The Unleashing of Evolutionary Thought is frightening in its implications; its author is a thoroughgoing naturalist who is opposed to anything savoring of the supernatural. He sees no hope for mankind or the world except in the complete overthrowing of all idea of God. He is a militant atheist who not only speaks for himself, but has well-documented his case for the irreconcilable nature of evolution with that of any religion based on a supernatural. He has brought forth quite an array of the names of great men who feel as he does, and he breathes contempt for any compromise of religion and evolution.
Dr. Riddle links the Christian and non-Christian religions of the world together when he gives battle to the supernatural. To him there is no difference between true Christianity and lifeless profession. His chief antagonism is reserved for the Roman Catholic Church which to a large degree education controls for its own people, and also seeks to control state education as well. This is done in spite of the fact that some prominent Catholic educators are willing to allow evolution up to a point where the soul of man is concerned. To this, he asserts that there is no place for the soul in the human body, and rejects it on the basis of "fact" and "reason."
When the noted biologist comes to the Protestant denominations, he allows that they have been and are more liberal toward evolution. (This is due largely to the lethargic character of a sizable segment of Protestant leaders.) Let us quote from Dr. Riddle:
"Protestantism, except, chiefly, its smaller sects, is a less consistent and less dangerous enemy of evolutionary biology and modern thought than is Catholicism. In part, this is a consequence of the disunity of Protestantism.... Protestant antagonism usually is so largely an indirect, off-campus and precollege affair that the true extent of its restraint is little recognized or resented even by the biologists who teach in these universities. It would be much more resented if it were better understood." (emphasis ours) p. 175.
Here is a thrust at Protestant leaders who allow varying degrees of evolutionary thought to be propounded; they simply do not understand its full atheistic implication. Dr. Riddle contends for "unmitigated evolutionary thought" (p. 176) as against "diluted evolution" (p. 177). It is high time that true Christians were awakened to what they are paving the way for by any allowance of evolution, mitigated or otherwise. Again, we say, It is either God and Genesis, or atheism and evolution. When once you leave the solid ground of God as the Creator and the Bible as His revelation, there is no stopping place until you come to the ship of "unmitigated evolution." Will you trust yourself or your children to this unsafe ship which is doomed to go down with all hands on board?
This book also deals with the attempts of biologists to compromise the issue with religion, thus:
"Biologists in nearly all countries, and particularly in America, have tried a compromise with religious creeds. That compromise has failed [emphasis ours].... Most youth of 1954... leave our schools without having an opportunity to learn that the worthy facts concerning man's origin and destiny come not from religious traditions but from investigations made in biological and other sciences within the time of men now living." p. 195.
When that writer takes up the subjects of morality and ethics in man, he utterly rejects religion as the basis. He says:
"A denial by theology or religion of the purely natural sources of morality and of values is a bald and crude pretension.... But, in advanced societies, a religion based on revelation, or indeed one that looks to any intervention of the supernatural in human affairs, mainly offers confusion to the jobs that call for fact, clarity and unchallenged logic. In presenting an account of unmitigated evolution, the natural sources of morality and values -or at least their nonrequirement of a separate and 'spiritual world'-must now be particularly emphasized.... The entire structure of evolution has neither consistency nor any deep significance without it." p. 92.
We are also told that man's evolutionary upgrading had finally produced a conscience for him (pp. 77, 84, 86, 91, 95).
Conscience is that inward sense of being able to distinguish between right and wrong that a beast does not have; but, according to divine revelation, man acquired it in the garden of Eden by the fall. Prior to that he only knew good; thereafter he knew "good and evil," but without the power for doing good. The conscience which he thus acquired was a bad one, for he knew he had sinned. This made him a coward who hid behind the trees to avoid meeting his Creator. Let any Christian answer the question, Whom are we to believe, God or an atheist?
This great man of letters does not hesitate to belittle the men of solid Christian faith, as the renowned Sir Isaac Newton, and John Napier. Both of these Christian men expected the second coming of Christ. Not that they were thoroughly clear as to the prophetic word as it is now better understood. But Sir Isaac's expressed belief that the coming of Christ was at hand (and this was to have been the hope of the Church in all ages)-they were converted to wait for Him-only served as a base for Mr. Riddle's ridicule:
"If history can prove anything, it proves that when science was less developed than it is now many good scientists accepted some or all of the most violently absurd theology of their particular age and place of birth." p. 62.
Again, Dr. Howard H. Kelley, the great surgeon of Baltimore, and probably the father of modern gynecology, who was a devout and earnest Christian, came in for his share of criticism. Mr. Riddle takes issue with Dr. Kelley's statement that man was created in the image of God, and that his progress was downward and not upward, and for saying, "I am a thoroughgoing believer in the special creation of man." Dr. Riddle accuses Dr. Kelley of mitigations of the meaning of the word "evolution." Now, it should be evident to any eighth grade scholar that Dr. Kelley was not mitigating evolution, but denying it outright. His reference to man's downward course is taken from Romans, chapter 1, where God points out the original knowledge that man had of Himself, but that when he gave up God, God gave him up to his lusts and passions. Romans aptly describes the excesses of fallen man in the days of the Roman Empire, and before (yea, and largely today). Listen to Dr. Riddle in his castigation of these mitigations, by which he means what Dr. Kelley said, and what all believers in and teachers of evolution say who do not comprehend the real depths of this Satanic innovation and adopt full "unmitigated evolution":
"Rather similar mitigations of the meaning of the word `evolution' widely prevail in Protestant and other world religions.... These 'mitigations' everywhere rob the broader principle of evolution of its real meaning and of its vast ability to assist society to a level-of sanity and warranted hope. They rob the race of a chance to build a genuinely modern society It would seem that no story now needs to be more firmly written nor widely spread than that of unmitigated evolution." p. xiii.
