Written by Robert Roberts

Brethren Of Christ Articles - Creation Vs Evolution

IS THERE A GOD?  there must be!  If you ask, Why?  I would say because Creation shows purpose.— Do I mean design?— Not exactly.  Design and purpose are no doubt the same thing in some connections; but I use purpose in a sense different from the meaning usually attached to “design” in arguments about God.  I mean a purpose invested in Creation itself.  When men say Creation shows design, they mean that it is so wisely made that it must have had a Maker:  that as the hand is so exactly adapted for prehension, it must have had an Adapter:  that as the eye is so exquisitely contrived for sight, it must have had a Contriver.  Creation shows a purpose that it should be carried on, the capacity for reproduction attaching to every plant and animal under the sun.  Evolutionist contend that the various existing forms of life have been evolved and shaped through what might be called the stress of necessity blindly acting upon them through circumstances; thus, the birds are supposed to have gradually got their wings through wanting to fly, the fishes their fins through wanting to swim; the men their legs and arms through wanting to walk and handle things, and so on.  Exercise is supposed to have developed them more and more through long ages.

Are there not difficulties in the way of these suppositions?  For example, how could a wing exercise itself in flying until it was a wing, and how could it become a wing in the first place?  But nevertheless, in a rough way, it is barely conceivable (at least as a hypothesis) that life has been developed by blind necessity, acting without purpose or intelligence in the stupendous laboratory of the universe, through the exigency of what is called “environment.”  But how can the mechanism of re-production be brought into this conception?  Re-production has no relation to the creature itself.  It has reference to successors.  It is a thing of futurity.  It cannot be the product of “environment.”  There is no necessity in the creature itself that it should be re-placed by a similar form of life when it dies.  There is no acting tendency, therefore, such as evolutionists suppose have blindly produced fins, wings, arms, legs, etc.  Yet here is the fact, that every form of life, animal and vegetable, is endowed with a mechanism of re-production which it does not require for its own use.  Here is evidence of a purpose that living creation should be perpetuated.  On no principle recognised by evolution can the existence of this re-productive apparatus be accounted for.  It not only exists in all forms of organised life, but in the very earliest forms, and in forms so simple that the supposed law of evolution has not had time to develop it, supposing such a thing could be developed by evolution—-that is by the pressure of necessity.  It is a provision for futurity; it is the indication of purpose. The purpose is embodied in things as they are.  This goes deeper than what is called “the design argument”.

There must be a God. Here is His manifest footprint.  Evolutionists exclude “purpose” from the action of their “force” and here is “purpose”—- a purpose that the forms of life produced shall be re-produced.

I believe in the God revealed in the Bible, but it is sufficient if I say by God I mean Intelligence somewhere operative through power.  The study of nature cannot inform us of the seat or nature of this intelligence; but it is a great matter that it shows us its existence, which it undoubtedly does.  Revelation does the rest.