Some drill and bore
The solid earth, and from the strata there
Extract a register, by which we learn
That He who made it, and revealed its date
To Moses, was mistaken in its age!
—William Cowper
DURING THE Middle Ages and Renaissance, no one knew quite what to make of fossils. The most popular explanation was that they were relics of plants and animals destroyed by the flood of Noah, but many distinguished scholars believed they had grown in the bowels of the earth by some sort of natural or occult process. A few argued that Satan placed them there to mislead the faithful. Others suggested God himself created them—either to befuddle scientists, test believers, or make crude experimental models of living forms.
One of the last to defend the divine origin of fossils was Professor Johann Beringer of the University of Würzburg.. In 1726, he published an expensive monograph describing some curious fossils he had discovered, many of them bearing replicas of the sun and moon, and various Hebraic words. Actually, they had all been carefully baked out of clay and planted in the earth by his students, but the poor professor fell completely for the hoax until one day he discovered a fossil with his own name on it! He spent the rest of his life buying up copies of the work, which of course made it much in demand as a collector’s item. As a crowning irony, a descendent had the treatise reprinted after the professor’s death, and reaped a handsome profit. It is really a sad tale—a scientist remembered today only for his gullibility.
Gradually, through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, naturalists became impressed by the fact that fossils in the lower and older beds of rock were relatively simple, and as one moved up through later strata, fossils became more complex. Was it possible life began in some simple form, millions of years ago, then slowly evolved through long geological ages into earth’s present fauna and flora? Finally, in 1859, Darwin published his Origin of Species. It was not the first book on evolution, but it was a book which marshalled such an imposing array of facts that it was no longer possible to dismiss the theory as fanciful and impious speculation.
The blow which this book let fall on the back of Christendom is hard to overestimate. Certainly it was a major factor in the widening Protestant split between fundamentalists and so-called modernists. The modernists, of course, accepted the new theory. It was, they said, simply God’s method of creation. If we do not take the Genesis story too literally—if we interpret the “days” as geological epochs—we can even read it as a rough description of evolutionary history.
The fundamentalists rejected evolution in toto. Most of them clung to the flood theory of fossils, which had been eloquently championed by Luther. Others, including British Prime Minister Gladstone, defended the view of a French naturalist, Baron Cuvier, that there had been a series of creations, at various intervals in geologic time, each following a cataclysm which buried earlier forms of life. Still another theory, which survives today in the notes of the popular Scholfield Reference Bible, was that fossils are remains of an earlier “Pre-Adamite” creation which flourished between the first and second sentences of the opening verse of Genesis!
Thousands of books were published in the nineteenth century, most of them in England, attempting to harmonize geology and Genesis. In this dreary and pathetic literature, one book stands out from all the others as so delightful and fantastic that it deserves special mention. It was called Omphalos (the Greek word for navel), and was written by zoologist Philip Gosse, father of the eminent British poet and critic, Edmund Gosse. Not the least of its remarkable virtues is that although it won not a single convert, it presented a theory so logically perfect, and so in accord with geological facts that no amount of scientific evidence will ever be able to refute it.
Gosse admitted geology had established beyond any doubt that the earth had a long geological history in which plants and animals flourished before the time of Adam. He was also convinced that the earth was created about 4,000 B.C., in six days, exactly as described in Genesis. How did he reconcile these apparently contradictory opinions? Very simply. Just as Adam was created with a navel, the relic of a birth which never occurred, so the entire earth was created with all the fossil relics of a past which had no existence except in the mind of God!
This is not as ridiculous as it may seem at first. Consider, for example, the difficulties which face any believer in a six-day creation. Although it is possible to imagine Adam without a navel, it is difficult to imagine him without bones, hair, teeth, and fingernails. Yet all these features bear in them the evidence of past accretions of growth. In fact there is not an organ or tissue of the body which does not presuppose a previous growth history.
The same is true of every plant and animal. As Gosse points out, the tusks of an elephant exhibit past stages, the nautilus keeps adding chambers to its shell, the turtle adds laminae to its plates, trees bear the annual rings of growth produced by seasonal variations. “Every argument,” he writes, “by which the physiologist can prove. . . that yonder cow was once a foetus . . . will apply with exactly the same power to show that the newly created cow was an embryo some years before creation.” All this is developed by the author in learned detail, for several hundred pages, and illustrated with dozens of wood engravings.
