Saturday, April 19, 2008 "Created equal vs. Evolved equal"

Saturday, April 19, 2008

“Created equal vs. Evolved equal”

This week again it is Creation vs. Evolution, and Julie's thoughts on the meaning of life.

 

“Created equal vs. Evolved equal”

“It shall be unlawful for any teacher in any of the Universities, normals, and all other public schools of the State which are supported in whole or in part by the public school funds of the State, to teach any theory that denies the story of the divine creation of man as taught in the Bible and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.” - - - - Scopes v. State, 289 S. W. 363 (Tenn. 1927).

This state law of Tennessee was the spark of the Scopes v. State trial (The Scopes Monkey Trail). It’s hard for us today to imagine a time when the state would uphold legislation that would prohibit teaching against divine creation.

It is here again that we find our selves polarized in the opposite direction of our foundation, we prohibit instead the teaching of divine creation but sanction that which we once prohibited.
As a matter of fact, as I alluded to last we, we even deny the very authority to which we ascribed our founding documents of freedom to. One being that we were all “created equal,” instead of “evolved equal.”

Some would tell us that our Founders did not have the wonderful information that has come to by the works of Charles Darwin to enlighten them. However, as I also mentioned last week, they were well-informed in the theory of evolution. So much so that even the most anti-religious founders rejected this theory of thought.

Thomas Paine was influential during our founding era, but his anti-religious views caused him to spend the last years of his life in New York as an outcast. When he died, he was buried in a farm field because no America cemetery would accept his remains. But I quote him below to emphasize the general view and well-equipped knowledge of evolution during the founding of this Great Nation.

“It has been the error of schools to teach astronomy, and all the other sciences and subjects of natural philosophy, as accomplishments only; whereas they should be taught theologically, or with reference to the Being who is the Author of them: for all the principles of science are of divine origin.

Man cannot make, or invent, or contrive principles; he can only discover them, and he ought to look through the discovery to the Author.

When we examine an extraordinary piece of machinery, an astonishing pile of architecture, a well-executed statue, or a highly-finished painting where life and action are imitated, and habit only prevents our mistaking a surface of light and shade for cubical solidity, our ideas are naturally led to think of the extensive genius and talent of the artist.

When we study the elements of geometry, we think of Euclid. When we speak of gravitation, we think of Newton. How, then, is it that when we study the works of God in creation, we stop short and do not think of God? It is from the error of the schools in having taught those subjects as accomplishments only and thereby separated the study of them from the Being who is the Author of them. . . .

The evil that has resulted from the error of the schools in teaching natural philosophy as an accomplishment only has been that of generating in the pupils a species of atheism. Instead of looking through the works of creation to the Creator Himself, they stop short and employ the knowledge they acquire to create doubts of His existence. They labor with studied ingenuity to ascribe everything they behold to innate properties of matter and jump over all the rest by saying that matter is eternal.

And when we speak of looking through nature up to nature’s God, we speak philosophically the same rational language as when we speak of looking through human laws up to the power that ordained them.

God is the power of first cause, nature is the law, and matter is the subject acted upon. But infidelity, by ascribing every phenomenon to properties of matter, conceives a system for which it cannot account and yet it pretends to demonstration.” - - - - Thomas Paine, A Discourse at the Society of Theo philanthropists, Paris, in Age of Reason: Miscellaneous Essays for Third and Fourth Parts, in Life and Writings of Thomas Paine 2-8 (Daniel Edwin Wheeler, ed., 1908).

May God bless each of you,
David