Evolution Implies Atheism

WHAT a book a devil's chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low, and horribly cruel, works of nature.
-- Charles Darwin

MAN, the highest form of evolutionary development is contesting his very existence against a world of deadly bacteria. Evolution produced the microbe as well as man. What intelligence is there in that? Would the reader use his intelligence to produce the cholera germ? And would he employ it to the point of turning out these filthy germs by the trillions?

Man plans. He would not, if he wished to make a human head, consume millions of years experimenting on the skulls of fishes. But that is how evolution works. Dr. W.K. Gregory of the American Museum of Natural History traces the evolution of the human face "from fish to man." It is a long drawn out, round-about process that no intelligent being would adopt. Time means nothing in evolution -- nor the result. There are, in the United States alone, a quarter of a million insane persons in public and private institutions. That is mental evolution after untold ages of cosmic evolution. Any man, if he had his way, could do better than that. Surely he would not, to demonstrate his goodness and wisdom, work overtime on infantile paralysis germs. Only forces blind to immediate and ultimate results could evolve such beings. Evolution means Atheism.

And man -- what of his evolution? Geologic ages spent in trees! An anthropoid ape walking on all fours, with ape brain and ape behavior and time as nothing in the long-drawn stretch of human evolution!

Human intelligence makes oxcarts before it makes automobiles, but it does not keep on making oxcarts after it has learned to make automobiles. Evolution is still busy turning out apes and billions of creatures far less lovely than the apes -- and doesn't know why. Priests in pulpits and monkeys in tree-tops still chatter nonsense after billions of years of evolution. No wonder Winwood Reade calls man's historic struggle upward "the martyrdom of man".

Piously-minded scientists who assure us that there is no conflict between religion and science are talking foolishness. If man is descended from an ape, he is not descended from Adam. There never was a first man any more than there was a first horse, a first cow, or a first stringbean. By slow stages our present forms of life have evolved from lower forms. Every biologist is aware than man's ancestry goes back to primitive apes and fishes. He was not made after the manner of the Bible fairy-tale. The cultured Chinese gentleman of today knows he is not descended from an original pair of Jewish parents.

Man did not come into the world ready-made; and his ancestral line must extend back by necessity to the lowest and most simple form of life. There can be no break in evolution, even in thought. It is impossible to imagine a point in man's evolution where one can say: "Man started here." The stages through which he passed have been long and varied and his own identity as a human individual must be imperceptibly blended in the ape form from which he emerged. As is scientifically known, man needlessly repeats in his embryonic development the successive stages of his animal descent. Sire Arthur Keith very forcibly remarks: 'What should we think of a builder who in the erection of a palace insisted on 'recapitulating' all the evolutionary stages which lie between a hut and a palace? A Builder behind evolution would be a stupid anarchist.

If mind is the highest development of life, and reason the highest expression of mind, there is little to be proud of. The substantial thinking of the world is done by less than one per cent of the population. Man, is spite of education, in spite of opportunities, in spite of progress, is chained to the past. The human brain is still dominated by the impressions of the cave and the jungle.

Most of us, mentally, are still living in the trees, even if we do walk upright. Beneath the veneer of "civilization," there is a solid, sordid mass of primitive psychology. We continue, in the name of justice, to break necks on the gallows and to fight like wolves. We settle our international differences by the methods of the gangster. That's evolution, with all its backward-dragging, disgusting hangovers from primitive culture. There are vestigial thoughts as well as vestigial organs. Man shares them all, because there is no supervising "intelligence" to eradicate them. Evolution spells Atheism -- a godless universe.

Evolution knows no moral feeling. The earth is a gory battle ground, where the weakest animals go to the wall in a pitiless struggle of tooth and claw. Evolution, century after century, repeats its own follies, by bringing into existence billions of the lowest types of life when it might produce only the highest; continues the production of useless and harmful organs; turns out beings, some of which live for only a day or an hour, or sometimes for only a few seconds. It is a ruthless, blundering, non-moral process, without a glimmer of guidance behind it.