In short—if God created the earth as described in the Bible, he must have created it a “going concern.” Once this is seen as inevitable, there is little difficulty in extending the concept to the earth’s geologic history. Evidence of the slow erosion of land by rivers, of the twisting and tilting of strata, mountains of limestone formed by remains of marine life, lava which flowed from long-extinct volcanoes, glacier scratchings upon rock, footprints of prehistoric animals, teeth marks on buried bones, and millions of fossils sprinkled through the earth —all these and many other features testify to past geological events which never actually took place.
“It may be objected,” writes Gosse, “that to assume the world to have been created with fossil skeletons in its crust—skeletons of animals that never really existed—is to charge the Creator with forming objects whose sole purpose was to deceive us. The reply is obvious. Were the concentric timber-rings of a created tree formed merely to deceive? Were the growth lines of a created shell intended to deceive? Was the navel of the created Man intended to deceive him into the persuasion that he had a parent?”
This question of whether Adam had a navel is by no means a forgotten one. A few years ago North Carolina’s Congressman Carl T. Durham and his House Military Affairs subcommittee objected to a cartoon of Adam and Eve in Public Affairs Pamphlet No. 85 (The Races of Mankind by Ruth Benedict and Gene Weltfish). The cartoon disclosed a pair of navels. The subcommittee thought this had something to do with communism. Their fears were somewhat allayed when it was pointed out that Michelangelo had painted a navel on Adam in his Sistine Chapel murals.
So thorough is Gosse in covering every aspect of this question that he even discusses the finding of coprolites, fossil excrement. Up until now, he writes, this “has been considered a more than ordinarily triumphant proof of real pre-existence.” Yet, he points out, it offers no more difficulty than the fact that waste matter would certainly exist in the intestines of the newly-formed Adam. Blood must have flowed through his arteries, and blood presupposes chyle and chyme, which in turn presupposes an indigestible residuum in the intestines. “It may seem at first sight ridiculous,” he confesses, “. . . but truth is truth.”
Gosse’s argument is, in fact, quite flawless. Not a single truth of geology need be abandoned, yet the harmony with Genesis is complete. As Gosse pointed out, we might even suppose that God created the earth a few minutes ago, complete with all its cities and records, and memories in the minds of men, and there is no logical way to refute this as a possible theory.
Nevertheless, Omphalos was not well received. “Never was a book cast upon the waters with greater anticipation of success than was this curious, this obstinate, this fanatical volume,” writes the younger Gosse in his book Father and Son. “. . . He offered it, with a glowing gesture, to atheists and Christians alike. . . . But, alas! atheists and Christians alike looked at it and laughed, and threw it away . . . even Charles Kingsley, from whom my father had expected the most instant appreciation, wrote that he could not . . . ‘believe that God has written on the rocks one enormous and superfluous lie.’. . . a gloom, cold and dismal, descended upon our morning tea cups.”
Compared to Gosse’s brilliant reconciliation of geology and the Bible, later attempts seem pale anticlimaxes. Yet they continued to be written, and are being written today. A bibliography of Protestant attacks on evolution, published in the United States alone since the turn of the century, would run into many thousands. Most of this literature is too frowsy to deserve even a passing glance, but occasionally a dignified, scholarly work finds its way into print. For example, Dr. Louis T. More, brother of the distinguished critic Paul Elmer More, and a professor of physics at the University of Cincinnati, gave a series of lectures in 1925 at Princeton which were published as a book titled The Dogma of Evolution. It is an infuriating book. Although Dr. More attacks evolution (using all the old and outworn arguments), he nowhere lets the reader know exactly what his own explanation is of the fossil record. One gathers he believes the different “species” came into being as a result of a series of independent creative acts. A somewhat similar blast at evolution was an article in the Atlantic Monthly (October, 1928) by another member of the Literary Humanist movement, Dr. Paul Shorey, head of the Greek Department at the University of Chicago. Titled “Evolution, a Conservative’s Apology,” the essay bulges with pleasant quotations from literary and philosophic greats, but otherwise reveals only the author’s lack of scientific background.
Among twentieth century Protestant opponents of evolution, one man and one alone stands head and shoulders above all others. He is the “geologist” whom Bryan cited as his chief authority at the famous Scopes trial in Tennessee, and almost every fundamentalist attack on evolution in the last three decades has drawn its major ammunition from his writings. He is, in fact, the last and greatest of the anti-evolutionists.
