen. 2:4—“these are the generations of the heaven and of the earth”), whereas this interpretation confines the history to the earth. On the meaning of the word“day,”as a period of indefinite duration, see Dana, Manual of Geology, 744; LeConte, Religion and Science, 262.(c) Thehyperscientific interpretationwould find in the narrative a minute and precise correspondence with the geological record. This is not to be expected, since it is foreign to the purpose of revelation to teach science. Although a general concord between the Mosaic and geological histories may be pointed out, it is a needless embarrassment to compel ourselves to find in every detail of the former an accurate statement of some scientific fact. Far more probable we hold to be(d) Thepictorial-summary interpretation. Before explaining this in detail, we would premise that we do not hold this or any future scheme of reconciling Genesis and geology to be a finality. Such a settlement of all the questions involved would presuppose not only a perfected science of the physical universe, but also a perfected science of hermeneutics. It is enough if we can offer tentative solutions which represent the present state of thought upon the subject. Remembering, then, that any such scheme of reconciliation may speedily be outgrown without prejudice to the truth of the Scripture narrative, we present the following as an approximate account of the coincidences between the Mosaic and the geological records. The scheme here given is a combination of the conclusions of Dana and Guyot, and assumes the substantial truth of the nebular hypothesis. It is interesting to observe that Augustine, who knew nothing of modern science, should have reached, by simple study of the text, some of the same results. See his Confessions, 12:8—“First God created a chaotic matter, which wasnexttonothing. This chaotic matter was made from nothing, before all days. Then this chaotic, amorphous matter was subsequently arranged, in the succeeding six days”; De Genes. ad Lit., 4:27—“The length of these days is not to be determined by the length of our week-days. There is a series in both cases, and that is all.”We proceed now to the scheme:1. The earth, if originally in the condition of a gaseous fluid, must have been void and formless as described inGenesis 1:2. Here the earth is not yet separated from the condensing nebula, and its fluid condition is indicated by the term“waters.”2. The beginning of activity in matter would manifest itself by the production of light, since light is a resultant of molecular activity. This corresponds to the statement inverse 3. As the result of condensation, the nebula becomes luminous, and this process from darkness to light is described as follows:“there was evening and there was morning, one day.”Here we have a day without a sun—a feature in the narrative quite consistent with two facts of science: first, that the nebula would naturally be self-luminous, and, secondly, that the earth proper, which reached its present form before the sun, would, when it was thrown off, be itself a self-luminous and molten mass. The day was therefore continuous—day without night.3. The development of the earth into an independent sphere and its separation from the fluid around it answers to the dividing of“the waters under the firmament from the waters above,”inverse 7. Here the word“waters”is used to designate the“primordial cosmic material”(Guyot, Creation, 35-37), or the molten mass of earth and sun united, from which the earth is thrown off. The term“waters”is the best which the Hebrew language affords to express this idea of a fluid mass.Ps. 148seems to have this meaning, where it speaks of the“waters that are above the heavens”(verse 4)—waters which are distinguished from the“deeps”below (verse 7), and the“vapor”above (verse 8).4. The production of the earth's physical features by the partial condensation of the vapors which enveloped the igneous sphere, and by the consequent outlining of the continents and oceans, is next described inverse 9as the gathering of the waters into one place and the appearing of the dry land.5. The expression of the idea of life in the lowest plants, since it was in type and effect the creation of the vegetable kingdom, is next described inverse 11as a bringing into existence of the characteristic forms of that kingdom. This precedes all mention of animal life, since the vegetable kingdom is the natural basis of the animal. If it be said that our earliest fossils are animal, we reply that the earliest vegetable forms, thealgæ, were easily dissolved, and might as easily disappear; that graphite and bog-iron ore, appearing lower down than any animal remains, are the result of preceding vegetation; that animal forms, whenever and wherever existing, must subsist upon and presuppose the vegetable. The Eozoön is of necessity preceded by the Eophyte. If it[pg 396]be said that fruit-trees could not have been created on the third day, we reply that since the creation of the vegetable kingdom was to be described at one stroke and no mention of it was to be made subsequently, this is the proper place to introduce it and to mention its main characteristic forms. See Bible Commentary, 1:36; LeConte, Elements of Geology, 136, 285.6. The vapors which have hitherto shrouded the planet are now cleared away as preliminary to the introduction of life in its higher animal forms. The consequent appearance of solar light is described inverses 16and17as a making of the sun, moon, and stars, and a giving of them as luminaries to the earth. CompareGen. 