WG-22-23. DEGENERATION
23. DEGENERATION
ONE common quality of all the products of evolution, which serves to distinguish them from all the products of creation, is the instability of the former, and their tendency to revert to their original condition, that is, to the condition into which they were brought by creation. This ineradicable tendency to progress backwards has been a sore trial to evolutionists. They had to take note of a fact so patent and universal, and room had, therefore, to be made in the evolutionary scheme for “dissolution” and “reversion to type”; and having thus provided sonorous names for these phenomena, our philosophers had therewith to be content. But has any evolutionist, or anyone else, ever produced a single instance of reversion to type in the spheres of creation? Again we have a very striking confirmation of our main proposition. In all the types as God created them there is neither evolution nor reversion. The types neither advance nor recede. Reversion to type occurs only where evolution has come in, and it proceeds just so far as to obliterate man’s treatment of God’s material. Having proceeded so far, it stops just there. In a word, reversion, when not interfered with, simply undoes what evolution has done.
It is as if each type was held to its place by an elastic cord. Man can pull it in various directions, thus producing “varieties” of plants and animals; but never can he stretch it far enough to cross the line of species. “After his kind” is the inflexible law of reproduction. And when man has relaxed his pressure on the type, the elastic cord quickly draws it back to its primal condition, and the effect of man’s operations is obliterated. This is “reversion to type.”
Hence all the speculation which pictures the return of the cosmos to its conjectured gaseous state, to begin evoluting all over again, is the wildest kind of unfounded nonsense. To such fancies as these do men—the wisest and best of them—expose themselves, when they reject the Word of God, with its simple, sufficient, and satisfactory account of creation, and of the entrance of evil and death upon a scene which God prepared for His own glory in the happiness of His creatures. It is a fearful thing not to receive a love of the truth. All who are thus deluded, and who thus reject the truth in order to follow their own vain imaginations into realms where the natural man cannot penetrate, are given over to a strong delusion that they should believe the lie, “because they receive not the love of the truth, that they might be saved” (2Th 2:10-11).
If it be true that evolution appertains solely to the conduct of the affairs of man in his fallen state, that evolution is the plan of progress adopted by man after his departure from God, we see what an affront has been offered to the Creator, the Son of God, by whom “were all things created that are in heaven and that are on earth, visible and invisible” (Col 1:16), in attributing to Him the method of His enemy. But such has been man’s way from the beginning. God put man in the garden to dress and keep it, and to have dominion over all creation; but he preferred Satan’s plan of becoming as god by the pursuit of Knowledge. God offered men again the Prince of Life, but they chose a murderer. This was the significance of the choice presented by Pilate, and as the Apostle Peter subsequently declared (Acts 3:14): “But ye denied the Holy One and the Just, and desired a murderer to be granted unto you; and killed the Prince of Life.” They preferred the devil, and “he was a murderer from the beginning” (John 8:44). God sent the True Light into the world, and men preferred the prince of darkness. “And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and that men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil” (John 3:19). God sent the truth in the person of His Son (John 1:17; John 14:6; John 18:37); but men preferred the devil, who “abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him;... for he is a liar and the father of it" (John 8:44).
It is not strange then, that when this pursuit of Knowledge had reached its limit of folly and madness, the works and workings of the devil should be attributed to Him who was manifested for the express purpose of destroying them. “For this purpose the Son of God was manifested, that He might destroy the works of the devil” (1Jn 3:8).