The name of this remarkable man is George McCready Price. According to the current Who’s Who, he was born in Canada in 1870. After obtaining several degrees at various Seventh Day Adventist schools and holding a number of teaching posts here and there, he became a professor of geology at a small Adventist college in Nebraska. At present, he is living in Loma Linda, California, having retired in 1938 from the faculty of another Adventist school, Walla Walla College in Washington.
Although Price has published some twenty books, the most important source of his views is The New Geology, a 726-page college text book issued in 1923. It is a classic of pseudo-science. So carefully reasoned are Price’s speculations, so bolstered with impressive geological erudition, that thousands of Protestant fundamentalists today accept his work as the final word on the subject. Even the sceptical reader will find Price difficult to answer without considerable background in geology.
The heart of Price’s approach can be stated in a few words. The great “sacred cow” of evolution, he points out, is the belief that fossils proceed from simple to more complex forms as you move from older to younger strata. Unfortunately, there is no adequate method of dating the ages of strata except by means of the fossils they contain. Thus a vicious circularity is involved—like a dog chasing its tail. The theory of evolution is assumed in order to classify fossils in evolutionary order. The fossils are used to date the beds. Then the succession of fossils from “old” to “young” strata is cited as “proof” of evolutionary development.
Price’s own opinion is that the entire creation took place a few thousand years before Christ, in six literal days exactly as described in Genesis. The different beds do not indicate different geological ages. They were all deposited simultaneously by the Great Flood, in turn caused by an astronomical disturbance which sent huge tidal waves crashing around the earth, buckled up the present mountain ranges, and destroyed the mild climate of Eden.a “The Grand Canyon of the Colorado,” he wrote a few years ago, “. . . may not be very much older than the Pyramids of Egypt.” Fossils, according to Price, are simply the records of antediluvian flora and fauna buried by the convulsion of the Flood.
If all this is true, then in outcrops where several or more fossil-bearing beds are found in one place, one would expect the fossils to be in the reverse of the evolutionary order as often as conforming to it (though Price makes allowance for the fact that marine life would tend to be buried first, land life later, and birds last of all). This, Price declares, is precisely the case, and much space in his books is devoted to pictures and descriptions of such “upside down” areas. To explain away these embarrassing beds, Price asserts, traditional geologists invent imaginary faults and folds. The following quotation on this point will introduce Price’s persuasive style:
. . . there is scarcely an artificial geological section made within recent years that does not contain one or more of these “thrust faults,” or “thrusts.” But the really important thing to remember in this connection is that it is solely because the fossils are found occurring in the wrong order of sequence that any such devices are thought to be necessary—devices which, as has already been suggested of similar expedients to explain away evidence, deserve to rank with the famous “epicycles” of Ptolemy, and will do so some day.
To a reader unacquainted with geology, this has a plausible ring. How is he to know, for example, that there are dozens of well established criteria by which a geologist can determine whether a fault or fold has occurred? In many cases, of course, the entire fold or fault is clearly visible. When this is not the case, there are other indications for which the trained geologist looks. An overturned fold, for instance, actually turns beds upside down. This naturally inverts such fossil evidence as wind ripple marks, mud cracks, rain prints, and foot tracks. Trilobites are found on their backs. The center of gravity of large particles buried in what was formerly mud will be high instead of low. And so on. In the case of faults, there is usually a clear fault line of demarcation and often slickened sides of rock along which the fault moved, and other mechanical evidences of shifting.
When Price describes his upside-down areas and says there is no evidence for faulting or folding other than the reversed fossil order, it simply isn’t so. All one need do is go to some of the original studies of the areas in question, and an abundance of technical evidence will be found for the faults and folds—evidence which has nothing whatever to do with the fossils. Price is fond, for example, of citing Chief Mountain, in the Alberta-Montana region of the Rockies, where older strata are found resting on younger. Although The New Geology reproduces seven photographs of this mountain (one is the book’s frontispiece), Price neglects to tell the reader that at the base of this mountain the fault line of the overthrust can be seen clearly, with slickened faces of rock which testify to the faulting movement. The Hart Mountain, in Wyoming, is another of Price’s upside-down spots. He fails to mention, however, that the fault line is easily traceable for some twenty-five miles.
