Studies In Creationism Studies in Creationism By FRANK LEWIS MARSH Professor of Biology, Union College Lincoln, Nebraska AUTHOR OF Evolution, Creation, and Science 1950 REVIEW AND HERALD PUBLISHING ASSOCIATION WASHINGTON, D.C. 1 Studies In Creationism CONTENTS 1. Bestial or Divine? 2. Creationist Theories 3. Evolutionist Theories 4. Materialism and Vitalism 5. Additional Concepts, Philosophies, and Principles 6. Concepts, Philosophies, and Principles-Continued 7. Origin of the Earth 8. Age of the Earth 9. The Bible 10. Evolutionism or Creationism? 11. The Days of Creation Week 12. Science and the Christian Religion 13. Creation Week-Sunday to Thursday 14. Origin of Land Animals; After His Kind 15. The Crowning Act of Creation 16. Genesis 2 17. The Creator-Sustainer and His Works 18. Changes Accompanying the Entrance of Sin 19. The Third and Greatest Curse 20. Early Postdiluvian Man 21. Jacob and the Flocks of Laban 22. Clean and Unclean Animals 23. A Fair Consideration of Man's Diet for Today 24. The Balance in Nature Literature Cited Index 2 Studies In Creationism 1. Bestial or Divine? “Is man an animal?” This is a rather common question. The answer among people in general may be an emphatic Yes or an equally emphatic No! The correctness of the answer will be judged by each individual according to his personal philosophy on that point. From the point of view of scientific classification, all living things, including man, are placed in one or the other of two groups. They are either plants or animals. In this classification man unquestionably is not a plant; therefore, he must be an animal. In common with animals in general, and in distinction to plants, man is able to locomote, or move, from place to place; the cells of his body are without surrounding walls. He is incapable of making his own food from the simple, raw materials-carbon dioxide and water plus certain substances from the soil. And his growth and development proceed in a strictly limited fashion, consisting chiefly of enlargement and maturing, with no continued production of new organs and tissues during the course of his life. Furthermore, man, in common with animals, has a body, which is formed of the chemical elements of the earth, the dust. The breath in his body is the same as the breath in the body of beasts. The processes of life in him are the same as those in the beasts, and they die alike. “That which befalls the sons of men befalls the beasts; even one thing befalls them: as the one dies, so dies the other; yea, they have all one breath; so that man hath no preeminence above a beast.” Ecclesiastes 3:19. The food of man, like that of the beasts, consists of carbohydrates, as sugar and starch; of fats, as butter and coconut oil; of proteins, as portions of milk, eggs, nuts, and beans; of vitamins; of minerals; and of water. Because these foodstuffs are the same for man and animals, the enzymes in their bodies, which bring about the digestion, assimilation, and oxidation of the materials, are identical. The hormones, or chemical messengers, of man are the same as those of animals, some of those of the latter frequently being taken from the bodies of animals and placed in the body of man to save his life, as in the use of insulin for diabetes, and of adrenin, or adrenalin, for acceleration of a heartbeat which has become dangerously slow and feeble. As far as the essential anatomy of man is concerned, he is so similar to certain higher animals in his bones, muscles, nerves, digestive tract, and all the rest, that the same manual of dissection can be used in all its minutiae for the body of man and that of any of the higher apes; that is, the gibbon, the orangutan, the chimpanzee, and the gorilla. The structures are almost identical. The differences are quite entirely those in proportions and relations of parts. However, similar as man and beast may seem when viewed from the close-range angle of the anatomists and physiologists, still, the differences are not imaginary. The proportions of the skeleton are so characteristic as to make it generally possible to classify a bone as human or ape even though a small fragment only is at hand. When a man and any one of the manlike apes are stood up together with the intention of demonstrating their similarities, the student quite invariably finds himself impressed, rather, with the great differences between them. Yes, man differs from the ape in his sparsity of hair, in his more flexible hands, and in his efficiency as a ground-dwelling biped, whereas the ape is basically a tree- dwelling quadruped. In fact, the structure of man's foot is one of his greatest anatomical differences from the manlike apes in the shortness of the four lesser toes, in the falling in line with them of the great toes, and in the expanded heel bone for a prop at the back, characteristics which at once mark man as destined to walk most efficiently in an upright position upon flat surfaces which are nearly, if not entirely, horizontal. But the comparison of man with ape impresses upon the student the fact that real differences do not depend upon and cannot be explained entirely on the basis of their dissected bodies. In mathematics the whole is equal to the sum of its parts, but this is not always true in biology. Any animal is considerably more than the total of the organic substances, the secretions, and the deposits that make up its body. There is something in addition to this demonstrable physical complex. The multitudinous structures of the bodily mechanism of any animal are operated and controlled by a mental mechanism which, at the present time, we cannot explain in terms of physics and chemistry. In each kind and variety of animal this mental control takes the form of a definite pattern of greater or lesser complexity which is peculiar to each variety of organism. Fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals other than man possess, in common with man, brains which have such principal parts as the cerebrum, cerebellum, and medulla oblongata. The more complex the structure of the organism is, the larger the cerebrum is in proportion to other parts of the brain. Intelligence, when the word is used in the sense of the power of meeting a novel situation successfully by adjusting one's 3 Studies In Creationism behavior to the total situation, is shared by man with practically all animals. Of course, the more complex the structure of the organism, the more capacity it possesses for greater power of intellect. Intelligence occurs to any considerable extent only among the back boned animals, and here it is not much in evidence among those members that do not have the outer layer of the cerebrum well developed. Man shows a larger proportion of cerebrum to other brain parts than do even the manlike apes. Furthermore, the whole brain of man, on the average, is, by volume, two to three times that of the great apes. The activities of many animals, even as complex as the frog, are almost entirely reflexive and instinctive. If the cerebral hemispheres are removed, the frog still acts in quite a normal fashion. With greater development of the cerebral cortex in animals, intelligence increases. Repeated and controlled experiments on horses, dogs, raccoons, and particularly on apes and monkeys lead us to believe that such animals do draw simple inferences. They possess little or no capacity for abstract thought or conceptual reasoning. Yet on occasion they perform certain acts as means to an end which they would not perform if they did not have this end in mind. Technically, it is difficult to distinguish between such mental operations and what we call reason in man. However difficult it may be to draw a clear-cut line between certain actions of highly intelligent animals and the simplest processes of reason in man, still, above this narrow borderline zone of action stands the incomparable ability of the human mind to engage in abstract thought. A monkey can look at the starry heavens, but only a man can ponder their meaning. In its broadest sense, only the human mind has the power of reason. Only the mind of man can have any conception of time, of space, and of self determination. Only man is self-conscious and possessed of the ability to understand the difference between right and wrong. It is this tremendous difference between the human mind and the mind of beasts that lifts man above any classification with the brutes. This distinctive mental mechanism of man with its electrochemical effects upon the intricacies of the organ systems of the human body, similar though these systems are to the organ systems of the beasts, places man in a class entirely by himself. As we contemplate the great gulf that the fact of the mind of man stretches between him and the beasts, we feel to join those who answer No! to the question at the beginning of this chapter. When we consider the anatomy and the life processes of man, indeed, he “hath no preeminence above a beast.” But rather than the body, of man, considered from an egocentric point of view, it is his mind which has shaped the past, which constitutes the present, and which determines the future. Because of this fact, man can rightly be contrasted with beasts rather than compared to them. He is unique among animals because of his thought mechanism.