I believe most of us know that Protestantism is not making the progress it did in earlier days. There has been a strange lessening of enthusiasm for Reformation principles. Issues which were once so very, very clear have now been clouded by modern Protestant theology and interpretation. In fact, the historic principle of the Bible and the Bible only is now being questioned as the real source of emphasis for Protestantism today.
We want to study some of these subtle changes that have taken place to steal away the power of that gospel message of old. We would like to know why churches have turned away from the clear Bible preaching of God’s Word and put their main emphasis upon social matters and upon a social gospel.
There are two mighty issues facing Protestantism today-evolution and modernism. We are going to take these matters up one by one and see what fearful inroads these heresies have made upon Protestant theology. First of all, we will think about evolution, the theory of evolution. You know, friends, one of the great marvels of this age is how this philosophical theory became acceptable on a scientific plane. This is something we just can’t understand, because there is nothing, absolutely nothing, scientific about it. It is utterly unscientific.
Now, we all recognize that science insists upon laboratory methods to verify its propositions. Science always says we must prove it. We must go to the laboratory. We must be sure of everything, put it in the test tube. And yet when science begins to deal in theories of the origin of things, friends, there can be no laboratory proof. There can be no scientific test. After all, no one was here when the world was made. No one was audience to those billions of years which the evolutionists claim for the progression of mankind. So, how could it possibly be scientific?
Now there are only two ways that a person can deal with this matter of the origin of mankind. First, by philosophy and second, by revelation. I have chosen the door of revelation to be the surest and the best. We think God has given us in the Bible a revelation of how things came to be. But philosophy, on the other hand, instead of having any kind of authority such as the Bible, simply speculates on how it might have happened. Now I have no quarrel with philosophy. If they want to imagine how things could have taken place, I don’t object. But when these speculations are presented as scientific facts, I do object strenuously.
What is this theory that philosophy instituted and science adopted. Well, it’s the idea that way back in the beginning of things there was only a one-celled organism in the whole world, or a tine monad, as it has been called by some. And this little monad or one-celled organism, without any intelligent design, without any external force applied, over a period of millions of years, simply evolved through a series of spectacular species changes until it turned from a little one-celled thing into an upright man.
Now really when I say these things, it’s almost with a smile because it’s impossible to even imagine an accidental development of a little one-celled animal into an upright individual with all the complexities of his make-up. Yet this is what evolutionary science has now adopted and which it now teaches as fact. Now let me give a fantastic illustration of this word evolution as it is used to describe the doctrine of organic evolution. When I use this illustration, friends, please understand that it’s utterly impossible but nevertheless it is a parallel of what the evolutionist is teaching.
Just imagine that the first tiny two-cylinder gas buggy that was ever made was never used by mankind at all. It was simply placed in an open field and left there. According to this theory of evolution, if you just leave something long enough, it’s bound to change. And so if you leave this little two-cylinder gas buggy there long enough, and a few million years pass by, it’s supposed to change. Without any outside pressure, without any external force applied, without any intelligence involved at all, it’s going to change from that little two-cylinder thing into a four-cylinder improvement.
Then if you will leave it there long enough, it will also develop into a six-cylinder and finally it will grow into a modern twelve-cylinder automobile. But you say, is that really evolution? No, that’s not quite it yet. Actually, if this same process continues and you still leave this modern car out there long enough, if it sprouts wings and then takes off flying as an airplane, that would be evolution.
You say, is it really this preposterous, the theory that is being taught? Listen, friends, it’s absolutely no more improbable-the thing that I have told you-than the theory which is being taught by a lot of scientists. It’s no more improbable than to think that an amoeba could become a worm or a worm become a fish and a fish an amphibian and that turn into a reptile and that into a bird which changes to a mammal which finally becomes a man. Now that’s precisely what the evolutionists teach. All those changes are supposed to take place by pure accident. By simply letting nature and time operate upon the little monad, it develops at last into a fully developed complex human being. So you see the illustration in not altogether without parallel.