Price also does not point out that the number of upside-down areas are exceedingly small in comparison with the tens of thousands of outcrops where fossils are always found in correct evolutionary order. In fact, the upside-down spots occur in the number which one would expect in view of the amount of folding and faulting that obviously has occurred. Actually the relative ages of major beds were fairly well worked out before the theory of evolution became current, and in recent years, dating by radio-active methods has added striking proof of the over-all correctness of dating by previous methods.
Concerning fossil remains of early man, Price’s views follow a statement by Mrs. E. G. White, the inspired prophetess of the Seventh Day Adventist cult. In her book Spiritual Gifts, 1864, Mrs. White had written:
If there was one sin above another which called for the destruction of the race by the flood, it was the base crime of amalgamation of man and beast, which defaced the image of Good, and caused confusion everywhere. . . .
Every species of animals which God had created was preserved in the ark. The confused species which God did not create, which were the result of amalgamation, were destroyed by the flood. Since the flood, there has been amalgamation of man and beast, as may be seen in the almost endless varieties of species of animals, and in certain races of men.
“I am sure,” Price once wrote, “that Sister White’s statements were given very providentially for our guidance. . . . I am confident that, if they had not been given us, we ourselves would now be in confusion and perplexity over this ‘species’ question. . . .”1
Sister White’s statement about amalgamation was dropped from later editions of her book, just as Hitler’s assertion that non-Aryan races were due to early Aryan-ape mating was omitted from the second edition of Mein Kampf. Nevertheless Price has remained loyal to her utterances. In his opinion, the men who lived before the flood were so completely destroyed that no fossil remains have been found. “. . . since we are told that the Lord wished to destroy that ungodly race, He probably did a good job of it and buried them so deeply that we have not yet discovered their remains,” he writes. The fossil human bones which have been uncovered are, he believes, those of men who lived after the flood.
Early Adventists frequently referred to certain primitive tribes—such as the African bushmen, Hottentots, and Digger Indians—as examples of degenerate hybrids, and on a few occasions, the entire Negro race. Price does not go quite this far. He thinks the Negro and Mongoloid races are degenerate types produced by amalgamation of the pure races God created at the Tower of Babel. Modern apes, however, are probably hybrid men. Here are Price’s words on this matter:
There are no clear and positive evidences from paleontology which would prove that the existing anthropoid apes existed before the great world cataclysm, or the Deluge. These present-day anthropoid apes may be just as much a product of modern conditions as are the Negroid or the Mongolian types of mankind. And if I were compelled to choose between saying that the apes are degenerate or hybridized men and that man is a developed ape, I am sure it would not take me very long to decide which it would be. Nor do I think it ought to take any well-informed scientist long to make the choice.2
The notion that higher apes are not animals at all, but either primitive or retrograde humans, has been held by a number of post-Renaissance naturalists, from the Scottish anthropologist, Lord Monboddo, to the American writer of popular books on animals, Ivan T. Sanderson. Monboddo thought the orang-outang belonged to the human species—a thought which inspired the character of Sir Oran Haut-ton in Peacock’s novel, Melincourt. Sanderson has similar views about gorillas. “Seeing these creatures in life, listening to their calls and talk . . . I can only regard them as a retrograde form of human . . . life,” he writes in his book Animal Treasure, 1937. (Sanderson’s latest contribution to zoology is an article in True, June, 1951, about fresh dinosaur tracks found on a beach in western Florida.)
Price is, of course, a devout Seventh Day Adventist. Like Velikovsky he has strong religious motives for establishing the truth of Old Testament records. But is this sufficient to force a man of his intelligence into the curious and lonely role he has played for almost half a century? Other drives creep out occasionally when he writes of “having to do this work of reforming the science of geology almost single-handed,” but on the whole, his books are singularly free of the intense egotism which characterizes so much pseudo-scientific writing. Price writes quietly, simply, clearly. Here for example—astonishingly free of the usual bitterness—is his description of his difficulties in getting a hearing for his views:
Twenty-five years ago, when I first made some of my revolutionary discoveries in geology, I was confronted with this very problem of how these new ideas were to be presented to the public. And it was only after I found that the regular channels of publication were denied me, that I decided to use the many other doors which stood wide open. Perhaps I made a mistake. Perhaps I should have had more regard to the etiquette of scientific pedantry, and should have stood humbly hat in hand before the editorial doors which had been banged in my face more than once. But I decided otherwise, with a full realization of the consequences; and I have not yet seen any reason for thinking that I really made a mistake. Some day it may appear. that the reigning clique of “reputable” scientists have never had a monopoly of the facts of nature.3
After publishing The New Geology, Price seems to have expected the theory of evolution to wither and blow away. In 1924, he wrote, “Organic evolution is dead. . . . This volume is merely a sort of funeral oration. Requiescat in pace.”4 A year later, in a debate with Joseph McCabe in London, he predicted that in two years, public opinion about evolution would change in England as he felt it already had done in America. Of course no such change had occurred in the United States at all. In fact not a single geologist considered Price’s books even worthy of refutation. Did this raise doubts in Price’s mind? Of course not. “My previous larger treatise on this subject has not been answered,” he wrote. “It will not be answered. But it has been ignored, and probably will still be ignored, because very few even among men of science, have the patience to follow carefully a completely new line of argument based on unfamiliar facts.”