9:13—“I do set my bow in the cloud.”As the rainbow had existed in nature before, but was now appointed to serve a peculiar purpose, so in the record of creation sun, moon and stars, which existed before, were appointed as visible lights for the earth,—and that for the reason that the earth was no longer self-luminous, and the light of the sun struggling through the earth's encompassing clouds was not sufficient for the higher forms of life which were to come.7. The exhibition of the four grand types of the animal kingdom (radiate, molluscan, articulate, vertebrate), which characterizes the next stage of geological progress, is represented inverses 20and21as a creation of the lower animals—those that swarm in the waters, and the creeping and flying species of the land. Huxley, in his American Addresses, objects to this assigning of the origin of birds to the fifth day, and declares that terrestrial animals exist in lower strata than any form of bird,—birds appearing only in the Oölitic, or New Red Sandstone. But we reply that the fifth day is devoted to sea-productions, while land-productions belong to the sixth. Birds, according to the latest science, are sea-productions, not land-productions. They originated from Saurians, and were, at the first, flying lizards. There being but one mention of sea-productions, all these, birds included, are crowded into the fifth day. Thus Genesis anticipates the latest science. On the ancestry of birds, see Pop. Science Monthly, March, 1884:606; Baptist Magazine, 1877:505.8. The introduction of mammals—viviparous species, which are eminent above all other vertebrates for a quality prophetic of a high moral purpose, that of suckling their young—is indicated inverses 24and25by the creation, on the sixth day, of cattle and beasts of prey.9. Man, the first being of moral and intellectual qualities, and the first in whom the unity of the great design has full expression, forms in both the Mosaic and geologic record the last step of progress in creation (seeverses 26-31). With Prof. Dana, we may say that“in this succession we observe not merely an order of events like that deduced from science; there is a system in the arrangement, and a far-reaching prophecy, to which philosophy could not have attained, however instructed.”See Dana, Manual of Geology, 741-746, and Bib. Sac., April, 1885:201-224. Richard Owen:“Man from the beginning of organisms was ideally present upon the earth”; see Owen, Anatomy of Vertebrates, 3:796; Louis Agassiz:“Man is the purpose toward which the whole animal creation tends from the first appearance of the first palæozoic fish.”Prof. John M. Taylor:“Man is not merely a mortal but a moral being. If he sinks below this plane of life he misses the path marked out for him by all his past development. In order to progress, the higher vertebrate had to subordinate everything to mental development. In order to become human it had to develop the rational intelligence. In order to become higher man, present man must subordinate everything to moral development. This is the great law of animal and human development clearly revealed in the sequence of physical and psychical functions.”W. E. Gladstone in S. S. Times, April 26, 1890, calls the Mosaic days“chapters in the history of creation.”He objects to calling them epochs or periods, because they are not of equal length, and they sometimes overlap. But he defends the general correspondence of the Mosaic narrative with the latest conclusions of science, and remarks:“Any man whose labor and duty for several scores of years has included as their central point the study of the means of making himself intelligible to the mass of men, is in a far better position to judge what would be the forms and methods of speech proper for the Mosaic writer to adopt, than the most perfect Hebraist as such, or the most consummate votary of physical science as such.”On the whole subject, see Guyot, Creation; Review of Guyot, in N. Eng., July, 1884:591-594; Tayler Lewis, Six Days of Creation; Thompson, Man in Genesis and in Geology; Agassiz, in Atlantic Monthly, Jan. 1874; Dawson, Story of the Earth and Man, 82, and in Expositor, Apl. 1886; LeConte, Science and Religion, 264; Hill, in Bib. Sac., April, 1875; Peirce, Ideality in the Physical Sciences, 38-72; Boardman, The Creative Week;[pg 397]Godet, Bib. Studies of O. T., 65-138; Bell, in Nature, Nov. 24 and Dec. 1, 1882; W. E. Gladstone, in Nineteenth Century, Nov. 1885:685-707, Jan. 1886:1, 176; reply by Huxley, in Nineteenth Century, Dec. 1885, and Feb. 1886; Schmid, Theories of Darwin; Bartlett, Sources of History in the Pentateuch, 1-35; Cotterill, Does Science Aid Faith in Regard to Creation? Cox, Miracles, 1-39—chapter 1, on the Original Miracle—that of Creation; Zöckler, Theologie und Naturwissenschaft, and Urgeschichte, 1-77; Reusch, Bib. Schöpfungsgeschichte. On difficulties of the nebular hypothesis, see Stallo, Modern Physics, 277-293.
