The Story of Creation as told by Theology and by Science
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T. S. Ackland >> The Story of Creation as told by Theology and by Science
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11 CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I. THE CASE STATED
CHAPTER II. DIFFICULTIES IN GEOLOGY
CHAPTER III. DIFFICULTIES IN ASTRONOMY
CHAPTER IV. DIFFICULTIES IN PHYSIOLOGY
CHAPTER V. SCIENCE A HELP TO INTERPRETATION
CHAPTER I.
THE CASE STATED.
The History of the Creation with which the Bible commences, is not
a mere incidental appendage to God's Revelation, but constitutes
the foundation on which the whole of that Revelation is based.
Setting forth as it does the relation in which man stands to God
as his Maker, and to the world which God formed for his abode, it
forms a necessary introduction to all that God has seen fit to
reveal to us with reference to His dispensations of Providence and
of Grace.
It is, however, not uncommonly asserted that this history cannot
be reconciled with a vast number of facts which modern science has
revealed to us, and with theories based on observed facts, and
recommended by the unquestioned ability of the men by whom they
have been brought forward. At first sight there does seem to be
some ground for this assertion. Geology, for instance, makes us
acquainted with strata of rock of various kinds, arranged in exact
order, and of an aggregate thickness of many miles, which are
filled with the remains of a wonderful series of plants and
animals, these remains not being promiscuously collected, but
arranged in an unvarying order. It seems impossible that all these
plants and animals could have lived and died, and been imbedded in
the rocks in this exact succession, in six of our ordinary days.
Astronomy directs our attention to changes now going on in the
starry heavens which occupy ages in their development, and points
to traces in the constitution of our own world which seem to
indicate that it was formed by analogous means. Physiology reveals
to us the fact that the different varieties of plants and animals
now in existence are not separated from each other by well defined
lines of demarcation, but shade into each other by almost
imperceptible gradations; and geological researches show that
while the existing species of animals are the representatives of
those which lived and died at a period in which we can find no
traces of man, they are not identical with them, but that either
the old species must have died out, and been replaced by a fresh
creation, or a considerable change must have taken place in the
course of ages. These facts are held to be incompatible with the
account of creation given by Moses, and hence it is inferred that
a record, which appears to be so widely at variance with admitted
facts, cannot be entitled to the authority which is claimed for
it, as a fundamental portion of a Revelation made by the Creator
Himself.
This difficulty is sometimes met by the assertion that the Bible
was not given to us to teach us Science, but to convey to us
certain information which was essential to our moral welfare, and
which we could not obtain by any other means; that these
discrepancies do not in any way interfere with that portion of
those truths which is involved in the History of Creation, but
that, however the narrative may be viewed as far as regards its
details, the facts that God is the Creator of all things visible
and invisible, that He is a Being of infinite Wisdom, Power, and
Love, and that He has placed man in a peculiar relation to
Himself, remain unaffected. On this ground it is often urged that
we may pass over scientific inaccuracies as matters of no great
importance.
Theologians are by no means agreed as to the nature and limits of
that inspiration by which Holy Scripture was written. There are
many who think that in matters purely incidental to its main
object, and lying within the reach of human faculties, the sacred
writers were left to the ordinary sources of information, and that
many alleged difficulties may be removed by this view.
But whatever may be thought of the application of this hypothesis
to some parts of the Bible, there are others to which it is
plainly inapplicable, and of these the narrative of the Creation
is evidently one. No theory of limited inspiration can be admitted
to explain any supposed inaccuracies in that narrative. It cannot
be liable to those imperfections which are inevitable when men
have to obtain knowledge by the ordinary means, because there were
no ordinary means by which such information could be obtained. The
most carefully preserved records, the oldest traditions could not
extend backwards beyond the moment when the first man awoke to
conscious existence. For every thing beyond that point the only
source of knowledge available was information derived from the
Creator Himself. It may be that a revelation of this character was
made to Adam in the days of his innocence, that it was carefully
handed down to his descendants, and that Moses, under the divine
direction, incorporated it into his history; or it may have been
directly communicated to Moses by special inspiration--that
matters not--but a divine revelation it must have been, or it is
nothing; the dream of a poet, or the theory of a philosopher, if
we can believe that such a philosopher existed at such a time. But
if it be indeed a revelation from the Creator Himself, we cannot
imagine that He could fall into any error, or sanction any
misrepresentation with reference even to the smallest detail of
His own work.
