When I was in high school this was one of class readings was to read this. I am going to share with you this argumentative essay by William J. Bryan.
The Bible or Evolution
I desire to present to you the greatest issue in the world. I am interested in the political issues, have been from my youth, but I have never discussed in politics any issue that approaches the issue I now present. I have been interested in international affairs for a quarter of a century, but no international gathering has ever had before it an issue so great as this question, Is the Bible true?
Do you know how much depends upon it? The Bible is either true or false; it is either the Word of God or the work of man. If the Bible is the work of man, then it is not the Word of God; and if the Bible is just the work of man, it is the greatest imposter this world has ever known. From its first page to its last, the Bible claims to be the revealed will of God; if it can come down from its high place to the level of man-made books, but it will sink lower than that. If it can be convicted of being an imposter, it never can survive the odium which that conviction will place upon it. But if it is true, then there is no other book to be mentioned in comparison with it. If it is true, then no guesses of any man can be substituted for the Word of God.
Is it true or false? What does the issue mean? The Bible contains the conception of God that is held by the Christian world; if the Bible is not true, the Christian world has no conception of God. The Bible gives us our own knowledge of Christ; if the Bible is not true, there is no Christ in the sense in which the Bible reveals Him to us. The Bible is the only infallible guide we have, the onlly one; if that infallible guide is taken away, we have no guide. If the parent cannot give the Bible to his child and say to the child, "It is true; you can trust it, you cannot be let astray if you will take it as a guide"--if the parent cannot say that to his child about the Bible, what can he say? Then he has no guide. That is the issue. Could there be any issue greater than that?
The Bible gies you the Christian's conception of God . . . that rules the world today. Take away from the world the Christian's conception of God, and you leave man to search after God; but, can man, by searching, find God? The best evidence that you need divine truth and revelation to disclose God is that more than half the scientists of this country, according to Professor Leuba of Bryn Mawr, who deals with nature, do not believe in a personal God or a personal immortality; that is the best evidence I can give you that unless you have the Bible to reveal God, you are not sure to find Him.
[Not only, my friends, is it impossible for one to find God by searching blindly for Him, but it is harder for an educated man now to find God without the Bible than it was for the Indian to do it. I have been told that they never found a tribe of Indians that did not believe in God; but what the Indians could find, some of our professors cannot find. The head of the Department of Biology at Dartmouth recently told a body of students, in my presence, that he did not pray; he said he did not believe in revealed religion.]
But to come back to my question; Is the Bible true? We have a fight on our hands and I am on the defensive. I have been on the defensive all my life; but when I am defending a thing I do not wait for the enemy to come and attack; when I find there is to be an attack, I go over and do the fighting on the enemy's territory. The question of whether the Bible is true is the issue, and I am going to do the fighting on the enemy's ground. I shall not wait until he takes off his mask and comes out into the open; I shall shell him in the woods and make him come out.
I want now to present the case strongly; I will present it as strongly as I can; if you know of anybody who goes further, I will take what that somebody else says, because nobody shall go beyond me. I will make this proposition, that the Bible has done more for the world than all the books that man ever wrote. Is that strong enough? If it were necessary to choose between the bible all alone and all the other books without the Bible--we do not have to make the choice, and we would not want to, but it shows relative values--I think it would be infinitely better to keep the bible all by itself and build the world anew on it and let all the rest of the books go, than to keep all the rest of the books, and let the Bible go. That is strong, but I have something stronger.
I now have a proposition, and I submit it to any professor in any school who is paid by taxation, and I submit it to any man who calls himself a Christian and then defends the modernist view of Christianity. Here is the proposition: I will give you three verses from one chapter of one book in the Old Testament that mean more to man than all the books men ever wrote, and we have all the rest of the Bible besides. Is that strong enough? That modernist who will not come out and fight that, might as well give up. Three verses, and they are in Genesis.
I was speaking in Atlanta recently and a sophomore in a college there came to me and said, "Mr. Bryan, I can reconcile Darwinism and Christianity." I said, "You must have a better mind than Darwin the, for he could not." He replied, "All I have to do is to discard Genesis."
What are the tree verses? First, "In the Beginning God." I assert that that is the only verse ever written that explains creation in such a way that you can believe it and defend it--the only one. We give the atheist too much latitude; we let him ask all the questions. Why? A five-year-old child can ask questions that no grown person can answer. Why give the atheist the child's task of asking questions? question that requires for its answer infinite knowledge, cannot be answered by a finite mind.