We adopt neither (a) the allegorical, or mythical, (b) the hyperliteral, nor (c) the hyperscientific interpretation of the Mosaic narrative; but rather (d) the pictorial-summary interpretation,—which holds that the account is a rough sketch of the history of creation, true in all its essential features, but presented in a graphic form suited to the common mind and to earlier as well as to later ages. While conveying to primitive man as accurate an idea of God's work as man was able to comprehend, the revelation[pg 394]was yet given in pregnant language, so that it could expand to all the ascertained results of subsequent physical research. This general correspondence of the narrative with the teachings of science, and its power to adapt itself to every advance in human knowledge, differences it from every other cosmogony current among men.
(a) Theallegorical, ormythical interpretation, represents the Mosaic account as embodying, like the Indian and Greek cosmogonies, the poetic speculations of an early race as to the origin of the present system. We object to this interpretation upon the ground that the narrative of creation is inseparably connected with the succeeding history, and is therefore most naturally regarded as itself historical. This connection of the narrative of creation with the subsequent history, moreover, prevents us from believing it to be the description of a vision granted to Moses. It is more probably the record of an original revelation to the first man, handed down to Moses' time, and used by Moses as a proper introduction to his history.We object also to the view of some higher critics that the book of Genesis contains two inconsistent stories. Marcus Dods, Book of Genesis, 2—“The compiler of this book ... lays side by side two accounts of man's creation which no ingenuity can reconcile.”Charles A. Briggs:“The doctrine of creation in Genesis 1 is altogether different from that taught in Genesis 2.”W. N. Clarke, Christian Theology, 199-201—“It has been commonly assumed that the two are parallel, and tell one and the same story; but examination shows that this is not the case.... We have here the record of a tradition, rather than a revelation.... It cannot be taken as literal history, and it does not tell by divine authority how man was created.”To these utterances we reply that the two accounts are not inconsistent but complementary, the first chapter of Genesis describing man's creation as the crown of God's general work, the second describing man's creation with greater particularity as the beginning of human history.Canon Rawlinson, in Aids to Faith, 275, compares the Mosaic account with the cosmogony of Berosus, the Chaldean. Pfleiderer, Philos. of Religion, 1:267-272, gives an account of heathen theories of the origin of the universe. Anaxagoras was the first who represented the chaotic first matter as formed through the ordering understanding (νοῦς) of God, and Aristotle for that reason called him“the first sober one among many drunken.”Schurman, Belief in God, 138—“In these cosmogonies the world and the gods grow up together; cosmogony is, at the same time, theogony.”Dr. E. G. Robinson:“The Bible writers believed and intended to state that the world was made in three literal days. But, on the principle that God may have meant more than they did, the doctrine of periods may not be inconsistent with their account.”For comparison of the Biblical with heathen cosmogonies, see Blackie in Theol. Eclectic, 1:77-87; Guyot, Creation, 58-63; Pope, Theology, 1:401, 402; Bible Commentary, 1:36, 48; McIlvaine, Wisdom of Holy Scripture, 1-54; J. F. Clarke, Ten Great Religions, 2:193-221. For the theory of“prophetic vision,”see Kurtz, Hist. of Old Covenant, Introd., i-xxxvii, civ-cxxx; and Hugh Miller, Testimony of the Rocks, 179-210; Hastings, Dict. Bible, art.: Cosmogony; Sayce, Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia, 372-397.(b) Thehyperliteral interpretationwould withdraw the narrative from all comparison with the conclusions of science, by putting the ages of geological history between the first and second verses ofGen. 1, and by making the remainder of the chapter an account of the fitting up of the earth, or of some limited portion of it, in six days of twenty-four hours each. Among the advocates of this view, now generally discarded, are Chalmers, Natural Theology, Works, 1:228-258, and John Pye Smith, Mosaic Account of Creation, and Scripture and Geology. To this view we object that there is no indication, in the Mosaic narrative, of so vast an interval between the first and the second verses; that there is no indication, in the geological history, of any such break between the ages of preparation and the present time (see Hugh Miller, Testimony of the Rocks, 141-178); and that there are indications in the Mosaic record itself that the word“day”is not used in its literal sense; while the other Scriptures unquestionably employ it to designate a period of indefinite duration (Gen. 1:5—“God called the light Day”—a day before there was a sun;8—“there was evening and there was morning, a second day”;2:2—God“rested on the seventh day”;cf.Heb. 4:3-10—where God's day of rest seems to continue, and his people are exhorted to enter into it;Gen. 2:4—“the day that Jehovah made earth and heaven”—“day”here covers all the seven days;cf.Is. 2:12—“a day of Jehovah of hosts”;Zech. 14:7—“it shall be one day which is known unto Jehovah; not day, and not night”;2 Pet. 3:8—“one day is with the Lord as[pg 395]a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day”). Guyot, Creation, 34, objects also to this interpretation, that the narrative purports to give a history of the making of the heavens as well as of the earth (Gen. 2:4—“these are the generations of the heaven and of the earth”), whereas this interpretation confines the history to the earth. On the meaning of the word“day,”as a period of indefinite duration, see Dana, Manual of Geology, 744; LeConte, Religion and Science, 262.