EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 



A Beginning 



"In the beginning God created the heaven and the 

 earth. And the earth was waste and void, and darkness 

 was upon the face of the deep" — Beyond this simple 

 statement of creative fact, human knowledge with all 

 its progress does not go. Man's best thought seems to 

 admit that there was a beginning, a creation. No 

 matter how many countless ages back he may push the 

 date, man still appears to believe that the universe, as 

 he knows it, has not existed from all eternity and will 

 not exist to all eternity. But a beginning postulates a 

 cause, a creation postulates a creator. Had the uni- 

 verse existed unchanged and in its present form from 

 all eternity, we might think of it as self-existent from 

 and through all time to all eternity. Once the idea of 

 a beginning is admitted, however, we must apparently 

 likewise admit the idea of a cause. This cause man 

 calls God. 



Light and Heat 



" And God said : Let there be lights in the firmament 

 o) heaven." — Here again human knowledge seems to 

 lend its corroborative evidence. The normal condi- 

 tions of space are apparently darkness and cold. Light 

 and heat are positive phenomena, somehow myste- 

 riously projected into the purely negative conditions 



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