A BRIEF FOR EVOLUTION

1. Biological evolution is a fact, proven beyond reasonable doubt and accepted universally in the scientific community. It is no longer a theory; it has become a scientific principle or law.

2. Evolution is the universal principle of orderly change that proves the existence of a theistic God.

• The fact of Creation supports Deism.

• The fact of Evolution supports Theism.

3. Great men who believed in both God and evolution included: Darwin, Hegel, Emerson, Renan, Schweitzer, Bergson, Fosdick, Teilhard, and Einstein.

4. The evolution question should have been settled for good at the Scopes trial, where William Jennings Bryan made himself and religion a laughingstock. Preachers who still attack evolution bring shame upon Christianity before all intelligent persons.

5. Youths of fundamentalist sects are forced to choose between what they hear at church and at school. Many preachers are openly anti-intellectual enemies of education.

6. The Church has a shameful record of opposition to scientific knowledge. The Church has persecuted Bacon, Columbus, Copernicus, Bruno, Galileo, Pascal, Newton, Darwin, and Huxley.

7. Any student who has completed a course in high school biology without discovering the truth of evolution was sleeping in class.

8. Bible literalists who defend the manufacture of man from mud must also defend a belief in dragons, unicorns, satyrs, cockatrices, a flat 4-cornered earth, and doors or windows in the dome of heaven.

9. That the Bible is not a book of science was well stated by Cardinal Baronius (1538-1607):

“The purpose of the Bible is not to tell us how the Heavens go

but to tell us how to go to Heaven.”

Richard L. Atkins

12-13-77