Although Seventh Day Adventists consider the Catholic Church the work of Satan, many Catholic writers on evolution have taken Price’s geology seriously. The most scholarly example is The Case Against Evolution, published in 1925. The author, George Barry O’Toole, accepts completely Price’s naive criticism of strata chronology, and his chapter on “Fossil Pedigrees” is little more than a verbose summary of Price. Similarly, Arnold Lunn, in the 1932 revised edition of Flight from Reason, describes Price as “professor of geology in an American University” and praises him for having “poured well-deserved ridicule on the arbitrary rearrangement of strata.” In the early thirties, Price contributed several articles to Catholic World, one of them on “Cranks and Prophets”5 in which he makes the inevitable comparison of himself with great scientists who were considered cranks by their contemporaries.
From the beginning until now, however, the Catholic Church has reacted to evolution with considerably less frenzy than the orthodox Protestant groups. In the early decades following Darwin’s book, the Church took no position on the theory beyond making clear that no Catholic could accept the gradual evolution of the human soul. The general reaction among Catholics at that time was, of course, one of hostility, but compared to the Protestant crackpot literature, very few Catholic books were written on the topic. Perhaps the Church had learned a bitter lesson from her experiences with Galileo.
On the lower levels of the Church, however, Catholic laymen have written many books against Darwin and his theory. In America, a typical work of this sort is God or Gorilla, by Alfred W. McCann, 1922. The author makes much of a “Triassic shoe sole fossil” which he says is proof that men were walking around in shoes in the Triassic period! A photograph shows what is obviously a common type of rock concretion. McCann is incensed because orthodox geologists refuse to take it seriously.
O’Toole’s The Case Against Evolution is a much more academic work than McCann’s, but beneath its ponderous style lies nothing new or significant. In England, Arnold Lunn’s Flight from Reason is equally banal. Lunn grants that each “species” may have been modified over the aeons by slight changes, but none are connected by a common family tree. A special creation is required for the origin of each.
The most amusing British Catholic attack on evolution was in Hilaire Belloc’s Companion to Mr. Wells’ Outline of History, 1926. The lacunae in Belloc’s scientific knowledge are equaled only by the heights of his cocksureness. Most of his arguments are so ancient and flimsy that not even Price had the courage to exhume them. The book prodded Wells into a reply, published later in the same year under the title Mr. Belloc Objects. Written in a mood of amused anger, it is a little masterpiece of polemics. Few literary debates in history have been so decisively won. Belloc produced a rebuttal pamphlet, Mr. Belloc Still Objects, twice as cocksure as the former work, but it was the shouting of a man too angry to realize how badly he had been wounded.
Belloc’s great and good friend Gilbert Chesterton seldom touched on evolution in his writing. When he did, he nearly always wrote nonsense. In The Everlasting Man, for example, he wastes many pages—as do so many anti-evolutionists—convincing the reader there is a great difference between the minds of men and animals. It is a waste because no evolutionist wishes to deny these differences. Men and monkeys are end points of quite separate branches of the evolutionary tree, and the transitional forms belong to the dim past. “. . . No one is more convinced than I am,” wrote Huxley, the great disciple of Darwin, “of the vastness of the gulf between civilized man and the brute.” Yet Chesterton could write: “The higher animals did not draw better and better portraits; the dog did not paint better in his best period than in his early bad manner as a jackal; the wild horse was not an Impressionist and the race-horse a Post-Impressionist . . . a cow in a field seems to derive no lyrical impulse or instruction from her unrivalled opportunities for listening to the skylark.”
