Chapter 11 Chapter Eleven Geology and Genesis

Those who drill the hard earth, Dig a chronicle from the strata. We know from the Chronicle that, The author who revealed the dates to Moses, Got the year wrong! —William Cowper During the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, people did not know about fossils. The most common explanation is that fossils are the remains of animals and plants destroyed by the flood of Noah's time.But many eminent scholars believe that they are formed under the earth's crust through natural and mysterious processes.A few argued that it was the work of the devil to lead devout believers astray.Others believe that it was created by God to confuse scientists or test believers, or that it was the original experimental model of God's creation of biological forms.

One of the modern defenders of the fossil creation theory is Professor Johann Bellinger of the University of Würzburg.He published an expensive treatise in 1726 describing some of the strange fossils he had found.There are figures of the sun and the moon and Hebrew characters on many fossils.In fact, these fossils were all carefully cultivated with mud by his students and buried in the ground, and the poor professor was fooled.It wasn't until one day that he found his own name on a fossil that he finally understood!He spent the rest of his life trying to buy his book back, but the book had become a collector's item, so it was harder to get it back.Ironically, after the professor's death, one of his descendants actually republished the work, earning a considerable amount of money from it.It is a sad story, one that is remembered today for the credulity of the scientist.

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, naturalists gradually noticed that fossils found deep underground and on ancient rock formations were relatively simple, while fossils in later formations were more complex.Did life start in some simple form millions of years ago and slowly evolve over long geological epochs to Earth's present flora and fauna?Later, Darwin published his book in 1859.This is not the first book on the theory of evolution, but the series of implications it presents are so profound that it is impossible to dismiss the theory as grotesque speculation. The impact of this book on the Christian world cannot be overestimated.It was, of course, a major factor in widening the schism between Protestant fundamentalists and so-called adherents of modernism.Adherents of modernism naturally embrace the new theory, which, they say, is simply God's way of making things.If the story of "Genesis" is not taken too seriously, if "day" is interpreted as a geological era, it can even be regarded as a book that briefly describes the history of evolution.

Fundamentalists are staunchly opposed to the theory of evolution.Most of them believed in the flood theory supported by Luther; others, including British Prime Minister Gladstone, supported the opinion of the French naturalist Baron Cuvier that in geological time, there were a series of floods at different periods. The creation process, every creation process appears after the flood buries the original life.There is also a theory that the fossils are the remains of early "Apocalyptic" creations that flourished during the period between Genesis 1, verses 1 and 2.This theory survives to this day in commentaries on the popular Scofield Beaded Bible.

Thousands of books were published in the nineteenth century, mostly in England, to reconcile geology with Genesis.Among these dull and sad books, there is one very different, wonderfully written, and eccentric, which deserves mention.Written by zoologist Philip Goss, father of the famous British poet and critic Edmund Goss, the book is titled Navel.Its excellence lies in this: Although no one will believe its content, the theoretical logic it proposes is in close agreement with geological facts, so that no scientific argument can refute it. Goss concedes that geology has established beyond any doubt that the earth had a long geological history before Adam, when flora and fauna flourished.He was also convinced that the earth was created in 6 days around 4000 BC, exactly as described in Genesis.How did he bring these two opposing views together?Quite simply, just as Adam was created with a navel and this trace of birth did not appear, so the whole earth was created with fossilized remains of all the remains of a past age that existed only in God's heart.

While it's conceivable that Adam didn't have a belly button, it's hard to imagine him without bones, hair, teeth, and nails.However, all of these features themselves provide evidence of original growth.In fact, any organ or tissue in the human body has a history of original development.This also applies to every plant and animal.As Goss points out, elephant tusks indicate past stages of development, nautiluses continually add chambers to their shells, sea turtles add layers to their carapaces, and trees have growth rings due to seasonal changes.He writes: “Every argument that biologists use to prove that . . . that cow was ever a fetus . The author quotes extensively from many sources and demonstrates it in detail in hundreds of pages, with dozens of woodcut illustrations attached.

