Excerpts from



Excerpts from

Evolution for John Doe (1925)

by Henshaw Ward

Chapter I: What John Doe Thinks About Evolution

John Doe thinks evolution is “the doctrine that man is descended from monkeys,” and he is so amused or so offended at this theory that his whole mind is occupied with it. His conception is ridiculously false. Until John Doe discards that notion and takes a fresh start, he will never understand the subject . . .

John Doe thinks that evolution explains the origin of life. But no scientist pretends to know anything about the origin, and in this book nothing is said of a subject which is far beyond the reach of the present human knowledge.

John Doe thinks evolution has something to do with “progress”—that it announces some creed of an onward and upward movement toward perfection. Evolution is nothing of the sort; it does not venture into any speculation about the meaning of life or its final goal. In this book there is no doctrine of “progress” and no philosophical reasoning . . .

John Doe guesses that evolution is true, but he rather wishes it were not. He has a vague fear that the theory is materialistic and tends to weaken religious faith. If he reads the opinions of eminent divines in Part Three, he will find that there is no ground for his fear. Recently a young Presbyterian minister said to me, “All our thinking is now based on evolution.” He represents the thought of many divinity schools to-day.

John Doe suspects from head-lines in his newspaper that evolution is a debatable theory, that it is being overthrown every six months, and that it may be discarded before long . . . [Evolution] is here to stay . . . every reputable modern scientist believes in it as a matter of course. It is now an integral part of all general education and culture. To suppose that it may some day be abandoned is to live in intellectual barbarism . . .

Probably most intelligent people have tried during the last quarter-century to learn something about a theory that has remodeled all the world’s knowledge and profoundly affected its way of thinking . . . [15-17]

Chapter XXV: The Fosdick Idea

. . . What Protestant has not heard of Henry Drummond? His Natural Law in the Spiritual World has been an inspiration to hundreds of thousands of Christians, and he accompanied the evangelist, Moody, in many of his revival services. “If God comes upon the scene at special crises,” says Drummond, “He is absent from the scene in the intervals. Is all-God or occasional-God the nobler theory? The idea of an immanent God, which is the God of evolution, is infinitely grander than the occasional wonder-worker who is the God of an old theology.”

As for the Catholics, their church has never pronounced against evolution. Every priest has always been free to believe in Darwinism or not. To give a view of what Catholics have done with the freedom in recent years I quote a few excerpts from a letter to the New York Times, written by Doctor Bertram C. A. Windle, of St. Michael’s College, University of Toronto. “The Church is neither committed to the crude and unthinkable Miltonic idea of creation, nor to the rigid ‘special creation’ view of Linnaeus. This entails an idea of species which is increasingly difficult to hold. The Church has never expressed any opinion as to the method of creation . . . From the time of St. Augustine of Hippo in the fourth century there has been a constant stream of suggestion that at the creation many, almost certainly most, living things were created, as he puts it, ‘potentially,’ and so as not then to appear, but only as an unfolded product when the time for them had arrived . . . St. Thomas Aquinas centuries ago . . . mentions this thesis with approval; and in the best writings of to-day what the last important writer, Professor de Dorlodot of Louvain University (a paleontologist) calls ‘the moderate view,’ is adopted—a view which is exactly that which was defined by Darwin himself when he wrote of ‘life with its several powers having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or one, and that from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been and are being evolved . . .’ Father Wasmann, S. J., the eminent authority on ants, and indeed on biology generally, when expressing his concurrence with this view says: ‘My own conviction is that God’s power and wisdom are shown forth much more clearly by bringing about these extremely various conditions through the natural causes of a race evolution than they would be by a direct creation of the various species.’ . . . My second quotation shall be from M. de Dorlodot . . . ‘It seems to me that the more science progresses, the more audible becomes the voice of nature proclaiming the glory of its Creator. And among the heralds whom nature has used to make her voice heard, even to the ends of the earth, I think it just to place in the first rank Charles Darwin.’” . . .

I have called this chapter the “Fosdick Idea” because the thought in it has been forcefully presented by the Reverend Harry Emerson Fosdick, who is a Baptist, a professor in the Union Theological Seminary, one of the best-known preachers of the day and one of the most effective in reaching young people . . . If he is wrong, heaven help the church. I quote from the answer which the New York Times asked him to make a communication that it had printed from Mr. Bryan, entitled “God and Evolution.” Doctor Fosdick’s article has been reprinted in several religious journals:

‘A large number of Christian people are quite as shocked as any scientist could be at Mr. Bryan’s sincere but appalling obscurantism . . .

The Bible is for Mr. Bryan an authoritative textbook in biology—and if in biology, why not in astronomy, chemistry, or any other science, art, or concern of man whatever? One who is acquainted with the history of theological thought gasps as he reads this . . .

One who is a teacher and preacher of religion raises his protest against this use of the Bible because it does such gross injustice to the Bible. When one reads an article like Mr. Bryan’s, one feels, not that the Bible is being defended, but that it is being attacked.

The fundamental interest which leads Mr. Bryan and others of his school to hated evolution is the fear that it will depreciate the dignity of man. Just what do they mean? Even in the Book of Genesis God made man out of the dust of the earth. Surely that is low enough to start, and evolution starts no lower. So long as God is the creative power, what difference does it make whether out of the dust by sudden fiat or out of the dust by gradual process God brought man into being?

If one could appeal directly to Mr. Bryan, he would wish to say: Let the scientists thrash out the problem of man’s biological origin, but in the meantime do not teach men that if God did not make us by fiat, then we have nothing but a bestial heritage. That is a lie, which once believed, will have a terrific harvest.

The real enemies of the Christian faith are not the evolutionary biologists, but folk like Mr. Bryan who insist on setting up artificial adhesions between Christianity and outgrown scientific opinions. The pity is that so many students will believe him and will give up Christianity in accordance with his insistence that they must . . .

If he [Bryan] does succeed in arousing a real battle over the issue, we can promise him also that just as earnestly as the scientists will fight against him in the name of scientific freedom of investigation, so will multitudes of Christians fight against him in the name of their religion and their God.’ [332-336]

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