Now the problem still remains, where did the little monad come from in the beginning? And that’s quite a problem because many scientists don’t want to admit that God had anything to do with creation at all. For a long time scientists believed in spontaneous generation. What is that? Well, they thought that if you put a pile of old rags in a corner and left them there, after a while a chemical reaction would take place and suddenly out of those rags, life would emerge. Now this, friends, was modern science some years ago. This was taught by some of the most learned men in the world, spontaneous generation, life just coming into being out of nothing.
That became a little unscientific because they finally realized that life comes only from life. But not the scientist is in a quandary if he doesn’t believe in the Bible story of creation. I’m sorry to say that some modern scientists are going back to that old theory again. Some of them are actually falling back on this theory of spontaneous generation because they have nothing else to believe in. They have absolutely no other explanation as to how the first little monad came into existence or how it arrived on the scene. That is, unless they take the actual teaching of the Scripture about creation.
Perhaps the greatest problem of all is to prove how that little monad became a man. Now there’s a real problem to the scientist who believe in evolution. And you know science has been combing the world looking for some tangible scientific evidence of the change they believe takes place in the progression of these organisms. They have been searching for a missing link, for some integrating form to show that species will change from a smaller form into a higher form of life. But you know, friends, they have never found a single shred of evidence to prove that it ever took place, or that it ever could possible take place. Every bit of evidence supports the story of Genesis record that God spoke the world into existence, that God created man as he is now in an upright form. But still, as I say, these people are hard to convince and they don’t want to give up their cherished theories.
Let’s go back to the book of Genesis for a moment now. Genesis 1:27: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.” Now isn’t that clear and simple? It says that God created man in God’s image. Now, what was God’s image, dear friends? Was it some one-cell form of life? Never! Man was made upright, we are told in the Scriptures, created after the image of God. Now look at verse 11. “And God said, let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding see, and the fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so.”
How did everything reproduce? After its kind. The grass brought forth grass. The trees brought forth trees. Nothing changed its family lines, in other words. There is no such thing as a changing of species. Pansies will always be pansies. Monkeys will always be monkeys. And men will always be men. There are not integrating forms to reveal any change from one family to another or from one species to another. Now friends, if the theory of evolution were correct, we should be able to find many, many varied forms of life changing from one family to another. For example, we should be able to find fish who are turning into mammals and mammals who are turning into birds, etc. But in all the records of civilized man there is no proof of such a change.
The scientists will dash madly all over the world if they think some missing link has been discovered. They found some new, strange sounding fish over in Malaya. Immediately the scientist booked a plane to fly over there to see that fish-to see if maybe it didn’t have some arms or if it didn’t look like some other kind of creature except a fish. But every time they have been disappointed. It just turned out to be a different kind of fish, that’s all. Fish remain fist, and birds remain birds, and monkeys remain monkeys, and they don’t seem to change their lines at all.
There is a certain fly called the common fruit fly and its scientific name is drosophila, and this fly is unusual in that it actually produces several generations every week. Now this provides an almost perfect setup for scientific observation. The scientists have been observing the fruit fly for a long time, a hundred years or more. This fruit fly can produce several generations every week. Now, friends, it any change takes place just by the passing of time and the reproducing of successive generations, this fruit fly should show some kind of change after these hundreds and thousands of generations. Yet, in all of these countless numbers of generations, they have not yet found a single change taking place in the fruit fly. It’s still just like it was thousands of generations ago. And the evolutionists don’t know how to explain it. According to their theory, something should have happened and the fruit fly should have grown up into a big horse fly at least. But nothing happened. No change has taken place.
All right, another fact which denies this theory is that these family members cannot change their species. They can’t crossbreed. Dogs will not interbreed with cats neither will horses with elephants. Everything seems to reproduce after its kind only, just as God said back in the beginning. The reason for this is that all of these families have a different number of chromosomes in their cells which means that they can only produce biologically after their kind. There could not possibly be any biological progression from one family or from one species to another. Now changes may take place within the species-yes.
You will get many different varieties developing within a family because of mutational changes. In other words, God didn’t have to create all the different kinds of dogs and the different kinds of birds or cats. He simply made one pair and from it, the varieties have developed according to the mutational changes within those species. But they have never gone across family lines to change into a different family. That would be transmutation, and it has never taken place in all history and it can’t take place according to the evidence at hand.