Sep
04
2010
Waiting for Evolution to Evolve
Guest Post by Robert Sagers
From another source there has been great progress in comprehending certain parts of Scripture. From physical science we have learned. We know how the world was once aghast about certain statements of astronomy. We are not troubled now. No one imagines that the ordinary astronomy teaches what is contrary to the Bible. The same thing is largely true of geology. It is amusing to look back and see geologists arrayed to-day against much that geologists maintained in times past, and then to remember how certain superservicable apologists have busily reconciled these now exploded theories. The cloud is like a camel. Nay, it is like a whale. Yes, very like a whale. Now, similarly as to another matter. I believe in—something above evolution. I do not know how much to believe about it. I do not know what it is. I am working for evolution to (evolve) itself. Let us not be ever hasty to reconcile the Bible with the present theories of evolution.
—John A. Broadus, “The Paramount and Permanent Authority of the Bible,” Baptist Courier, 23 June 1887, 1. (HT: Gregory A. Wills, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 1859-2009 [New York: Oxford University Press, 2009], 139.)
Most of all, perhaps, we need intimate knowledge of the past. Not that the past has any magic about it, but because we cannot study the future, and yet need something to set against the present, to remind us that the basic assumptions have been quite different in different periods and that much which seems certain to the uneducated is merely temporary fashion. A man who has lived in many places is not likely to be deceived by the local errors of his native village; the scholar has lived in many times and is therefore in some degree immune from the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone of his own age.
—C. S. Lewis, “Learning in War-Time,” in The Weight of Glory (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 58-59.