Man has truly been called a religious animal. He is the only part of God's creation, that has a sense of God. That sense may be perverted. Man may not like to retain God in his knowledge, but in refusing the true God he must invent a false god for he cannot get on without a god. See the old Egyptians as they worshipped the bull, the cat, the ibis, the beetle. How true it is " they... changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and four-footed beasts, and creeping things " (Rom. 1:2323And changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things. (Romans 1:23)). Look at the heathen idols in India, more in number today than the dense millions who inhabit the peninsula; look at China with its heathen temples, at Japan, Africa, the Islands of the sea. Recall how in this country we once worshipped Woden and Thor and many another false god, to which our very names for the days of the week bear witness.
There is not a trace of this spiritual nature in the lower creation. Put a prayer book in the hand of an anthropoid ape. Give him a hymn book and a Bible. What can he do with them? However degraded and perverted the spiritual nature may be in man, it is entirely wanting in the lower creation.
Alfred Russell Wallace writes thus:- " We thus find that the Darwinian theory, even when carried to its extreme logical conclusion, not only does not oppose, but lends a decided support to a belief in the spiritual nature of man It shows us how man's body may have been developed from that of a lower animal form under the law of natural selection; but it also teaches us that we possess intellectual and moral faculties which could not have been so developed, but must have had another origin; for this origin we can only find an adequate cause in the unseen universe of Spirit."
This admission is begging the question—a get-out, in homely language. When and how, and why, and at what stage did the Creator instill these intellectual moral and spiritual qualities in man? Was it that God took some ugly repulsive ape-like man, his mind and qualities only that of a super-ape, and begot these marvelously superior powers in him? Did they arrive in small quantities and gradually increase in number and volume, or did this ape-like man one day act like a superior ape and the next day like an inferior man? It is a hard nut for the evolutionist to crack, and his heaviest scientific hammer cannot do it. Perhaps an examination of Professor Haeckel's genealogical tree will help us.