... But now there was no Fall; there was no total
depravity, or imminent danger of endless doom; and, the basis gone, the
superstructure followed."
It is written with earnestness and in excellent English; it must mean
something. But what can it mean? How could physical science prove that
man is not depraved? You do not cut a man open to find his sins. You do
not boil him until he gives forth the unmistakable green fumes of
depravity. How could physical science find any traces of a moral fall?
What traces did the writer expect to find? Did he expect to find a
fossil Eve with a fossil apple inside her? Did he suppose that the ages
would have spared for him a complete skeleton of Adam attached to a
slightly faded fig-leaf? The whole paragraph which I have quoted is
simply a series of inconsequent sentences, all quite untrue in
themselves and all quite irrelevant to each other. Science never said
that there could have been no Fall. There might have been ten Falls, one
on top of the other, and the thing would have been quite consistent with
everything that we know from physical science. Humanity might have grown
morally worse for millions of centuries, and the thing would in no way
have contradicted the principle of Evolution.
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