In short, if the earth was created by God as described in the Bible, then he must have created it as a "developed enterprise".Once this concept is considered necessary, it becomes a little difficult to explain the geological history of the earth.Signs of the slow erosion of land by rivers, curved and sloping strata, limestone mountains formed by the remains of marine life, lava from extinct volcanoes, scratch marks on rocks left by glaciers, footprints of prehistoric animals, teeth marks on buried bones, and Millions of fossils scattered across the Earth—all this, and many others, testify to past geological changes that never actually took place.

Goss writes: "It may be objected that to imagine that the world was created with fossilized bones in its crust—the bones of animals that never actually existed—is to accuse the Creator of making some Objects designed to deceive us. The answer is obvious. Did God create trees with growth rings just to deceive people? Did God create growth lines on shells to deceive people? Did God create humans with growth rings? Navel, is the purpose to trick them into believing they have parents?" The question of whether Adam had a belly button has not been forgotten.A few years ago, North Carolina Congressman Carl Durham and his House Armed Services Subcommittee reported in Public Affairs Document 85 (Run Benedict and Gene Weltfish The Human Race), took issue with a caricature of Adam and Eve.People in comics have belly buttons.The subcommittee's concerns were reassured when it was pointed out that Michelangelo's Adam in the Sistine Chapel fresco also had a belly button.

Goss is thoughtful on this issue, even discussing the discovery of fossilized dung.Hitherto, he writes, this "has been regarded as exceptionally strong evidence for the existence of life before the creation of the world".However, he pointed out that the problem was no more difficult than explaining the fact that God's newly created Adam had both waste and waste in his intestines.There must also be blood flowing in his arteries, and to have blood there must be chyle and chyme; "It might seem ridiculous at first," he admits, "...but the truth is the truth." Goss' argument is virtually unassailable.He does not need to give up any geological truth, and he is in full agreement with "Genesis".As Goss points out, we can even assume that God created the world minutes ago, with all the cities and sources, and memories in people's minds, and there is simply no logical way to refute such a possible theory .

However, the book "Navel" was not accepted by most people.Goss Jr. wrote in one of his books: "There never was a book that could count on much success and no rewards like this strange, obstinate, whimsical book.  … With enthusiasm he The gesture of dedicating it to atheists as much as to Christians. . . . But atheists and Christians alike laughed at it. . . . Even Charles W. Kingsley also wrote that he couldn't... 'believe that God would write a gigantic and unnecessary lie on a rock'." Subsequent efforts in this direction pale in comparison to Goss's remarkable reconciliation of geology and the Bible, but the subject continues to be written, as it is today.Since the beginning of this century, thousands of Protestant works on evolution have been published in the United States alone.Most of these works are unreadable, but there are occasional books with a serious and academic flavor.For example, Dr. Louis More, professor of physics at the University of Cincinnati and brother of the noted critic Paul Moore, gave a series of lectures at Princeton in 1925, published under the title The Dogma of Evolution.This is a very infuriating book.Dr. Moore uses all the old and outdated arguments to attack the theory of evolution, but just keeps the reader from knowing exactly his own interpretation of the fossils.One gets the impression that he saw the formation of different "species" as the result of a series of isolated creative acts.A similar attack on the theory of evolution was published in the October 1928 issue of The Atlantic by Dr.The title of the article, "Evolution, A Conservative Apology," was filled with quotes from literary and philosophical bigwigs, but it betrayed the author's lack of scientific knowledge.

