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Another nail was driven into the coffin of Creation and the Fall of Adam, and the doctrine of redemption could only be rescued by making it independent of the Jewish fable on which it was founded. Darwinism, as it is called, has had the larger effect of discrediting the theory of the adaptation of means to ends in nature by an external and infinitely powerful intelligence.
It is useless to multiply quotations. Darwinism is never brought up either formally or incidentally, that its exclusion of design in the formation of living organisms is not urged as the main objection against the whole theory. By George Warington, Esq., F. C. S., M. V. I. On certain Analogies between the Methods of Deity in Nature and Revelation. By Rev. G. E. Henslow, M. A., F. L. S., M. V. I.
Scathing criticisms were uttered on Darwin's ideas, both on the platform and in print, by Doctor Noah Porter of Yale, Doctor Hodge of Princeton, and Doctor Tayler Lewis of Union College. Agassiz, the man who was regarded as the foremost scientist in America, thought he had to choose between orthodoxy and Darwinism, and he chose orthodoxy.
Some of the most distinguished of the German biologists of the present day, such men as Driesch and others, calmly tell us that the edifice erected by Darwin will have to come down because of newly discovered evidence, and indeed some of them go so far as to declare that Darwinism was a crude hypothesis very superficial in its philosophical aspects and therefore acceptable to a great many people who, because it was easy to understand and was very different from what our fathers had believed, hastened to accept it.
This matter-of-fact Darwinism need not frighten us. It will do us no harm to remember, now and then, "the hole of the pit whence we were digged;" and besides, as far as any relationship between us and the birds is concerned, it is doubtful whether we are the party to complain.
It might be well for them to remember that Darwin himself was compelled by his better sense to declare that science demands a miracle in order to the existence of the living unit lying at the base of the series of evolution. So after all it remains a fact that Darwinism is chained to miracle.
There is a feeling abroad now, to which biology and Darwinism lend some colour, that theory is simply an instrument for practice, and intelligence merely a help toward material survival. Bears, it is said, have fur and claws, but poor naked man is condemned to be intelligent, or he will perish. This feeling William James embodied in that theory of thought and of truth which he called pragmatism.
Haeckel, a most extreme evolutionist, confesses: "Most modern investigators of science have come to the conclusion that the doctrine of evolution, and particularly Darwinism, is an error, and can not be maintained." Prof. Huxley, said that evolution is "not proved and not provable."
The author of the work with which we are dealing tells us that "Darwin's law of selection as a natural explanation of the origin of all fitness in form and function has lost its prestige at the present time, and all of Darwinism which now meets with universal acceptance is the law of the survival of the fittest, a limited application of Darwin's great idea as expressed by Herbert Spencer."
I really believe that the alternative is either Darwinism or nothing, for I do not know of any rational conception or theory of the organic universe which has any scientific position at all beside Mr. Darwin's.