The following words from Dr. Wright may not at first resonate with the way moderns think, but from this window is a view to interesting reflections. Written over a century ago, these words are worth a look:
Theories of evolution have chased each other off the field in rapid succession for thousands of years. Evolution is not a new thing in philosophy, and such is the frailty of human nature that it is not likely to disappear suddenly from among men. The craze of the last half century is little more than the recrudesence of a philosophy which has divided the opinion of men from the earliest ages. In both the Egyptian and the East Indian mythology, the world and all things in it were evolved from an egg; and so in the Polynesian myths. But the Polynesians had to have a bird to lay the egg, and the Egyptians and the Brahmans had to have some sort of a deity to create theirs. The Greek philosophers struggled with the problem without coming to any more satisfactory conclusion. Aniximander, like Professor Huxley, traced everything back to an “infinity” which gradually worked itself into a sort of pristine “mud” (something like Huxley’s exploded “bathybius”), out of which everything else evolved; while Thales of Miletus tried to think of water as the mother of everything, and Aneximenes practically deified the air. Diogenes imagined a “mind stuff” (something like Weissmann’s “biophores,” Darwin’s “gemmules possessed with affinity for each other,” and Spencer’s “vitalized molecules”) which acted as if it had intelligence; while Heraclitus thought that fire was the only element pure enough to produce the soul of man. These speculations culminated in the great poem of Lucretius entitled, De Rerum Natura, written shortly before the beginning of the Christian era. His atomic theory was something like that which prevails at the present time among physicists. Amid the unceasing motion of these atoms there somehow appeared, according to him, the orderly forms and the living processes of nature.
Modern evolutionary speculations have not made much real progress over those of the ancients. As already remarked, they are, in their bolder forms atheistic; while in their milder forms they are “deistic” — admitting, indeed, the agency of God at the beginning, but nowhere else. The attempt, however, to give the doctrine standing through Darwin’s theory of the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection has not been successful; for at best, that theory can enlarge but little our comprehension of the adequacy of resident forces to produce and conserve variations of species, and cannot in the least degree banish the idea of design from the process.
From: CHAPTER 6 THE PASSING OF EVOLUTION BY PROFESSOR GEORGE FREDERICK WRIGHT, D. D., L.L. D., Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio. In THE FUNDAMENTALS – A TESTIMONY TO THE TRUTH Volume 4 Edited by R.A. Torrey, A.C. Dixon and Others. ca. 1909
