The Bible says man was created in the image of God.

If this means that humans have a bodily form similar to God, then likewise many of the lower animals are in the image of God, as they obviously are quite similar in form to man.

Yet the Bible strongly implies that animals were not created in the image of God—only man.

What then is meant by the expression …

“In the Image of God”

THE Bible tells us that the first man was the direct creation of God and that, as he came from the hand of his Creator, he bore the divine image. This means that he was perfect in physique and capable of exhibiting those qualities of kindness, sympathy, and love which we naturally attribute to God and which the Scriptures assure us actually belong to him. That man is not perfect today is Scripturally attributed to retrogression due to disobedience of divine law. Have scientists been able thus far to produce any proof that this is not true?

Evolutionists claim, on the other hand, that man’s present condition of imperfection is not due to retrogression, but to the alleged fact that we are not far enough along on the road of evolution to expect to find man any more perfect than at present, but that as the evolutionary process continues, man of the future will really be more nearly perfect in every way than now. Are scientists able to substantiate this theory of human evolution, or does it as yet continue to be merely an unproved theory? Which is correct, the Scriptural view, or the evolution theory? This is the issue we wish to face in this article.

There is no question concerning the significant Scriptural testimony relative to the origin of man, but there is a serious question as to the meaning of the best evidence thus far produced by scientists to prove that the Bible does not tell the truth on the subject of creation. Let us examine this evidence in the order of its alleged importance. Evolutionists are agreed that Paleontology, or the study of fossils, is their most hopeful source of research. Fossils, as all know, are the remains of plants or animals found in or upon the earth; and evolutionists concede that the remains of extinct species which have thus far been found constitute their strongest argument for evolution. Admittedly, however, this falls far short of proof.

It was the dream of Darwin, and it is the hope of all his followers today, that eventually sufficient fossils of extinct and current species may be found to enable scientists to make up a series of such similar structures as will show an unbroken gradation, from the lowest to the highest in order of development, and thereby prove evolution’s case by circumstantial evidence.

But modern paleontologists are not so hopeful of success as were their fellows some years ago. They have, of course, found many fossils since Darwin’s day and have tried to arrange them in an unbroken series; yet they have so many missing links in their chain of evidence that their fossil record is becoming exceedingly discouraging.

Of course, the science of paleontology is relatively new. No scientist had suspected that there were such things as fossils of extinct species of animals until the beginning of the nineteenth century. At that time some workmen, digging in an old quarry near Paris, found the remains of a prehistoric elephant, which was unlike the skeleton of any known variety of elephant now living on earth.

That opened a new chapter in scientific history. Since then the earth has been combed for specimens of extinct species, in an endeavor to complete the fossil record and thus permit the evolutionists to present a series of skeletons in a progressive chain, each one nearly like its predecessor but showing some small step of improvement, such as Darwin’s theory calls for. In this way they have hoped to prove circumstantially an evolutionary law of development that has operated from the very beginning of life upon this planet.

The scientists have made up a few sectional series of certain types of fossils, each showing more or less similarity to the other, which they fondly display in the museums. But, said the late Professor C.A. Seward, of Cambridge University in an article in “Nature” magazine, “A student who takes an impartial retrospect soon discovers that the fossil record raises more problems than it solves.”

Instead of revealing a perfect gradation from the lowest to the highest in plant and animal structures, as the evolution theory requires, it rather indicates thus far that from time to time during geologic history new and distinct species have suddenly appeared which possess organs and structures that in no way resemble those of any preceding type.

For example: The evolutionists have theorized that reptiles, by several successive minute steps, gradually evolved into birds. Yet the fossil record reveals that birds made their appearance suddenly and dramatically with full feathers and wings; and no intermediate types of creatures between reptiles and birds thus far have been found. Such unbridged gaps as these throughout the fossil record create the unsolved problems to which Professor Seward alluded in the foregoing quotation, but they agree perfectly with the Bible account of creation.