Among twentieth-century Protestant opponents of evolution, one man, and this one man alone, stood out from the crowd.He was the "geologist" whom Brian referred to as the leading authority in the famous Scopes trial in Tennessee.In the past 30 years, almost all fundamentalists have taken his writings as their main weapon when attacking the theory of evolution.In fact, he is the latest and greatest anti-evolutionist. This outstanding figure was George Price, born in Canada in 1870.He earned degrees and taught in several places at various Seventh-day Adventist schools, and later served as a professor of geology at a small Seventh-day Adventist college in Nebraska.He lived in Loma Linda, California after retiring in 1938 from Walla Walla College in Washington State, another university of the denomination. Although Price published some 20 books, his arguments were concentrated in a 726-page college text, The New Geology, published in 1923.This is a classic pseudoscientific work.So well argued, with so many references to geological terms, that thousands of Protestant fundamentalists today regard his work as the final word on this issue.Even skeptical readers find it difficult to refute Price without considerable knowledge of geology. The heart of Price's argument can be stated in a few words.He pointed out that the sanctity of the theory of evolution lies in the idea that as the strata change from ancient to later times, fossils also gradually change from simple to complex forms.Unfortunately, there is no other proper way of dating the strata than by the fossils buried in it.This creates a vicious circle, just like a dog chasing its own tail.The role of the theory of evolution is to classify fossils in the order of evolution, and use fossils to determine the age of strata.Therefore, changes in fossils from "old" to "new" are considered "evidence" of evolutionary development. Price's point of view is that the entire world was created thousands of years before the birth of Christ, as described in "Genesis", which took exactly 6 days.Different strata do not indicate different geological ages.They were all deposited simultaneously by the time of the Great Flood, which was caused by a great tidal wave caused by celestial disturbances, which struck the whole earth, collapsed the mountains of the time, and destroyed the temperate climate of Eden.He once wrote: "The Grand Canyon of Colorado ... may not be much older than the pyramids of Egypt." According to Price, fossils are simply the remains of pre-Flood animals and plants buried by the Great Flood. If this is the case, then in the outcroppings of the fossil strata, one must find fossils with layers that correspond to the order of evolution, and others that do not, and the two cases are equal (although Price also taking into account the fact that sea creatures tend to be buried first, land creatures second, and birds last).This is the case, claims Price, who devotes much of his publication to pictures and illustrations of this "upside-down" region.To explain these embarrassing formations, conventional geologists invented imaginary faults and folds, Price asserts.The following quotes on this issue illustrate Price's way of reasoning: ... There is hardly a man-made geological section made in recent years that does not include one or several such "thrust faults" or faults". But the real point that must be remembered in this This method was deemed necessary only if the order was reversed—a method which, like the aforementioned expedients for the interpretation of the evidence, is comparable to Ptolemy's famous "epicycle" theory, which someday will be. . To a reader who is not familiar with geology, this statement seems to make a lot of sense.How would he know, for example, that geologists have dozens of accepted criteria for determining whether a fault or fold has occurred?Of course, in many cases the entire fold or fault can be clearly seen.If not, experienced geologists look for other signs.For example, an upside-down fold actually turns the formation upside down.This naturally turns fossil remains such as storm marks, ground fissures, rain tracks and footprints upside down.Trilobites will lie on their backs.The center of gravity of a large mass buried in the original clay-rock formation will be high rather than low, and so on.If it is a fault, there is always a clearly defined fault line, and where the fault moves, the rock surface is often smooth, and there are other mechanical signs of the changes that have taken place. Price described the stratigraphically reversed areas he saw as saying that there were no remnants of faults or folds, just a reversed sequence of fossils, but that was not the case.One