Why not admit it? If we are to discuss Christianity with an atheist, he cannot ask more than that he and the Christian ask questions about: and if we let him ask the first one, we give him more than he can demand. There is no reason why an atheist should demand the right to ask the first question, but I will concede what he cannot claim and let him ask it.
What is his first question? There is only one first question. "Where do you begin?" My answer is, "I begin where the Bible begins." "And where does the Bible begin?" "in the Beginning"--where else could it begin? "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth." We begin with a First Great Cause, all-wise, all-powerful, all-loving. We begin with a cause sufficient for anything that can come thereafter. Start with a God who is Infinite and nothing can be asked you that God's existence cannot explain.
Having answered the atheist's first question, it is now our tern, and I ask our first question of the atheist, "Where do you begin?" And then his trouble begins. The atheist is all right as long as you let him ask questions, but when you start to ask him questions, that is different.
Where does the atheist begin? Have you ever tried to find out where he begins? He does not begin with God, for he denies that there is a God. He cannot commence back of that, for there is nothing back of God. Where does the atheist begin? He begins by assuming something that he cannot explain. If he starts with the nebular hypothesis (the theory that the solar system was once a cloudlike substance that condensed to form the sun and the planets), he assumes that matter and force were here, but he does not tell you where they came from or when they came or how they came or why. He just starts by saying, "Let us suppose two things--matter and force." If you let him suppose twice, he will suppose a third without asking you, and suppose that force working on matter created the world. That is that atheist.
I have as much right to suppose as he has; if the atheist has a right to commence by supposing two things that he does not explain, I certainly have half as much right; I have a right to commence my supposing one thing that I cannot explain--God. I had rather begin with God and reason down, than commence with a piece of dirt and reason up. Which line of reasoning, my friends, do you like? Search all the libraries, read all the books, there are only two lines of reasoning in regard to the beginning. One is from God down ,and the other is from inanimate matter up. Which is more reasonable?
I affirm that there has never been proposed as a substitute for the Bible account of creation any account that is an reasonable, that is as easy to understand, that is as easy to believe, as easy to explain, and as easy to defined. Don't let them take away that first verse; it is the only solid rock there is--all else is shifting sand. That is the first verse, the beginning of all t hings, including life. Where else can you find anything so important to man?
And the second verse of the three is the twenty-fourth verse; that is the only place you will find the most fundamental scientific fact. We do not call Moses a scientist, but Moses, in one sentence, stated a scientific fact, the greatest scientific fact in the world--a scientific fact that means more to man than all the scientific facts that all the scientists have ever stated. What is that scientific fact? The law that governs the continuity of life. If life is to continue on this earth, it must be reproduced, and reproduction must be according to the law, or lawless.
In the twenty-fourth verse of the first chapter of Genesis, Moses states God's universal law of reproduction according to kind. No living thing has ever violated that law; no living thing in the animal or vegetable world has, so far as man can prove, ever violated that law. Every life is reproduced according to kind; even man, with all his power, has never been able to persuade or compel that intangible, invisible thing that we call life to violate the law laid down in the twenty-fourth verse, establishing reproduction according to kind. They have never found one single species that can be proven to have come from another. They have never found any kind of reproduction except according to kind; and yet, the only thing that has seriously menaced religion in nineteen hundred years is the effort to substitute man's guess for God's law, when there is nothing to support man's guess and every thing to support God's law.
the third verse of the three is the twenty-sixth, and what is that? It is the only explanation that can be found anywhere of man's presence here. No man, without revelation, ever solved the problem of life. Not one. No philosopher has done it, no scientist has ever attempted it. You will not find the solution in the twenty-sixth verse, and there only. You will find that after God made all things, He made man--not as He had made all other things, but in His own image. He puts him here as a part of the divine plan, and for a purpose; that is the only place you will find it. How can man, unaided from above, find out the reason for his own existence? He cannot do it.
Man comes into the world without his own volition; he has not a word to say about the age in which he will be born, or the land in which he will first see the light, or the race of which he will be a member, or the family environment that shall surround him in his youth. So far as he is concerned, it is a matter beyond his control. He comes but he does not know, when he comes, how long he will stay.