Chesterton’s thesis, of course, is that there is such a huge difference between men and animals—men speak, create works of art, laugh, wear clothes, feel guilt, form governments, worship God, and so on—that one cannot conceive of a transitional stage. The simple answer is that the same vast difference exists between a man and a newborn baby. The reply that a baby grows into a man is irrelevant. The point is that if a baby and man can be the end points of a continuum, with no sharp line which the infant hurdles to acquire “human” traits, then there is at least no theoretical reason why man and an animal ancestor (much more “human” than a newborn baby) might not lie on a similar continuum.
In the same volume, Chesterton makes fun of the fact that beautiful cave paintings, the work of prehistoric men, had been found in southern France. He assumes that because the artists were prehistoric, they must therefore be considered ape-like, and the fact they painted so well seems to him a huge joke on the anthropologists. Unfortunately Chesterton did not trouble to learn that the cave paintings were the work of Cro-Magnon man, a fully developed human type with a brain capacity slightly larger than modern man. In an appendix to the book, he makes a lame apology for this oversight.
At the moment, Catholic opinion is swinging rapidly toward full acceptance of evolution, with the firm qualification that at some point in geologic time the human soul was infused into a body which had evolved to a point ready to receive it. In fact, this view was defended as early as 1871 by a Catholic biologist, St. George J. Mivart, in his book Genesis of Species. Later, for other reasons, Mivart was excommunicated, but now his book is regarded as highly prophetic.6 In 1950, the Pope issued an encyclical in which he warned Catholics against acting “as if the origin of the human body from preexisting and living matter were already completely certain,” but gave permission for a Catholic to believe it if he wishes. The official attitude is that the evolution of plants and animals is probably true, but that evolution of man’s body is a question not yet decided. A Catholic scientist may work toward making it a probable hypothesis, but until this occurs, it must not be taught in Catholic schools.
It is interesting to note that Dr. Mortimer J. Adler of the University of Chicago and Great Books fame, and one of the nation’s leading neo-Thomists, has for some time been carrying on a one-man crusade against evolution. In What Man Has Made of Man, 1937, Adler brands evolution a “popular myth,” insisting it is not an established fact “but at best a probable history, a history for which the evidence is insufficient and conflicting . . . facts establish only one historical probability: that types of animals which once existed no longer exist, and that types of animals now existing at one time did not exist. They do not establish the elaborate story which is the myth of evolution. . . .”
“I say ‘myth,’ ” Adler continues, “in order to refer to the elaborate conjectural history, which vastly exceeds the scientific evidence. ... This myth is the story of evolution which is told to school children and which they can almost visualize as if it were a moving picture. It is the concoction of such evolutionary ‘philosophers’ as Herbert Spencer, Ernst Haeckel and Henri Bergson, as well as the invention of popularizers of science.”
Dr. Adler makes clear he is not denying an orderly succession of living forms through the ages. What he objects to is the view that they lie on a continuum in which one species fades into another by imperceptible changes. The evidence indicates, he argues, that “species” differ not in degree but in kind, with a radical “discontinuity” separating them.
In Problems for Thomists, 1940, Adler examines in more detail the question of how many “species” exist. In other words, how many creative acts of God are required to explain the evolutionary jumps? He opposes the view of Jacques Maritain, a leading Catholic philosopher, that the number is very large and unknowable. Adler’s own view, which he considers “almost completely demonstrated,” is that there is a small number of species—probably four (matter, plant, animal, and man), but certainly more than three and less than ten. Within a species, changes have occurred, but each species itself is a fixed type—immutable in its essence, and coming into being only by an act of God. Adler suspects that each species was created in several different types, underived from each other—for example, the separate creation of flowering and non-flowering plants. The scientific evidence for this is “indecisive,” he admits, but there is a theological argument of “great suggestive force” based on a passage in The Wisdom of Solomon (11:21), one of the Old Testament books considered apocryphal by Protestants.
In the April 1941 issue of Thomist, Adler contributed an article called “Solution of the Problem of Species” in which he argues that Maritain’s position can be positively disproved. His own view, after an error has been corrected, can now be established with certainty. He made the error out of “excessive zeal,” he states. “I might almost say that what blinded me was the brightness of the new light.”
Adler’s latest blast at evolution was in a lecture before a student Catholic club at the University of Chicago, in 1951. Men and apes, he declared, are as different “as a square and a triangle. There can be no intermediate—no three and one-half-sided figure.” Most of Adler’s arguments were straight out of the arsenal of Bible Belt evangelism. “Sometimes the difference between a child and a pig,” he said, “is not very noticeable. But the child grows up to be a man and the pig seldom does.” If a scientist would only produce an ape that could speak “in simple declarative sentences,” Adler said, he would admit a close bond between man and monkey.