need only go to the areas previously explored to find a great deal of technical evidence of faults and folds which have nothing to do with fossils.For example, Price likes to cite the example of Alberta in the Rocky Mountains, the main mountain in Montana, where old formations lie on top of new ones.Although seven photographs of the mountain were reproduced in New Geology (one is still printed on the cover), Price forgot to tell the reader that a fault of the overthrust fault is clearly visible at the base of the mountain lines, and smooth rock surfaces evidence fault activity.Mount Hutt in Wyoming is another example of strata reversal that Price likes to cite.He failed to mention, however, that the fault line is clearly visible here and is about 25 miles long. Nor does Price point out that the number of areas where the strata are reversed is extremely small compared with the thousands of rock outcroppings where fossils are always in the correct evolutionary order.In fact, stratigraphic inversions occurred at the same sites where, as one would expect, significant folds and faults had occurred.In fact, the major formations have been dated with considerable accuracy long before the prevailing theory of evolution, and radiometric dating in recent years has convincingly demonstrated the accuracy of the methods of the old past. Regarding the issue of early human fossil remains, Price's point of view is to echo the words of the "Sabbath-day Rebirth" believers and the female prophet EG White who is said to be very effective.In her book Natural Talent (1864), she wrote; If there is one evil greater than that which requires the destruction of mankind by a flood, it is the vile evil of mixing man and beast, because it mars the image of God and causes chaos everywhere. ... All the species created by God survived in the ark, and those not created by God were destroyed by the flood.Since the Flood there has been a mixture of man and beast, as can be seen in the almost incessant variation of the species of animals, and in certain races of man. Price once wrote: "I believe that the words of Sister White are the teachings given to us by the providence of God. . into a state of confusion and confusion.  …” Hitler's assertion that the non-Aryan races arose from mating of early Aryans with apes was omitted in the second edition of the book, and so is Sister White's above statement about human-animal hybrids in It was also cut out in later editions of her book.Still, Price took her word for it.He argued that pre-Flood humans had been completely wiped out by the Flood, and therefore no fossil remains of them would be found.He wrote: "...for we have heard that God wished to destroy that godless wicked race, and that He may have done so thoroughly, and buried them so deep that we have not discovered Their remains." He believes that the human skeleton fossils that have been discovered are the remains of humans who lived after the flood. Early Adventist believers often regarded certain primitive tribes, such as nomadic tribes in Africa, Hottentots, and American Indians who dug roots for food, and sometimes all blacks as a typical degenerate mixed race.Price isn't quite there yet.He believed that Negroes and Mongoloids were degenerate race types produced by the mixture of pure races created by God in the Tower of Babel.Modern apes, however, may have been hybrids.Here's Price's take on the issue: There is no clear and conclusive evidence in paleontology that the extant apes existed before the world cataclysm, the Great Flood.Today's great apes are probably as much a product of modern conditions as the Negroids and Mongoloids in humans.If I had to choose between the idea that apes are degenerate or hybrid humans and that humans are evolved apes, I believe it would not take me long to decide.I think that no educated scientist can make a choice without spending a lot of time. Some post-Renaissance naturalists, from the Scottish anthropologist Lord Momberdo to the American author of popular knowledge of animals, Ivan Sanderson, believed that the advanced apes were not animals at all, but primitive or degenerated of humans.Momberdo considered orangutans to be a species of man.This idea gave rise to such a character as Sir Oran Hotton in Peacock's novel "Melincott".Sanderson feels similarly about gorillas.In his book Animal Treasure (1937), he wrote: "Looking at the lives of these animals, listening to their cries and conversations... I can only see them as a degenerate humans." (Sanderson's most recent contribution to zoology was an article in the June 1951 issue of Truth about the discovery of dinosaur tracks on a beach in West Florida.) Price was, of course, a devout