More than half of the little children born into the world die before their tongues can lisp the word "life" in any language, and the wisest of men cannot guarantee themselves for an hour against accident, disease or death. Do you think that man can control his own life? Think back a few weeks when an hundred thousand Japanese were ushered into eternity in a moment by a trembling of the earth; and only a few days after that twenty-two boys of our navy perished instantly as eleven destroyers piled one after another on the rocks of the Pacific coast.
This is man. How can you guess why he is here? But when you find that man is "the child of a Kind" and that the earth is his royal inheritance, then you know that his first duty (and it ought to be his greatest pleasure) is to find out what God's will is concerning him, and to do it. He finds that God has revealed His will to him; he finds that God says to him, "All this world is yours; even my sovereign will, will you restrain your will; do with these things just as you like--but remember that for every ounce of your strength, for every atom of your influence, and for every moment of your life, I will hold your responsible. All I ask of you is that you obey the laws that I, in my infinite wisdom, have made for your happiness--laws wiser than man can make for himself, laws that link his happiness to his virtue and his prosperity to his righteousness--laws that make it possible for him to rise up to and live upon that exalted plane to which I call my children."
Here are the three verses; the first one gives us the origin of life; the second one gives us the law governing life's continuity; and the third one gives us the explanation of man's presence here. You cannot find this anywhere else. Search your libraries, read your books, and among all the things that man has said, you cannot collect from them all anything equal in importance to man to that which you find in three verses of one chapter of Genesis, and we have all the rest of the Bible besides.
We have the record of God's dealing with a chosen people. We have the inspiration of the prophets; we have the consolation of the Psalms; and then we have the New Testament with the story of Jesus and His atoning blood; we have a code of morality that will endure for all time; we have a Gospel that is for every creature; and then we have Christ's promise, "Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world," and His assurance that in His hand is all power, in Heaven and in earth. That is your Bible, and that is being attacked today. It ought to be defended by everybody who calls himself a Christian.
What is it that is attacking the Bible today? There is only one thing. The Bible need not be afraid of crime, because the more crime there is, the more the need for the Bible. The Bible neeot be afraid of sin, for the more sin there is, the more we need the Bible standard by which to measure it and condemn it. What is it that troubles Christianity today? It is a scientific excuse for discarding God, and . . . for discarding Christ. That is the only thing there is, and it is a menace to the Christian religion of the world; it is also a menace to society, and to civilization. That is why I am defending the Bible. It gives us that upon which the world must bui9ld, and there is no hope for the future if we give it up. I want, therefore, to speak of evolution, the idea that man, instead of being created by Almighty God by separate act and put here for His purpose, is just an animal developed.
Evolution is an hypothesis. What does hypothesis mean? Sometimes people use a word they do not understand and quit using it when they find out what the word means. I heard of a man whose wife called him a model husband. He thought it a great compliment, and quit work and went around among his neighbors bragging about it, until finally he came to one with a dictionary. This neighbor said, "It is nothing to brag about," and suggested that he look it up in the dictionary. So he went to the dictionary to find out what it meant, and what do you suppose he found? He found that the word "model" means a "small imitation of the real thing," and then he went back to work!
Look up the word hypothesis. It means guess--guess. It is a scientific synonym for "guess." If Darwin had called it a guess, it would not have lived a year; but guess is too small a word for a "scientist," so he blew into it and inflated it until it had four syllables in it, "hypothesis," and then because it was empty it would float on the surface of public opinion.
An hypothesis is all right if you know how to use it, so is a guess. We all have to guess; I suppose there is not a business that does not have more or less guessing in it. The farmer has to guess what kind of weather there is to be, when he plants his crops. If he guesses right, he has a good crop; if he guesses wrong, he may lose. . . .
I want to show you that you do not have to be a scientist to be able to trace your ancestry; you can do it just as well as a college graduate can. I will give you the facts and you may sit in judgment on them. Some of these scientists in judgment on them. Some of these scientists are trying to get rid of Darwin; they even say that Darwin never taught that man came from the monkeys. I went down to speak in New Haven a year ago and a young student, a son of a college mate of mine, came to me and said that his professor said that Darwin never taught that men came up from the monkey. Ford's paper sent out a questionnaire to about twenty prominent educators, and eighteen out of the twenty said that Darwin never taught that man came up from the monkey.