(c) Thehyperscientific interpretationwould find in the narrative a minute and precise correspondence with the geological record. This is not to be expected, since it is foreign to the purpose of revelation to teach science. Although a general concord between the Mosaic and geological histories may be pointed out, it is a needless embarrassment to compel ourselves to find in every detail of the former an accurate statement of some scientific fact. Far more probable we hold to be(d) Thepictorial-summary interpretation. Before explaining this in detail, we would premise that we do not hold this or any future scheme of reconciling Genesis and geology to be a finality. Such a settlement of all the questions involved would presuppose not only a perfected science of the physical universe, but also a perfected science of hermeneutics. It is enough if we can offer tentative solutions which represent the present state of thought upon the subject. Remembering, then, that any such scheme of reconciliation may speedily be outgrown without prejudice to the truth of the Scripture narrative, we present the following as an approximate account of the coincidences between the Mosaic and the geological records. The scheme here given is a combination of the conclusions of Dana and Guyot, and assumes the substantial truth of the nebular hypothesis. It is interesting to observe that Augustine, who knew nothing of modern science, should have reached, by simple study of the text, some of the same results. See his Confessions, 12:8—“First God created a chaotic matter, which wasnexttonothing. This chaotic matter was made from nothing, before all days. Then this chaotic, amorphous matter was subsequently arranged, in the succeeding six days”; De Genes. ad Lit., 4:27—“The length of these days is not to be determined by the length of our week-days. There is a series in both cases, and that is all.”We proceed now to the scheme:1. The earth, if originally in the condition of a gaseous fluid, must have been void and formless as described inGenesis 1:2. Here the earth is not yet separated from the condensing nebula, and its fluid condition is indicated by the term“waters.”2. The beginning of activity in matter would manifest itself by the production of light, since light is a resultant of molecular activity. This corresponds to the statement inverse 3. As the result of condensation, the nebula becomes luminous, and this process from darkness to light is described as follows:“there was evening and there was morning, one day.”Here we have a day without a sun—a feature in the narrative quite consistent with two facts of science: first, that the nebula would naturally be self-luminous, and, secondly, that the earth proper, which reached its present form before the sun, would, when it was thrown off, be itself a self-luminous and molten mass. The day was therefore continuous—day without night.3. The development of the earth into an independent sphere and its separation from the fluid around it answers to the dividing of“the waters under the firmament from the waters above,”inverse 7. Here the word“waters”is used to designate the“primordial cosmic material”(Guyot, Creation, 35-37), or the molten mass of earth and sun united, from which the earth is thrown off. The term“waters”is the best which the Hebrew language affords to express this idea of a fluid mass.Ps. 148seems to have this meaning, where it speaks of the“waters that are above the heavens”(verse 4)—waters which are distinguished from the“deeps”below (verse 7), and the“vapor”above (verse 8).4. The production of the earth's physical features by the partial condensation of the vapors which enveloped the igneous sphere, and by the consequent outlining of the continents and oceans, is next described inverse 9as the gathering of the waters into one place and the appearing of the dry land.5. The expression of the idea of life in the lowest plants, since it was in type and effect the creation of the vegetable kingdom, is next described inverse 11as a bringing into existence of the characteristic forms of that kingdom. This precedes all mention of animal life, since the vegetable kingdom is the natural basis of the animal. If it be said that our earliest fossils are animal, we reply that the earliest vegetable forms, thealgæ, were easily dissolved, and might as easily disappear; that graphite and bog-iron ore, appearing lower down than any animal remains, are the result of preceding vegetation; that animal forms, whenever and wherever existing, must subsist upon and presuppose the vegetable. The Eozoön is of necessity preceded by the Eophyte. If it[pg 396]be said that fruit-trees could not have been created on the third day, we reply that since the creation of the vegetable kingdom was to be described at one stroke and no mention of it was to be made subsequently, this is the proper place to introduce it and to mention its main characteristic forms. See Bible Commentary, 1:36; LeConte, Elements of Geology, 136, 285.6. The vapors which have hitherto shrouded the planet are now cleared away as preliminary to the introduction of life in its higher animal forms. The consequent appearance of solar light is described inverses 16and17as a making of the sun, moon, and stars, and a giving of them as luminaries to the earth. CompareGen. 