Seventh-day Adventist.Like Velikovsky, he had a strong religious motive to establish the records of the "Old Testament" as truth.But could such a purpose alone drive a man of his learning to play an eccentric and solitary role for almost half a century?He also incidentally reveals other motives when he writes that "the science of geology had to be reformed almost single-handedly".But on the whole, his book is admirable for its freedom from the intense self-aggrandizement that is so evident in pseudoscientific writing.Price's writing is plain, concise, and clear.Here's an example of his surprising lack of resentment when he describes his difficulty in finding opportunities to express his views: When I first made some revolutionary discoveries in geology 25 years ago, the problem I faced was how to introduce these new ideas to the public.It was only after I found out that the normal publishing channels were partially closed that I decided to take advantage of the other doors that were still open.I may have made a mistake.Perhaps I should have respected the pedantic old rules of the scientific world, and should have groveled and stood outside the gate of the editorial office that had rejected me more than once.But I didn't do that, fully understanding what that would entail.Moreover, I have no reason to think that I have actually made a mistake.One day it will be realized that the ruling circle of "reputable" scientists can never have a monopoly on the facts of nature. After publishing The New Geology, Price had expected evolution to wither and wither, to be blown away by a gust of wind.In 1924 he wrote: "Biological evolution is dead. . . . This book is but a eulogy. Rest in peace!" A year later, while debating Joseph McCabe in London, he predicted that the British public would Views on evolution will change within two years, as he thinks has happened in the United States.Of course, no such change has taken place in the United States at all.Virtually no geologist thinks that Price's book deserves refutation.Did that ever raise doubts in Price's mind?of course not. "The long papers I wrote before on this subject have not been answered," he wrote, "and no one has been able to. But it has been ignored, and will probably continue to be ignored. For even in science, almost No one will patiently listen carefully to an entirely new argument based on facts with which no one is familiar." While Seventh-day Adventists believe the Catholic Church is run by Satan, many Catholic writers take Price's geology seriously when writing about evolution.The most scholarly example is The Indictment of Evolution, published in 1925.The author, George O'Toole, fully accepts Price's naive criticism of geochronology.His chapter on "The Origin of Fossils" is little more than a lengthy overview of Price's views.Likewise, Arnold Lunn, in the 1932 revision of The Evasion Theory, refers to Price as "a professor of geology at an American university" and praises him for his response to "arbitrary rearrangement of stratigraphy." ridiculed." In the early 1930s, Price wrote several articles in The Catholic World, in which, in an article on "eccentrics and prophets," he compared himself to those who had been contemporaries He is compared and taken for granted by the great scientists who have been regarded by generations as eccentrics. From the beginning to the present, the reaction of the Catholic Church to the theory of evolution has been far less violent than that of the orthodox Protestant groups.In the decades since Darwin's writings appeared, the Church has done nothing about the doctrine other than to make it clear that Catholics cannot accept the gradual evolution of the human soul.The general reaction of archbishops at the time was of course to object, but few Catholics wrote on it compared to the fanatical writings of Protestants.This may be due to the lessons the Catholic Church learned the hard way about Galileo. In the lower churches, however, non-monastic Catholics wrote books against Darwin and his teachings.In the United States, the typical example of this kind of work is Alfred McCann's "God or Gorilla", published in 1922.The author talks a lot about "sole fossils in the Triassic period", and believes that this is evidence that humans walked with shoes in the Triassic period!As can be seen in the photo, it is clearly just a common type of rock concretion.McCann was furious that orthodox geologists did not take his findings seriously. O'Toole's Indictment of Evolution is much more scholarly than McCann's book, but there is nothing new or important about it except tedious features.In Britain, Arnold Lunn's The Evasion Theory was equally lackluster.Although Lunn also admits