WHAT OF IT? AN OPEN LETTER TO STUDENTS 509 



the implications of evolution for your outlook on life in general, including 

 religion. Although I lay no claim to having originated most of the ideas 

 and viewpoints, 1 shall write this chapter largely in the first person as a 

 constant reminder that the opinions expressed are personal ones. If some 

 of you find my viewpoints helpful, my inclusion of this discussion will have 

 been justified. Yet you have complete freedom to ignore any of the ideas 

 which seem to you unfruitful or unacceptable. 



Evolution and Religion 



One question about evolution is in the minds of a large proportion of the 

 students who study the subject with me. Occasionally they say something 

 about it in class, or when they stop to see me after class, but for the most 

 part they wonder about it in private or in the small circle of their "bull 

 sessions." This is the question of the relation of evolution to the stories of 

 creation contained in the Bible. As children at home and in their churches 

 they learned about how things started; now at college they hear an entirely 

 different story. That is a really unsettling experience when it involves the 

 book which forms the principal document of our religion. In the light of 

 scientific discoveries must we discard the Bible and with it our religion? 



The whole difficulty here lies in the fact that we try to use the Bible in 

 ways for which it was never intended. It is a book of religion, not a book of 

 science. If that fact becomes thoroughly established in our minds most of 

 our difficulty vanishes. The Bible as we know it is the work of many writ- 

 ers, writing at widely diverse periods in human history. The contributions 

 of these multitudinous writers are almost inextricably mixed, although 

 modern Biblical scholars have done much to untangle the intertwining 

 strands. All of the writers had this in common: they were interested in re- 

 ligion, not science, and they did their writing long before anyone knew 

 anything about modern science. If in writing of religion they had occasion 

 to refer to science they inevitably did so in terms of the science known in 

 their day. So if we piece together these scattered references to the physical 

 world we obtain a picture of the world and solar system as these people 

 thought them to be. And by reading other writers who wrote at the same 

 periods, in Babylonia, for example, we learn that these ideas of the world 

 were widely current at the time. 



As Fosdick (1924) has pointed out, to a considerable extent these peo- 

 ple relied on their senses and thought that the universe was as it seemed to 

 be. They thought the earth was flat and that a sea lay under it (Psalm 

 136:6; Psalm 24:1-2; Genesis 7:11). They thought that the heavens were 