"We must get rid of the great moral governor, or head director. He is a fiction of our brains." So wrote the American naturalist, John Burroughs. He had studied close to nature and knew there is no Kindly Eye, no Heavenly Father, back of the universe. "All the forces of nature are going their own way; man avails himself of them, or catches a ride as best he can. If he keeps his seat, he prospers; if he misses his hold and falls he is crushed."

There is not a third-rate intelligence on earth that could not, after ten minutes' contemplation, devise a better scheme of things. Man's life is largely consumed in improving his surroundings and adjusting the blunders of nature. Daily, hourly, he must employ his wits to untangle the snares of unthinking nature. It would take an intelligence below the level of a moron to carry on evolutionary processes as commonly observed. It has taken evolution, unguided by intelligence, countless ages to develop the simple, unattractive flower known as the wild rose. Evolution, with man's intelligence behind it, has, in a relatively short period of time, changed this simple flower, by artificial selection, into the glorious, multi-petalled American Beauty. That was intelligence behind evolution. Man has not only produced new species of flowers from wayside weeds, but given scent to odorless lilies and eliminated the thorns from raspberry and blackberry bushes. He has been able to evolve a spineless cactus, which, breeding true, now furnishes the desert with food for cattle. He has, by applying his intelligence to evolution, done in a short period of time that which evolution might have accomplished only after millions of years - or never at all. He has speeded up those processes which, under natural evolution, drag along hopelessly or reach an ultimate utility only after thousands of failures and unfavorable adaptations.

To be sure, there are countless facts in nature which imply Atheism independent of evolution and regardless of whether one creature or structure has evolved from another. The "cruelty" of the cat, the spider, or the tiger would be just as "cruel" -- and would imply Atheism -- even if these creatures had always been exactly what they are now. But there are other fats based upon an understanding of evolution that supplement ordinary observation of natural phenomena. Without the slightest knowledge of evolution, one might wonder at the ease and rapidity with which our "Heavenly Father," by means of an earthquake in Lisbon, wiped out 60,000 of his children in six minutes; but when this same Intelligence, in a burst of infinite wisdom, takes 3,000,000 years to change a four-toed extremity into a hoof (as in the evolution of the horse's foot) we are led to marvel, not so much at the Deity's stupidity as at the asininity of the pious dolts who teach the existence of a god.

The God idea cannot be reconciled with our knowledge of evolution. Belief in a Ghost directing the universe must be discarded along with the belief in witchcraft, the sanctity of the snake-dance, and the rituals of voodooism.

Politicians and Prayer

THANKSGIVING DAY has come and gone, millions of prayers have been said, and--believe it or not--the war goes on. God, if he heard his petitioners, gave them the blind stare. The reason there wa no response may be simply stated. The Heavenly Father, who is said to be interested in our welfare, does not exist.

A God that can hear prayers for the cessation of war should be able to hear the blast of bombshells, the cries of helpless aged and infants, the groans of the wounded lying in snow-drifts or on hot desert sands. If he hears their cries and does not act, it is because he is quite willing to wait until one side or the other has exausted itself. He is like a father watching his two children knifing each other and twiddling his thumbs.

On Thanksgiving Day, high government functionaries prayed to God, rolled their eyes like geese, sang silly hymns, and behaved like 12th Century numskulls anathematizing a comet. They knew, if they knew anything, that their antics in church would not change the course of the war, or prevent a single enemy bullet from reaching its mark. They knew that for long days to come the holocaust would go on, regardless of their mumblings to God.

Politicians are not always of the first order of intelligence, but none of them can be so dumb as not to observe, time and time again, that prayers are useless. Most of them, by now, must necessarily realize that praying for peace is like spitting in the wind. If prayers could stop the war, the world would be at peace.

The several "freedoms" for which we claim to be fighting are beautiful enough in themselves, but what good is freedom alone, or own own Bill of Rights, if it leads to nothing more than the liberty of men to make asses of themselves? Something more necessary to raise the thinking standards of a people.