that each "species" has changed slightly over long periods of time, none are linked by a common family system.The origin of every species is a special creation. The most ridiculous attack on the theory of evolution by British Catholics was Hilaire Belloc's "Guide to Mr. Wells's Outline of World History" published in 1926.Belloc was as ignorant of science as he was arrogant.Most of his arguments were old and unreliable, and even Price didn't have the courage to bring up these antiques.The book so infuriated Wells that he published his rebuttal later that year under the title "Mr. Belloc's Dissent."Bitter and acerbic, this essay is a small masterpiece of argumentative writing.Among the pen and ink lawsuits in history, I am afraid that there is no such a complete victory as this one.Belloc wrote another rebuttal pamphlet, Mr. Belloc Still Dissenting, twice as conceited as the previous book, but it was nothing more than exasperated yelling, and he could not have mortally wounded himself. have no idea. Belloc's friend, the famous Gilbert Chesterton, rarely touched on the question of evolution in his writings.If this problem comes up, he will talk nonsense.For example, in his article "Immortal Man", like many opponents of evolution, he wasted a lot of space to convince people that there is a big difference between human and animal thinking.This is pure nonsense.For no evolutionist denies this distinction.In the genealogy of evolution, man and retribution are the result of the development of two completely different branches, whose transitional forms belong to the distant past.Huxley, a great disciple of Darwin, wrote, "...I am more convinced than anyone that the abyss between civilized man and brutes is enormous." Chesterton, however, went so far as to write: "The higher animals are not No better portraits are drawn; the most evolved dog is no better drawn than it was in the wild; wild horses are no Impressionists, and race horses are no Post-Impressionists... Cows in the field listen to larks singing more opportunities than anyone else, but it doesn't seem to be aroused and cultivated by it." Chesterton's point, of course, is that there are such vast differences between humans and animals: humans can talk, create art, laugh, dress, feel guilty, organize governments, worship God, and so on.It is therefore impossible to conceive of any transitional stages between them.The short answer to this is that there is an equally huge difference between adults and newborn babies.If the answer is that a baby grows into a man and that is two different things, then the crux of the matter is this: If babies and adults can be the result of a continuum of development, babies do not need to cross a distinct line to acquire "human" characteristics. there is no reason, then, at least in theory, that the ancestors of man and animals (more "human" than newborn babies) could not belong to a similar continuum. In the same work, Chesterton pokes fun at the fact that beautiful cave paintings by prehistoric people have been found in southern France.He imagined that since these artists were prehistoric people, they must be like orangutans, and their superb painting art, in his opinion, made a big joke on anthropologists.Unfortunately, Chesterton hadn't managed to find out that the cave paintings were the work of the Kromagnons, a fairly well-developed species with slightly larger brains than modern humans.In an appendix to the book, he apologized for the omission, but did not justify it. Recently, Catholic opinion is rapidly shifting toward the full acceptance of evolution, with a firm reservation that, at a certain stage in geological time, the human soul was infused from outside into a human body that had evolved to receive it.In fact, as early as 1871, a Catholic biologist, St. George Mivat, defended this view in his book The Origin of Species.Later, Mivat was excommunicated for other reasons, but his writings are now considered prophetic. In a 1950 encyclical, the Pope warned Catholics not to "think that the theory of the origin of the human body from pre-existing living matter is completely settled," but he allowed believers who wanted to believe it to keep their own. Belief.The official position is: the evolution of animals and plants may be true, but the evolution of the human body has yet to be determined.Catholic scientists may undertake research to develop a possible hypothesis, but it may not be taught in Catholic schools until the hypothesis has been certified. It is worth mentioning that Dr. Mortimer Adler of the University of Chicago, one of the leading Neo-Thomists in the United States, known as the compiler of the "Great Tome", was for a time single-handedly denouncing the theory of evolution.In How Man Evolved, published in 1937, Adler dismissed evolution as a "popular myth," insisting that it was not an established fact, "but at best a possible historical , an ill-documented and contradictory history...these facts can only establish a historical possibility: species of animals that once existed no longer exist, species of animals that exist now did not exist in the past. These does not establish the elaborately made-up story that is the myth of evolution.  …” Adler continues: "When I say 'myth,' I mean an elaborately fabricated history that goes far beyond scientific evidence.  … This myth is the story of evolution taught to elementary school children, almost like a movie The story is made up by evolutionary 'philosophers' like Herbert Spencer, Ernst Haeckel and Henri Bergson, and invented by popularizers of science .” Dr. Adler made it clear that he did not deny that life-forms evolved gradually over eons, he merely objected to the idea that they belonged to a continuum in which some species, through imperceptible changes into other species.He argues that the evidence shows that "species" differ not in degree but in kind, with a fundamental "discontinuity" separating them. Adler looked more closely at the question of how many "species" there were in his 1940 book The Thomistic Problem.In other words, how many acts of God would it take to explain evolutionary mutations?He opposed the view of the eminent Catholic philosopher Jacques Malidin that this number was very large and unknowable.Adler thought that only a small number of species would be needed, perhaps as few as four (substance, plant, animal, and human), but certainly between three and ten.He considers his view "almost fully proven."Within a species there have been variations, but each species is itself a fixed type, eternally immutable in substance, and exists only as a result of God's creation.Adler conjectured that each species was created in several different forms, independent of each other, e.g., flowering and non-flowering plants were created separately.He admits that the scientific basis for this theory is "unclear," but there is a theological argument based on the "Wisdom of Solomon" (a part of the Old Testament considered unreliable by Protestants). The "great power of inspiration" based on a verse (11:12) in Chapter 1). In the April 1941 issue of The Thomist, Adler published an article entitled "The Solution to the Species Problem."In this article, he argues that Malidan's view is completely refutable, and his own view can be safely established after correcting an error.His mistake, he said, was the result of "overzealousness." "I could almost say that it was the brilliant brilliance of the new light that captivated my eyes." Adler's most recent attack on evolution was a 1951 lecture he gave to the Catholic Student Club at the University of Chicago.他宣称，人和类人猿的区别就象“正方形和三角形一样，没有中间的形式，没有三边半形。”艾德勒的论点大部分直接来自“圣经地带”的福音理论库中。他说：“有时，一个孩子和猪的区别并不太明显。但小孩可以长大成人，而猪就办不到。”艾德勒又说，只要有一位科学家能生产出一只会讲“简单陈述句”的类人猿来，他便承认人类和猴子有紧密的联系。 （顺便提到一件趣事。美国有一位业余动物学家理查德·加纳，把一生大部分时间贡献给记录和分析猿类的语言，最后宣称他学会了用猴子的语言用它们交谈。参见他的著作《猴子的语言》（1892年）；《大猩猩和黑猩猩》（1896年）对类人猿和猴子》（1900年）。但其他权威学者对他的著作评价不高。） 艾德勒在结束演说时说，所有这些事实只有两种解释：人类或者是由野兽经过进化突变而“产生”的；或者是由上帝所直接创造的。人们认为，艾德勒在这里并非指创造躯体和灵魂，而是指那种越来越普遍的天主教观点，即认为灵魂是注入躯体中的，而这个躯体的父母是野兽。 这种观点当然引起了不少人的质问。天主教毫无疑问将会对这些问题进行相应的探讨。例如，把保存完好、后来证实是尼安德特人（一种前额如类人猿一样低、头部前倾、没有下巴和大姆指不对应的人种）的10多具骸骨究竟属于哪一种呢？这些生物已能生火，并且用雕饰的石头埋葬死者。威尔斯在答复贝洛克时提出了下列的问题： 当我听说贝洛克先生将要解释和答复《世界史纲》一书时，我的思想便马上转到这些生物上来了。贝洛克先生会对它说些什么呢？他会认为它是人类堕落之前的生物呢，还是人类堕落之后的生物？他会从他的保险柜中取出惊人的新科学来修正它的身体结构吗？他会把它作为兄弟对待，并说这种生物是以最崇高的一神教为根据呢，还是把它当作一个为了把邪恶的人引入歧途而制造的魔鬼呢？ 他什么也没有说！每当它走近他时，他便走开了。但我相信这种生物并没有离开他。如果不是白天便是在晚上，它一定会问他：“贝洛克先生，我有一个需要拯救的灵魂吗，贝洛克先生？那个海德堡人的颚骨是不是属于我们同类的？贝洛克先生，您已经忘了我了。在五分之四的旧石器时代中我是'人'，当时再没有别的人。我蹒跚而行，不能直立走路，也不能象您那样仰望天空，但是，贝洛克先生！您有勇气把我说成是'狗'吗？”没有回答。 正统派遇到的另一个重要问题是，最早的灵魂只注入一对男女中呢，还是同时创造了许许多多的人？如果是后者，那么该隐就可以同别人结婚，而不必一定要娶他的姊妹。在教皇1950年发表的通谕中，以这种看法与原罪的教义有抵触为理由而巧妙地加以谴责。还有，灵魂的注入发生在生命的什么时代？如果说最早的男女在接受灵魂之前已是成人，那他们一定是早期过着动物的生活，后期则过人的生活。而另一方面，如果说灵魂是在怀孕时（或在出生时）注入的，那就意味着最早的男女是由没有灵魂的母亲抚育大的。这些看法都是合乎逻辑的，只不过在人们乍一想到时会感到古怪而已。 到目前为止，对这些纠缠不清的问题作了最全面探讨的是1932年出版的欧内斯特·梅辛杰神父的《进化论和神学》一书。他勇敢地为亚当的躯体的进化辩护，但坚持认为夏娃的出生是奇迹般的事件。亚当半边身子的一部分（不一定是一条肋骨）一定包含着“实际上完整的物种”，由此而创造的夏娃，与生物学家们称之为“无性生殖”的情况相似。梅辛杰神父最后说：“从亚当产生夏娃的问题，在《圣经》和口头传下来的教义中是那么明确，只要认真思考，至少不会成为问题。而且，除了对这件事理解上有些困难之外，没有理由去怀疑它。” 教会的神学家们和艾德勒博士也许应当更仔细地考虑一下乔治·普赖斯的革命性的地质学。他对岩石的解释是非常简单易懂的。只要地层是按年代顺序排列的这一理论被接受，就不会产生任何使人困惑的问题。普赖斯最近写道：“人们可能相信一个美丽而完善的世界是可以直接创造出来的，……但这种经历漫长年代的无尽痛苦的作法……看来并不是……创造世界的明智方法。这可能是一个自然发展的过程，……促它更象是一场巨大的恶梦，而不是一个创造过程。” 但最好还是请他们再深思一下圣奥古斯丁这几句明智的话吧：“常有这样的情形，人们对天和地，或世界其它部分产生了疑问……。而对于这些问题，非教徒拥有知识……，而一个基督教徒根据圣经谈论这类事时，被不信教的人听了说些闲话，说他讲得驴将不对马嘴，因而忍不住哈哈大笑起来，这实在是十分难堪而且糟糕的局面，千万要小心避免才是。”