9:13—“I do set my bow in the cloud.”As the rainbow had existed in nature before, but was now appointed to serve a peculiar purpose, so in the record of creation sun, moon and stars, which existed before, were appointed as visible lights for the earth,—and that for the reason that the earth was no longer self-luminous, and the light of the sun struggling through the earth's encompassing clouds was not sufficient for the higher forms of life which were to come.7. The exhibition of the four grand types of the animal kingdom (radiate, molluscan, articulate, vertebrate), which characterizes the next stage of geological progress, is represented inverses 20and21as a creation of the lower animals—those that swarm in the waters, and the creeping and flying species of the land. Huxley, in his American Addresses, objects to this assigning of the origin of birds to the fifth day, and declares that terrestrial animals exist in lower strata than any form of bird,—birds appearing only in the Oölitic, or New Red Sandstone. But we reply that the fifth day is devoted to sea-productions, while land-productions belong to the sixth. Birds, according to the latest science, are sea-productions, not land-productions. They originated from Saurians, and were, at the first, flying lizards. There being but one mention of sea-productions, all these, birds included, are crowded into the fifth day. Thus Genesis anticipates the latest science. On the ancestry of birds, see Pop. Science Monthly, March, 1884:606; Baptist Magazine, 1877:505.8. The introduction of mammals—viviparous species, which are eminent above all other vertebrates for a quality prophetic of a high moral purpose, that of suckling their young—is indicated inverses 24and25by the creation, on the sixth day, of cattle and beasts of prey.9. Man, the first being of moral and intellectual qualities, and the first in whom the unity of the great design has full expression, forms in both the Mosaic and geologic record the last step of progress in creation (seeverses 26-31). With Prof. Dana, we may say that“in this succession we observe not merely an order of events like that deduced from science; there is a system in the arrangement, and a far-reaching prophecy, to which philosophy could not have attained, however instructed.”See Dana, Manual of Geology, 741-746, and Bib. Sac., April, 1885:201-224. Richard Owen:“Man from the beginning of organisms was ideally present upon the earth”; see Owen, Anatomy of Vertebrates, 3:796; Louis Agassiz:“Man is the purpose toward which the whole animal creation tends from the first appearance of the first palæozoic fish.”Prof. John M. Taylor:“Man is not merely a mortal but a moral being. If he sinks below this plane of life he misses the path marked out for him by all his past development. In order to progress, the higher vertebrate had to subordinate everything to mental development. In order to become human it had to develop the rational intelligence. In order to become higher man, present man must subordinate everything to moral development. This is the great law of animal and human development clearly revealed in the sequence of physical and psychical functions.”W. E. Gladstone in S. S. Times, April 26, 1890, calls the Mosaic days“chapters in the history of creation.”He objects to calling them epochs or periods, because they are not of equal length, and they sometimes overlap. But he defends the general correspondence of the Mosaic narrative with the latest conclusions of science, and remarks:“Any man whose labor and duty for several scores of years has included as their central point the study of the means of making himself intelligible to the mass of men, is in a far better position to judge what would be the forms and methods of speech proper for the Mosaic writer to adopt, than the most perfect Hebraist as such, or the most consummate votary of physical science as such.”On the whole subject, see Guyot, Creation; Review of Guyot, in N. Eng., July, 1884:591-594; Tayler Lewis, Six Days of Creation; Thompson, Man in Genesis and in Geology; Agassiz, in Atlantic Monthly, Jan. 1874; Dawson, Story of the Earth and Man, 82, and in Expositor, Apl. 1886; LeConte, Science and Religion, 264; Hill, in Bib. Sac., April, 1875; Peirce, Ideality in the Physical Sciences, 38-72; Boardman, The Creative Week;[pg 397]Godet, Bib. Studies of O. T., 65-138; Bell, in Nature, Nov. 24 and Dec. 1, 1882; W. E. Gladstone, in Nineteenth Century, Nov. 1885:685-707, Jan. 1886:1, 176; reply by Huxley, in Nineteenth Century, Dec. 1885, and Feb. 1886; Schmid, Theories of Darwin; Bartlett, Sources of History in the Pentateuch, 1-35; Cotterill, Does Science Aid Faith in Regard to Creation? Cox, Miracles, 1-39—chapter 1, on the Original Miracle—that of Creation; Zöckler, Theologie und Naturwissenschaft, and Urgeschichte, 1-77; Reusch, Bib. Schöpfungsgeschichte. On difficulties of the nebular hypothesis, see Stallo, Modern Physics, 277-293.