If then there are really any errors in this record--any assertions
which the discoveries of science have proved to be untrue, we
cannot account for them on any theory of limited inspiration. A
single proved error would be fatal to the authority of the whole
narrative. But, on the other hand, we are not justified in
expecting such an account of the Creation as would commend itself
to the scientific intellect of the present day. When we attempt to
form a judgment upon it. We must look not only to its alleged
author, but also to the purposes for which, the circumstances
under which, and the persons to whom it was given. In these we may
expect to meet with many limitations. It was not designed for the
communication of scientific knowledge, it was necessarily conveyed
in human language, and addressed to human intelligence, that
language and that intelligence being, not as they are now, but as
they were, taking the latest possible date that can be assigned to
it, considerably more than three thousand years ago.
This last consideration affects not only the record itself, but
also our facilities for understanding and forming a judgment upon
it. We have to contend with difficulties of interpretation arising
from our inability fully to realize the circumstances under which
it was given, and to place ourselves in the mental position of its
original recipients. Owing to our want of this power it may well
happen, that though we are in possession of vastly increased
knowledge, we may be far more liable to fall into error in some
directions, in the interpretation of it, than those to whom it was
originally addressed.
An additional difficulty arises from the circumstance that our
knowledge, wonderfully as it has been increased of late, is yet
very far from complete, and is probably in many cases still mixed
with error. Hence it may very well happen that where there is
complete harmony between the history and the facts, we may suspect
discord owing to our misunderstanding of the record, or our
misconception of the facts. In order that the harmony may be
recognized in its fulness, there must be a perfect understanding
of the record, and a perfect knowledge of the facts. But from both
of these we are probably at present very far removed.
If a person who was a thorough master of some science undertook to
write a treatise for the purpose of teaching children the
rudiments of that science, we should expect, and the more strongly
if the author were a master of language as well as of science,
that his work should contain indications of a master's hand. We
should expect that while the book conveyed clearly and simply to
the minds of those for whom it was written, the truths which it
was intended to teach, it should also convey to the more educated
reader some intimations of a deeper knowledge on the part of its
author. The choice of a word, the turn of a phrase, the order in
which facts were arranged, the occurrence here and there of a
sentence which an ordinary reader would pass over as unimportant,
would to such a person be indications of trains of thought far
more profound than those which appeared on the surface. And this
recognition would be proportional to two things--the amount of
scientific knowledge possessed by the reader, and his mastery of
the language in which the book was written.
Such, then, are the characteristics which we may expect to find in
the Record of Creation, if it be indeed, as we believe, a
revelation from God, made to men in a very low stage of
intellectual development. In order that we may be able to form a
satisfactory judgment of it, it will be well for us to consider a
little in detail two classes of difficulties. 1. Those which
belong to the Revelation itself, arising from the limitations to
which it was necessarily subject in its delivery. 2. Those which
arise from our imperfect knowledge of the language in which it is
written, and from our inability to place ourselves in the
intellectual position of those to whom it was originally given.
1. When this record was committed to writing, language was in a
very different condition from that in which it is now. We have an
account of the first recorded exercise of the faculty of speech in
Gen. ii. 19. Adam first used it to give names to all the living
creatures as they passed in review before him. In accordance with
this statement it appears, from the researches of philologists,
that language in its earliest state was entirely, or almost
entirely limited to words denoting sensible objects and actions.
It seems probable that these names were derived from radicals
expressing general ideas [Footnote: Max Muller's Lectures on the
Science of Language, First Series Lect. viii. ix.]; but there is
reason to doubt whether these radicals ever had a formal existence
as words--they seem rather to have been the mental stock out of
which words were produced. But the human mind had from the first
powers for the exercise of which this limited vocabulary was
insufficient. Even in the outer world there was much which was the
object of reason and inference rather than of sense, while the
whole world of consciousness was entirely unprovided with the
means of expression. To meet this difficulty words, which
originally denoted objects of sense, were used figuratively to
express ideas which bore some resemblance or analogy, real or
fancied, to their original significance. As time passed on this
difficulty was gradually diminished: synonyms crept into all
languages from various sources, and when once adopted, they were
in many cases gradually differentiated, the various senses which
the original word had borne were portioned off among them, and
increased precision was thus obtained.