And to whom do our political leaders pray for moral guidance and help? To the "Ruler of the Universe", of course, to the one who, if he existed, is responsible for the thousands of criminal assaults to which man has been subjected since he emerged from the ape. If there be a God, who but he sends the lighting's bolt, the avalance and the tidal-wave, the cyclone and the typhoon, the famine and the drought? If the Pearl Harbor attack was an act of "treachery", what is to be said about the eruption of Mont Pelee, the earthquake at Lisbon, the Galveston Flood? What is the "treachery" of the Japs compared to God's assaults on humanity in a single tidal-wave or hurricane, which, in the twinkling of an eye, wipes out an entire community? What can compare with the "sneak punch" of the volcano whose boiling lava descends on innocent noncombatants in the dead of night? God, in his conduct toward men, has descended to acts of violence for which we hang criminals. If the Nazis ever resort to that much-feared means of warfare, the spreading of disease germs, they will be merely following in the footsteps of God, who has been carrying on a never-ending "germ war" against us since early times. "If, indeed, there were a judgment day", remarks Winwood Reade, "it woul be for man to appear at the bar, not as a criminal, but as an accuser."

Our praying politicians present an inglorious spectacle in our national life, because they show to what levels our government leaders will descend in order to curry favor with the custodians of superstition.

Our Gun Powder Survival

THE end of the human race has been variously discussed, from a fanatic invasion from Mars to our extinction by a comet or a collision with another celestial body.

Now come two individuals, a statesman and an historian, and gravely tell us that wars will extinguish the human race. It is utter moonshine.

Lord Halifax, British ambassador to Washington, delivers himself of this poppycock:

"If the nations fail after this war to make the most of their opportunties to forge a lasting peace, the human race may come perilously near to self-extermination."

Mr. H.G. Wells, even more dramatically than Lord Halifax, states:

"If man does not adjust himself very soon to the changes his inventions have wrought in his environment, he will disappear as a species."

Here we have plain rhetoric, with no semblance to anything but the sloppiest thinking. What Lord Halifax and H.G. Wells fail to note is that the human race can breed faster than it can exterminate its members by sword and cannon.

In spite of the fact that wars have been going on from earliest recorded time, that they are getting bigger and and more technical in each succeeding age, and that global conflicts are now the order of the day, the population of the world has steadily increased. There are more people on the globe today than when Caesar conquered Gaul. How long do you think it would take 2,000,000,000 individuals, quarreling by means of gun-powder, to obliterate themselves?

War, as a blood-letting process, is less deadly than disease. Cancer, tuberculosis, and heart disease exact a bigger toll than war. In 1940, these three diseases caused the death of 610,525 persons. This is more than our total casualties in World War I. We survive these afflications as we survive our losses on the battlefield.

Our total casualties in World War I were 364,800. This is equal to the population of a city the size of Indianapolis. We survived World War I, as did every other nation that engaged in it, and had, at the last census, a total population of 131,669,275, the largest in our history. Not even the vaquished nations were obliterated. Germany came back for more, full of fight and fury, and made a nasty mess of things, as she is likely to do again, in World War 3 or even in World War 20, if she finds an opportunity.

Total American casualties in the present World War, as reported, July, 1944, were 299,474. This is about one-seventh the number of persons born each year. How long, at this rate, do you think it will take our enemies to wipe out the United States?

And what of other countriess fighting in this war? There are 457, 836,475 Chinese. Japan has been at war with China for the past seven years and hasn't even begun to scratch the surface of Chinese obliteration. Yet we are told that the human race will be exterminated by war.

What, too, of India with its population of 388,997,955? Even the bubonic plague and cholera and a high death rate (India is estimated to lose a million inhabitants annually from tuberculosis alone) have not prevented India from increasing its population. That unhappy land, with its cobras and religion, now has 54,000,000 more inhabitants than it had 50 years ago.

You cannot kill off the human race by wars. If you could, it would have been extinguished long ago.