In a speech at Dartmouth not that long ago I told them about this dispute and asked, "Is there anybody in this audience who says that Darwin never taught that man came up from a monkey?" One professor held up his hand. I said, "I thought there might be one, so I brought this book from your library." I read to him where Darwin, in his Descent of Man, went back as far as he could go to find life and then traced it down to the present, according to his guess. (He uses phrase, "We may well suppose," eight hundred times in two volumes.) When he gets to the place where the tree branches into the Old World monkeys and New World monkeys, he makes man come from the Old World monkey--he does not even allow us to come from a good American monkey. Then I read where Darwin said that we probably came from the chimpanzee rather than the gorilla. Why? Because the gorilla is so big and strong that it would not be likely to cultivate the social instincts; it was therefore more likely that we came from one of the weaker branches. Then he located us in Africa; our first parents, he thought, were there, "But," he says "why speculate?" If he had thought of that before he wrote, he would not have written anything, because it is all speculation.
What was Darwin's guess? That about two hundred millions of years ago one of a few germs appeared on this planet. When he first announced his hypothesis, he said God put them here; . . . when he became an agnostic, he apologized and changed it and said they "appeared." That does not indicate where they came from: that pleased the atheist just as much as the theist because it does not indicate source. Two hundred millions of years ago--that was his guess; but his son's guess was that it was only fifty-seven millions. What would you think of a son who would knock seventy-five percent of his father's guess out at one blow? Some say it was twenty-four million years, some say three hundred million years. You can see how little accuracy has to do with this guessing when one can guess ten times as long as another and be equally credible as a guesser. Darwin said one of a few germs appeared; some say only one.
I read a book on evolution not long ago in which the author said that everything is the animal world came originally from one germ; and he spoke of it as positively as if he had been there. He waid everything in the vegetable world came from one germ. There were two germs; from one all the animals came, and from the other all the vegetables came. He said that back of those two germs was one germ from which the two came. What a time in which to live, when on germ had two children, one an animal and the other a vegetable!
. . . according to Darwin's guess, everything we now see came from one or a few germs of life. All the evolutionists believe this, whether they call themselves Christian, theist, or atheist. Our answer is that if it were true that all species came by slow development from one or a few germs, every square foot of the earth's surface would teem with evidences of change. If everything changed, we ought to find evidence of it somewhere, but because it is not true, never was true and seemingly cannot be true, they have not found one single thing, living or dead, in process of change. They have examined millions of specimens, from insects so mall that you have to look at them with a microscope, up to mamals, but everything is perfect.
They have not found one in process of change, and they have not been able to show that a single species ever came from another. Darwin said so while he lived and expressed surprise that, with two or three million species, they had not found a single one that they could trace to another; but he thought we should accept his hypothesis, even though the "missing links had not bee found"--not the missing link, but the missing links (plural) had not been found. I we have a million different species, we must have at least a million connecting links, one to link each species to another, but a scientist, speaking in London not long ago, said that if evolution were true, it would not be one link between two species, but there would be a million links between two species, and yet, with a million times a million links that must have existed, if evolution be true, they have not found a single link.
Aside from the absence of proof, there is positive proof that there is no internal and eternal urge in nature--no pushing power that raises anything to a higher place. Chemistry would find evolution if there were such a thing in nature, but chemistry has not found it and it is not there. All the formulae of chemistry are exact and unchanging. Water, for instance, was here before any form of life appeared. Water has not changed and nothing else has changed, so far as we can learn from nature.
. . . I am not afraid of an atheist; the atheist is not doing much harm, because when a man denies the existence of God, he puts himself outside the pale of reason. A man who can look at this universe and not believe that a God made it, cannot impress many people with the weight of his arguments. I don't worry about them; the man I am afraid of is the theistic evolutionist, who says he believes in God but leads the student who trusts him and follows him back step by step, until God is out of sight. He deceives the student; he tells him he does not have to give up God; that evolution is God's plan and a more sublime plan. And yet, when he gets to the beginning of evolution he has put God so far away that He has no influence on life. I regard theistic evolution as simply an anesthetic which deadens the pain while atheism removes the religion. . . .
Evolution, theistic and atheistic, carried to its logical conclusion, robs Christ of the glory of a virgin birth, of the majesty of His deity, and of the triumph of His resurrection. That kind of Christ cannot save the world. We need the full statured Christ of whom the Bible tells; the Christ whose blood has colored the stream of time, the Christ whose philosophy fits into every human need, the Christ whose teachings alone can solve the problems that vex our hearts perplex the world.
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