But in the infancy of mankind the figurative system was in full
operation. Hence, all early documents have a strong tinge of the
poetic element. Poetry, strictly so called, probably had not as
yet a separate existence; but the whole spoken and written
language was permeated by that poetic spirit which delights in
tracing subtle analogies, and in expressing the invisible by means
of the visible. The translation of the Sanscrit Hymns, which has
recently appeared [Footnote: Hymns of the Big Veda Sanhita,
translated by Max Muller, vol. i.], furnishes a most valuable
illustration of this state of thought and of language. These hymns
are probably nearly coeval with the Pentateuch. They were the
production of a different branch of the human family, and indicate
a different tone of thought, but they bring out very clearly the
figurative character of primitive language, abounding in fanciful
descriptions of natural phenomena, which, when their metaphorical,
character was forgotten, passed by an easy transition into the
graceful myths and legends of early Greece.
Then there was a poverty in these primitive vocabularies even in
reference to sensible objects, which in many cases rendered it
necessary to employ the same word in more or less extensive
significations, and in the Semitic languages the power of
inflexion was in some directions very limited. This limitation is
most remarkable in the forms used for the expression of time. One
form alone was available to express those modifications which are
indicated by the imperfect, perfect, pluperfect, and aorist tenses
of the classical languages.
Instances of all these sources of uncertainty meet us very early
in Genesis. In the very first verse we have a word, [Hebrew
script], which has great latitude of meaning. It is either the
earth as a whole (ver. 1), or the land as distinguished from the
water (ver. 10), or a particular country (ii. 11). In many cases,
as in all these, the context at once determines the sense to be
chosen; but there are other cases in which considerable difficulty
arises. The whole question of the universality of the deluge
turns, in a great degree, upon the signification which is assigned
to this same word in the sixth and following chapters. In the
second verse we have another word, [Hebrew script], which is
capable of various interpretations. It is used throughout the
Bible in the three distinct meanings of "wind," "breath," and
"spirit." Where we read, "And the Spirit of God moved upon the
face of the waters," the Jewish paraphrase is, "And a wind of God
(i.e. a great wind) moved," &c. Here there is nothing in the
context to assist us in determining the sense to be chosen; but,
as will be seen in the sequel, modern science indicates that the
Jewish interpretation is untenable, and that our translation is,
consequently, the correct one. As an instance of confusion of
time, we may refer to ii. 19. In our translation this verse seems
to place the creation of animals after that of man; but in xii. 1,
the very same form is translated by the pluperfect, "Now the Lord
had said unto Abram." It ought evidently to be translated in the
same way here: "And out of the ground the Lord God had formed,"
&c. In ii. 5, on the other hand, the pluperfect might with
advantage have given place to another form: "For the Lord God did
not cause it to rain." The phenomenon referred to appears to have
been local and temporary. Had the pluperfect been omitted in one
case and supplied in the other two sources of apparent difficulty
would have been removed.
It is very clear, then, that there could be no approach to
scientific accuracy in a narrative written in such a language as
this. Such accuracy is, in fact, attainable only in proportion, as
science has moulded language for its own purposes. But language is
at all times an index of the general mental condition of the
people who use it, and so the knowledge and the ideas of the men
of these primitive times must have been extremely limited in all
those directions with which we have to do. Accordingly, we find no
trace of any doubt whether the information with reference to
external objects which was received through the senses was in all
cases to be depended on. There can be little doubt that to those
early observers the sky was a solid vault, on the face of which
the sun, moon, and planets moved in their appointed courses; the
stars were points of light, golden studs in the azure canopy; the
sun and moon were just as large as they appeared to be, and the
earth was a solid immovable plane of comparatively small extent.