(a) Theallegorical, ormythical interpretation, represents the Mosaic account as embodying, like the Indian and Greek cosmogonies, the poetic speculations of an early race as to the origin of the present system. We object to this interpretation upon the ground that the narrative of creation is inseparably connected with the succeeding history, and is therefore most naturally regarded as itself historical. This connection of the narrative of creation with the subsequent history, moreover, prevents us from believing it to be the description of a vision granted to Moses. It is more probably the record of an original revelation to the first man, handed down to Moses' time, and used by Moses as a proper introduction to his history.
We object also to the view of some higher critics that the book of Genesis contains two inconsistent stories. Marcus Dods, Book of Genesis, 2—“The compiler of this book ... lays side by side two accounts of man's creation which no ingenuity can reconcile.”Charles A. Briggs:“The doctrine of creation in Genesis 1 is altogether different from that taught in Genesis 2.”W. N. Clarke, Christian Theology, 199-201—“It has been commonly assumed that the two are parallel, and tell one and the same story; but examination shows that this is not the case.... We have here the record of a tradition, rather than a revelation.... It cannot be taken as literal history, and it does not tell by divine authority how man was created.”To these utterances we reply that the two accounts are not inconsistent but complementary, the first chapter of Genesis describing man's creation as the crown of God's general work, the second describing man's creation with greater particularity as the beginning of human history.
Canon Rawlinson, in Aids to Faith, 275, compares the Mosaic account with the cosmogony of Berosus, the Chaldean. Pfleiderer, Philos. of Religion, 1:267-272, gives an account of heathen theories of the origin of the universe. Anaxagoras was the first who represented the chaotic first matter as formed through the ordering understanding (νοῦς) of God, and Aristotle for that reason called him“the first sober one among many drunken.”Schurman, Belief in God, 138—“In these cosmogonies the world and the gods grow up together; cosmogony is, at the same time, theogony.”Dr. E. G. Robinson:“The Bible writers believed and intended to state that the world was made in three literal days. But, on the principle that God may have meant more than they did, the doctrine of periods may not be inconsistent with their account.”For comparison of the Biblical with heathen cosmogonies, see Blackie in Theol. Eclectic, 1:77-87; Guyot, Creation, 58-63; Pope, Theology, 1:401, 402; Bible Commentary, 1:36, 48; McIlvaine, Wisdom of Holy Scripture, 1-54; J. F. Clarke, Ten Great Religions, 2:193-221. For the theory of“prophetic vision,”see Kurtz, Hist. of Old Covenant, Introd., i-xxxvii, civ-cxxx; and Hugh Miller, Testimony of the Rocks, 179-210; Hastings, Dict. Bible, art.: Cosmogony; Sayce, Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia, 372-397.
(b) Thehyperliteral interpretationwould withdraw the narrative from all comparison with the conclusions of science, by putting the ages of geological history between the first and second verses ofGen. 1, and by making the remainder of the chapter an account of the fitting up of the earth, or of some limited portion of it, in six days of twenty-four hours each. Among the advocates of this view, now generally discarded, are Chalmers, Natural Theology, Works, 1:228-258, and John Pye Smith, Mosaic Account of Creation, and Scripture and Geology. To this view we object that there is no indication, in the Mosaic narrative, of so vast an interval between the first and the second verses; that there is no indication, in the geological history, of any such break between the ages of preparation and the present time (see Hugh Miller, Testimony of the Rocks, 141-178); and that there are indications in the Mosaic record itself that the word“day”is not used in its literal sense; while the other Scriptures unquestionably employ it to designate a period of indefinite duration (Gen. 1:5—“God called the light Day”—a day before there was a sun;8—“there was evening and there was morning, a second day”;2:2—God“rested on the seventh day”;cf.Heb. 4:3-10—where God's day of rest seems to continue, and his people are exhorted to enter into it;Gen. 2:4—“the day that Jehovah made earth and heaven”—“day”here covers all the seven days;cf.Is. 2:12—“a day of Jehovah of hosts”;Zech. 14:7—“it shall be one day which is known unto Jehovah; not day, and not night”;2 Pet. 3:8—“one day is with the Lord as[pg 395]a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day”). Guyot, Creation, 34, objects also to this interpretation, that the narrative purports to give a history of the making of the heavens as well as of the earth (Gen. 2:4—“these are the generations of the heaven and of the earth”), whereas this interpretation confines the history to the earth. On the meaning of the word“day,”as a period of indefinite duration, see Dana, Manual of Geology, 744; LeConte, Religion and Science, 262.