While these men of faith are held up to scorn, such heretics, agnostics and atheists as Voltaire, Freud, Hans Reichenbach, Henry Ward Beecher, Thomas Huxley, Julian Huxley, Charles Darwin, John Dewey, and Thomas Paine, come in for his favorable comments and plaudits.
Dr. Riddle does not hesitate to say that astronomers and other scientists are not qualified to speak on biological evolution; but he, an atheist, does not hesitate to quote from the Bible and attempt to speak on Biblical items. Here his great ignorance shows. By his own principle he has no right to speak there, but he has no such reserve. Lest any think we overstate the case against Dr. Riddle's praise for skeptics and atheists before mentioned, note this is an example:
"The over-all philosophy of this book is essentially that of John Dewey. It is the same as that of Freud's booklet of 1927, The Future of an Illusion, in which he showed that psychology must resist and defeat religion. And it is also the same as that of Reichenbach, whose book, The Rise of Scientific Philosophy appeared as the present work was nearing completion." p. xxi.
Here is a quotation from John Dewey:
"Faith in divine authority in which Western civilization confided, inherited ideas of the soul and its destiny, of fixed revelations, of completely stable institutions, of automatic progress, have been made impossible for the cultivated mind of the Western world." p. 60.
Much is made in this book of the "cultivated mind," "best informed minds," "intelligence of learned people," and it is assumed throughout that any really informed person would accept "unmitigated evolution," and reject anything supernatural. This is the acme of self-conceit. Only the rejecters of God are cultivated, learned, and informed. One may well wonder if there is not a source of some information of which they little dream.
Our thrusts are also directed at the so-called fundamentalist preachers and teachers who accept or teach a mitigated evolution, thinking that there is somehow or somewhere a meeting place between this (so-called) science and true Christianity. Let Mr. Riddle again speak on this subject:
"The eyes of unmitigated evolution, though not those of a protectively dwarfed and misty evolution [emphasis is ours], see the persistence of hot conflict down to our own day, in every quarter of the globe. Only the full retreat that is associated with a rejection of a supernatural element that exempts morals and values from considerations of time and place-from process of change-and with a resulting redefinition of religion would provide escape from this conflict. This required redefinition involves religion's abandonment to science of its former dominion—the origin, nature and destiny of man...
"As long as religion or religions. presume to provide an interpretation of man, of nature, or of conduct-or, again, as long as religion or religions have a supernatural content-nothing can
be more absurd than the, contention that religion and science
are distinct areas and are free from conflict." pp. 38, 39.
Some statements and quotations from others are too shocking to relate here, but suffice it to say that unholy hands (and brains) do not hesitate to compare God unfavorably to the beast Nero, and to scoff at the holiest of miracles-which to reject brings damnation. "0 that they were wise, that they understood this, that they would consider their latter end." Deut. 32:2929O that they were wise, that they understood this, that they would consider their latter end! (Deuteronomy 32:29). Is this man not guilty of "wishful thinking"? Is not the wish that there were no God parent to his thoughts? And yet he uses the term "wishful thinking" along with "imagination and myth" to any who use the word "create" and hence a "Creator" for any process along the line, all the way back to an atom.
Lest any compromiser of evolution and Christianity thinks he has achieved a modus vivendi, let him note the following:
"To all this natural process and result, accomplished under natural, not supernatural, law, the term 'evolution' is rightly applied. And this clean and precise term would not now be widely misunderstood if church and theology, aided by an occasional scientist, had not, since Darwin's day, put their own several head-chopping mitigations on the true meaning of this word." pp. 45, 46.
But if you were to ask, But where did the creation come from? Dr. Riddle says:
"The 'earliest' state of the universe is, indeed quite unknown."
But he adds:
"Rather more than suspicion puts all matter of the known universe in an inconceivable concentrated `monobloc' occupying a fixed position in space, with an 'explosion' of the monobloc providing what our ideas of time call a beginning of galaxy formation." p. 45.
May we be permitted to be naive enough to ask, Where did the said monobloc come from? Dr. Riddle disposes of Christianity as myth and imagination, but does he not have a fertile imagination? After all the arduous task of seeking to prove that there is not, need not, and could not be a Creator, he ends up with having to invent a source from which all the tangled processes of evolution must have sprung. He, as do all of his kind, finally leads his followers up a blind alley from which there is no exit. Only by a retreat, by a complete reversal of direction, can they attain to the true wisdom.
"For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and will bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent. Where is the wise? where is the scribe? where is the disputer of this world? hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? For after that in the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe." 1 Cor. 1:19-2119For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and will bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent. 20Where is the wise? where is the scribe? where is the disputer of this world? hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? 21For after that in the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe. (1 Corinthians 1:19‑21). May many persons be delivered from the deception of these "blind leaders of the blind," who can very ably state their case against God and the work of His fingers (Psalm 8:33When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; (Psalm 8:3)).