At the time of the Exodus, it seems clear that, even among a
people so far advanced as the Egyptians, all that lay beyond the
mountains which bounded their land on the west was believed to
belong not to living men, but to disembodied spirits. It was the
terrible country through which the souls of the departed made
their arduous way to the Hall of Judgment [Footnote: "The Nations
Around," pp. 49, 50.] Accordingly, we find that the Egyptians made
no attempt to extend the limits of their empire in this direction,
while the monarchs of the Mesopotamian region seem to have been
equally unambitious of conquest beyond the mountain ranges which
bounded the valley of the Tigris on the east. Mesopotamia, then,
on the east, Egypt on the west, Armenia and Asia Minor on the
north, and Arabia on the south, seem, in the view of the
contemporaries of Moses, to have been the utmost regions of the
world. Ignorant as they were of any countries beyond these, they
were, of course, equally ignorant of the numberless varieties of
plants and animals that were to be found in them, and with which
we are familiar. Mining was not unknown, but the mines were few
and superficial; they could not reveal much of the structure of
the earth, and what little they did reveal passed unnoticed.
Nothing was known of the successive beds of rock which form the
crust of the earth, of the fossils with which they abound, or of
the gradual changes to Which they are still subject. If any one
had told the men of that generation that the solid earth on which
they stood, or the everlasting hills which surrounded them, were
undergoing slow but steady modifications, he would have been
looked upon as a madman.
A revelation, then, addressed to men whose language, whose
intellectual powers, and whose stock of ideas were thus limited,
must of itself also necessarily have been both limited and
destitute of precision. It could only deal with things with which
they had some acquaintance, or of which they could form some idea,
while, from the character of the language, and the extreme brevity
of the record, the treatment of even these few subjects must have
been of a vague and indefinite character. Traces of a deeper
knowledge there might be, but they would not lie upon the surface.
They must be carefully sought for, and then they would be
discernible only by those who were in possession of the key which
would unlock their hidden secrets.
Such are the limitations under which the revelation was
necessarily given. We have now to consider our own especial
difficulties, the obstacles which stand in our way when we would
discover for ourselves all the information which the record is
capable of conveying. For if this record be, as we believe, the
work of the Great Architect of the Universe, then it is probable
that its every detail is significant; that wherever it was
possible words were chosen which, when scrutinized, would convey
much more information than appeared on the surface. The great
problem for us to solve is, What are the difficulties which stand
in our way when we would seek this knowledge, and what are the
means by which those difficulties may be surmounted, and the
hidden treasure displayed?
Our first difficulty arises from a matter which, viewed in another
light, is one of our greatest blessings. We are familiar with the
Record through the medium of our own noble version. Probably it is
impossible for any translation more exactly to represent the
original as it presented itself in the first instance to the minds
of those to whom it was addressed. Accordingly we learn it in our
earliest childhood; its majestic phrases imprint themselves on our
memory; our undeveloped minds seem capable of taking in all that
it was intended to convey, and so the impressions formed of it in
our infancy abide with us all our days. We are contented with
them, and do not trouble ourselves to inquire whether there is not
something beyond, which we have not realized.
All this time we forget that, excellent as it is, it is after all
only a translation, and that the very best translation cannot
represent in their fulness the ideas embodied in the original.
Etymological relations between words often give a force and
meaning to a sentence which it is impossible to transfuse into
another language, because the same relations do not exist between
the words which we are constrained to employ. Then there is an
intimate relation between men's thoughts and the language which
they habitually use, so that those thoughts cannot be perfectly
expressed in a language whose character is different. Again in
every language there are many words which bear several cognate
senses, which may be represented by as many different words in the
language of the translation; so that if the best word is chosen,
much of the fulness of the original must be lost; while it may so
happen that the selected word has also a variety of
significations, which do not correspond with the varying meanings
of the original word, and thus senses may be ascribed to the
original which it will not bear, because the reader annexes to the
word in the translation a sense different from that in which it
corresponds to the original word. To all these sources of
imperfection must be added the fact that our translation was made
at a time when science was not yet sufficiently developed to
exercise any influence upon it. There was nothing to induce the
translators to attempt, where it was possible, to preserve any
indications of a deeper meaning, because they had no reason to
suspect that any such deeper meaning existed, or that any
indications of such a meaning were to be found.