(c) Thehyperscientific interpretationwould find in the narrative a minute and precise correspondence with the geological record. This is not to be expected, since it is foreign to the purpose of revelation to teach science. Although a general concord between the Mosaic and geological histories may be pointed out, it is a needless embarrassment to compel ourselves to find in every detail of the former an accurate statement of some scientific fact. Far more probable we hold to be
(d) Thepictorial-summary interpretation. Before explaining this in detail, we would premise that we do not hold this or any future scheme of reconciling Genesis and geology to be a finality. Such a settlement of all the questions involved would presuppose not only a perfected science of the physical universe, but also a perfected science of hermeneutics. It is enough if we can offer tentative solutions which represent the present state of thought upon the subject. Remembering, then, that any such scheme of reconciliation may speedily be outgrown without prejudice to the truth of the Scripture narrative, we present the following as an approximate account of the coincidences between the Mosaic and the geological records. The scheme here given is a combination of the conclusions of Dana and Guyot, and assumes the substantial truth of the nebular hypothesis. It is interesting to observe that Augustine, who knew nothing of modern science, should have reached, by simple study of the text, some of the same results. See his Confessions, 12:8—“First God created a chaotic matter, which wasnexttonothing. This chaotic matter was made from nothing, before all days. Then this chaotic, amorphous matter was subsequently arranged, in the succeeding six days”; De Genes. ad Lit., 4:27—“The length of these days is not to be determined by the length of our week-days. There is a series in both cases, and that is all.”We proceed now to the scheme:
1. The earth, if originally in the condition of a gaseous fluid, must have been void and formless as described inGenesis 1:2. Here the earth is not yet separated from the condensing nebula, and its fluid condition is indicated by the term“waters.”
2. The beginning of activity in matter would manifest itself by the production of light, since light is a resultant of molecular activity. This corresponds to the statement inverse 3. As the result of condensation, the nebula becomes luminous, and this process from darkness to light is described as follows:“there was evening and there was morning, one day.”Here we have a day without a sun—a feature in the narrative quite consistent with two facts of science: first, that the nebula would naturally be self-luminous, and, secondly, that the earth proper, which reached its present form before the sun, would, when it was thrown off, be itself a self-luminous and molten mass. The day was therefore continuous—day without night.
3. The development of the earth into an independent sphere and its separation from the fluid around it answers to the dividing of“the waters under the firmament from the waters above,”inverse 7. Here the word“waters”is used to designate the“primordial cosmic material”(Guyot, Creation, 35-37), or the molten mass of earth and sun united, from which the earth is thrown off. The term“waters”is the best which the Hebrew language affords to express this idea of a fluid mass.Ps. 148seems to have this meaning, where it speaks of the“waters that are above the heavens”(verse 4)—waters which are distinguished from the“deeps”below (verse 7), and the“vapor”above (verse 8).
4. The production of the earth's physical features by the partial condensation of the vapors which enveloped the igneous sphere, and by the consequent outlining of the continents and oceans, is next described inverse 9as the gathering of the waters into one place and the appearing of the dry land.
5. The expression of the idea of life in the lowest plants, since it was in type and effect the creation of the vegetable kingdom, is next described inverse 11as a bringing into existence of the characteristic forms of that kingdom. This precedes all mention of animal life, since the vegetable kingdom is the natural basis of the animal. If it be said that our earliest fossils are animal, we reply that the earliest vegetable forms, thealgæ, were easily dissolved, and might as easily disappear; that graphite and bog-iron ore, appearing lower down than any animal remains, are the result of preceding vegetation; that animal forms, whenever and wherever existing, must subsist upon and presuppose the vegetable. The Eozoön is of necessity preceded by the Eophyte. If it[pg 396]be said that fruit-trees could not have been created on the third day, we reply that since the creation of the vegetable kingdom was to be described at one stroke and no mention of it was to be made subsequently, this is the proper place to introduce it and to mention its main characteristic forms. See Bible Commentary, 1:36; LeConte, Elements of Geology, 136, 285.