(In passing, it is amusing to note that an American amateur zoologist, Richard Lynch Garner, devoted most of his life to recording and analyzing simian speech, and finally developed the ability, so he claimed, to converse with monkeys in their own tongue. See his The Speech of Monkeys, 1892; Gorillas and Chimpanzees, 1896; and Apes and Monkeys, 1900. His books are not, however, highly regarded by other authorities.)
Only two explanations will fit all the facts, Adler concluded his speech. Either man “emerged” from the brute by a sudden evolutionary leap, or he was created directly by God. One assumes Adler did not mean a creation of body and soul, but rather the increasingly popular Catholic view of an infusion of soul into a body which had bestial parents.
Many questions are raised by this view of course, and no doubt there will be considerable Catholic speculation in the future about them. For example: where is one to place the dozens of well-preserved skeletons which have been found of Neanderthal man—a creature with a low forehead like an ape, a head that hung forward, no chin, and non-opposable thumbs? It was a creature that made fires, and buried its dead with ornamental stones. In his reply to Belloc, Wells posed the problem as follows:
When I heard that Mr. Belloc was going to explain and answer the Outline of History, my thought went at once to this creature. What would Mr. Belloc say of it? Would he put it before or after the Fall? Would he correct its anatomy by wonderful new science out of his safe? Would he treat it like a brother and say it held by the most exalted monotheism, or treat it as a monster made to mislead wicked men?
He says nothing! He just walks away whenever it comes near him.
But I am sure it does not leave him. In the night, if not by day, it must be asking him: “Have I a soul to save, Mr. Belloc? Is that Heidelberg jawbone one of us, Mr. Belloc, or not? You’ve forgotten me, Mr. Belloc. For four-fifths of the Paleolithic age I was ‘man.’ There was no other. I shamble and I cannot walk erect and look up at heaven as you do, Mr. Belloc, but dare you cast me to the dogs?”
No reply.
Another important question facing the orthodox is whether the initial infusion of the soul took place only in a single pair, or were many humans created simultaneously? The latter view would enable Cain to marry someone other than his sister. In the Pope’s encyclical of 1950, however, this view was wisely condemned on the grounds that it would conflict with the doctrine of Original Sin. Again: at what age of life did the infusion occur? If the first man and woman were adults before they received souls, then they would have lived the early part of their lives as animals, and the latter part as humans. On the other hand, if the soul was infused at conception (or at birth), it would mean that the first man and woman were brought up and suckled by a soulless mother or mothers. There is nothing illogical about either of these views, but they strike one at first thought as rather odd.
To date, the most complete discussion of these tangled problems is Evolution and Theology, a book published in 1932 by Father Ernest C. Messenger. Father Messenger courageously defends the evolution of Adam’s body, but insists that the formation of Eve was a miraculous event. A portion of Adam’s side (not necessarily a rib) would contain “virtually the perfection of the species,” and the creation of Eve from it would be analogous to what biologists call “asexual generation.” Father Messenger concludes: “The formation of Eve ex Adamo seems to be so clear in Scripture and Tradition that, at the very least, it cannot be prudently called into question. Further, there is no reason to doubt it, other than the difficulty of understanding how it could take place.”
Perhaps the church theologians and Dr. Adler should consider more carefully the revolutionary geology of George McCready Price. There is a grand simplicity about his reading of the rocks, and none of the distressing issues which arise once the time chronology of the beds is accepted. “One direct creation of a beautiful and perfect world,” Price wrote recently, “. . . might be believed; but this long-drawn-out agony of interminable ages . . . does not look like . . . an intelligent method of creating a world. It may be a naturalistic process . . . but it is much more like a cosmic nightmare than a creation.”7
Or better still, let them ponder these wise words of St. Augustine. “It very often happens there is some question as to the earth or sky, or other elements of this world . . . respecting which, one who is not a Christian has knowledge . . . and it is very disgraceful and mischievous and of all things to be carefully avoided, that a Christian speaking of such matters as being according to the Christian Scriptures, should be heard by an unbeliever talking such nonsense that the unbeliever perceiving him to be as wide from the mark as east from west, can hardly restrain himself from laughing.”