To the difficulties of translation must be added the difficulties
of accumulated tradition. The characteristics which mark our own
childish intellect are apparent also in the collective intellect
of the human race in its earlier and ruder development. There are
two characteristics of the human mind in this condition, which
have had a very great effect on the interpretation of this portion
of the Bible.
The first of these is the impatience of doubt and uncertainty. The
power of recognizing the imperfection of our knowledge, and the
consequent necessity of suspending our judgment, is a power which
is only gradually acquired with the accumulation of experience.
The young untrained mind finds it difficult to realize the truth
that any information communicated to it is not altogether within
the grasp of its faculties. It must attach some definite meaning
to the words; it must image to itself some way in which great
events were brought about, great works were accomplished. It finds
it difficult to realize a fact as accomplished, unless it can also
picture to itself some way in which it might have been effected.
For this purpose such knowledge as it has at its command is
employed, and where that fails recourse is had to the imagination
to supply the deficiency. Thus it has been with ourselves in our
childhood, and thus it was in the childhood of the world.
Knowledge was indeed sought, but it was not sought in the right
way, and so the search often resulted in error, and this error
produced its effect in the interpretation of the passage in
question. The old school of inquirers started from certain
abstract principles, and endeavoared to reduce the results of
observation to conformity with those principles. This was the case
with astronomy. The old astronomers taking as axioms the two
assumptions that everything connected with the heavenly bodies
must be perfect, and that the circle is the only perfect figure,
easily satisfied themselves that the orbits of all the heavenly
bodies must be circles. Hence came the
"Cycle on epicycle, orb on orb,"
by which they sought to account for the phenomena which they
observed. When once the method was changed, when once it had
occurred to Kepler that, as it seemed to be impossible to account
for the apparent motion of Mars by any theory of circular orbits,
it might be worth while to try to ascertain by observation what
its orbit really was, a few years of patient labour sufficed to
solve the problem.
It was science such as this, then, that our forefathers brought to
the interpretation of the Mosaic Record, and the consequence was
that when, from time to time, facts were casually brought to light
which might have led the way to vast discoveries, their true
significance was never discerned; all that was sought from them
was some additional support to the old views. Thus sometimes
gigantic bones were exhumed: without investigation, it was at once
assumed that they were human bones, and they were brought forward
to prove the truth of the statement, "There were also giants in
the earth in those days." Sea-shells were found on mountain sides,
far from and high above the sea--they were evidences of the
Deluge.
The second characteristic of that state of mind is its admiration
of the startling and the vast. In these alone it recognizes the
tokens of unlimited power. It is unable to appreciate those more
majestic manifestations of power which are discerned by the
enlightened eye, when a stupendous scheme is developed, gradually
and imperceptibly, but without pause or hesitation through a long
succession of ages; when a multitude of seemingly discordant
elements are at last brought together in a perfect work; when a
power, unseen and unnoticed, slowly but surely overrules the
working of ten thousand apparently independent agents, through a
thousand generations, and moulds their separate works into one
harmonious whole. Such a manifestation of power as this was beyond
the grasp of the untrained mind; but to such intellects there was
something irresistibly fascinating in the idea of a world rising
into perfect existence in a moment, of innumerable hosts of living
creatures called into being at a word. Such was the meaning of the
account of creation which naturally suggested itself to the
untrained mind, and there was nothing in science in those early
days to throw any doubt upon it, and so this belief was
unhesitatingly and almost universally adopted. Here and there,
indeed, some man of deeper thought than his brethren, such as St.
Augustine [Footnote: See St. Augustine, "De Genesi ad Literam,"
Liber Imperfectus, and Libri Duodecim, and also "Confessionum"
Liber xiii.], suspected that there might be more in that seemingly
simple record than was generally acknowledged; but such men had no
means of verifying their conjectures, and their number was very
small. For three thousand years the old view was practically
unquestioned, it received the tacit sanction of the Church, it
gradually became identified in the minds of all with the record
itself, and was as much an article of faith as the very Creed.
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