6. The vapors which have hitherto shrouded the planet are now cleared away as preliminary to the introduction of life in its higher animal forms. The consequent appearance of solar light is described inverses 16and17as a making of the sun, moon, and stars, and a giving of them as luminaries to the earth. CompareGen. 9:13—“I do set my bow in the cloud.”As the rainbow had existed in nature before, but was now appointed to serve a peculiar purpose, so in the record of creation sun, moon and stars, which existed before, were appointed as visible lights for the earth,—and that for the reason that the earth was no longer self-luminous, and the light of the sun struggling through the earth's encompassing clouds was not sufficient for the higher forms of life which were to come.
7. The exhibition of the four grand types of the animal kingdom (radiate, molluscan, articulate, vertebrate), which characterizes the next stage of geological progress, is represented inverses 20and21as a creation of the lower animals—those that swarm in the waters, and the creeping and flying species of the land. Huxley, in his American Addresses, objects to this assigning of the origin of birds to the fifth day, and declares that terrestrial animals exist in lower strata than any form of bird,—birds appearing only in the Oölitic, or New Red Sandstone. But we reply that the fifth day is devoted to sea-productions, while land-productions belong to the sixth. Birds, according to the latest science, are sea-productions, not land-productions. They originated from Saurians, and were, at the first, flying lizards. There being but one mention of sea-productions, all these, birds included, are crowded into the fifth day. Thus Genesis anticipates the latest science. On the ancestry of birds, see Pop. Science Monthly, March, 1884:606; Baptist Magazine, 1877:505.
8. The introduction of mammals—viviparous species, which are eminent above all other vertebrates for a quality prophetic of a high moral purpose, that of suckling their young—is indicated inverses 24and25by the creation, on the sixth day, of cattle and beasts of prey.
9. Man, the first being of moral and intellectual qualities, and the first in whom the unity of the great design has full expression, forms in both the Mosaic and geologic record the last step of progress in creation (seeverses 26-31). With Prof. Dana, we may say that“in this succession we observe not merely an order of events like that deduced from science; there is a system in the arrangement, and a far-reaching prophecy, to which philosophy could not have attained, however instructed.”See Dana, Manual of Geology, 741-746, and Bib. Sac., April, 1885:201-224. Richard Owen:“Man from the beginning of organisms was ideally present upon the earth”; see Owen, Anatomy of Vertebrates, 3:796; Louis Agassiz:“Man is the purpose toward which the whole animal creation tends from the first appearance of the first palæozoic fish.”
Prof. John M. Taylor:“Man is not merely a mortal but a moral being. If he sinks below this plane of life he misses the path marked out for him by all his past development. In order to progress, the higher vertebrate had to subordinate everything to mental development. In order to become human it had to develop the rational intelligence. In order to become higher man, present man must subordinate everything to moral development. This is the great law of animal and human development clearly revealed in the sequence of physical and psychical functions.”W. E. Gladstone in S. S. Times, April 26, 1890, calls the Mosaic days“chapters in the history of creation.”He objects to calling them epochs or periods, because they are not of equal length, and they sometimes overlap. But he defends the general correspondence of the Mosaic narrative with the latest conclusions of science, and remarks:“Any man whose labor and duty for several scores of years has included as their central point the study of the means of making himself intelligible to the mass of men, is in a far better position to judge what would be the forms and methods of speech proper for the Mosaic writer to adopt, than the most perfect Hebraist as such, or the most consummate votary of physical science as such.”
On the whole subject, see Guyot, Creation; Review of Guyot, in N. Eng., July, 1884:591-594; Tayler Lewis, Six Days of Creation; Thompson, Man in Genesis and in Geology; Agassiz, in Atlantic Monthly, Jan. 1874; Dawson, Story of the Earth and Man, 82, and in Expositor, Apl. 1886; LeConte, Science and Religion, 264; Hill, in Bib. Sac., April, 1875; Peirce, Ideality in the Physical Sciences, 38-72; Boardman, The Creative Week;[pg 397]Godet, Bib. Studies of O. T., 65-138; Bell, in Nature, Nov. 24 and Dec. 1, 1882; W. E. Gladstone, in Nineteenth Century, Nov. 1885:685-707, Jan. 1886:1, 176; reply by Huxley, in Nineteenth Century, Dec. 1885, and Feb. 1886; Schmid, Theories of Darwin; Bartlett, Sources of History in the Pentateuch, 1-35; Cotterill, Does Science Aid Faith in Regard to Creation? Cox, Miracles, 1-39—chapter 1, on the Original Miracle—that of Creation; Zöckler, Theologie und Naturwissenschaft, and Urgeschichte, 1-77; Reusch, Bib. Schöpfungsgeschichte. On difficulties of the nebular hypothesis, see Stallo, Modern Physics, 277-293.