And the reptile-bird gap is but one of the yawning chasms in the fossil chain, of which the ordinary layman has heard little. Everybody, of course, is familiar with the fact that there is a “missing link” between the so-called anthropoid ape and mankind. But this link, even if it could be found, would not complete the case for organic evolution—there are too many other and even larger gaps that must yet be spanned before Darwin’s theory can be confirmed by the fossil record.

Darwin himself appreciated all this even in his day, and in his “Origin of Species” he made this frank admission: “Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely gradated organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and serious objection which can be urged against the theory.” Darwin, however, expressed the hope that the many gaps in the fossil record would eventually be filled by further geologic research.

More than a century has elapsed since Darwin’s death, and geologic research has gone forward on a worldwide scale as never before, but his fond hope has not yet been realized. Indeed, the more the geologist delves into earth’s silent strata, and the more the paleontologist seeks to complete his finely gradated organic chain, the more pronounced becomes the divergence between theory and fact, even as Professor Seward tacitly admits.

Professor Louis Trenchard More, Dean Emeritus of the University of Cincinnati, also doubtless considers himself a believer in organic evolution. Yet he has this to say: “The more one studies paleontology [fossils] the more certain does one become that evolution is based on faith alone; exactly the same sort of faith it is necessary to have when one encounters the great ‘mysteries’ of religion. The changes that are noted as time progresses show no orderly and no consecutive evolutionary chain and, above all, they give us no clue whatever as to the cause of variation…. The evidence from paleontology is for discontinuity; only by faith and imagination is there continuity of variation.”—“Dogma of Evolution,” p. 160

The Darwinists have contended that nature makes no leaps, but moves by slow infinitesimal steps of perpetual progress. Yet the fossil record does not confirm that theory. Either nature in the remote past has made sudden, enormous jumps contrary to all human experience and observation, or else there was a special creation of the successive fixed species throughout all geologic times. And certainly the latter does not call for any greater degree of faith than does the former.

The fossil record at its very start presents us with several unfilled gaps which no evolutionist can explain. Fossils from the very earliest strata show wide differentiation of species then in existence, with no intermediate forms to connect one species with another. Professor Cook, of Cambridge University, says this concerning these earliest living forms in that remotely distant Cambrian geologic era (“Cambridge Natural History,” Vol. III, page 5): “The first undisputed traces of animal life to appear in the Cambrian epoch, exhibit the same phylectic distinctions as now exist—sponges, echinoderms, mollusca, and worms, formed already, in those immeasurably remote ages, groups apparently as generally distinct from one another as they are at the present time.”

Another conundrum for the evolutionist is the fact that we still have these same types of sponges, mollusca, echinoderms, and other Cambrian sea life living on earth today. They have never evolved a step in all these ages, but appear in the same form throughout all geologic strata, down to modem times. Although many of the ancient species have become extinct, nevertheless those which are still in existence look just as they did when they made their initial appearance on earth.

Speaking of the earliest fossils of shellfish, the late Professor Geoffrey W. Smith of Oxford University says in “Primitive Animals,” page 91: “If we examine the fossil shells, and those of the living animals, with the minutest care, we would not be able to detect the smallest difference.”

We thus see, by the admissions of evolutionists themselves, that the Darwinian theory, which has been foisted upon the immature minds of school children for the past three generations and which has caused the world to believe in it, is recognized by its own sponsors to be faulty at its foundation and unstable throughout its entire structure.

Clearly the following utterances of Dr. D.H. Scott in his epoch-making address some time ago before the British Association, cannot be disputed: “For the moment, at all events, the Darwinian period is past. We can no longer enjoy the comfortable assurance that once satisfied so many of us, that the main problem has been solved—all is again in the melting pot. Now, in fact, a new generation has grown up that knows not Darwin.”

Deceptive Museum Exhibits

In view of the frank admissions by the paleontologists that there are numerous unbridged gaps in the fossil record, many doubtless will wonder about the so-called fossil exhibits to be seen in some of our museums. The fact is that these exhibits are artificially arranged, wholly without respect to any chronological sequence, and are therefore plainly deceptive.

These museum exhibits always begin with the smallest and the simplest fossils and gradually go on up to the more complex organisms, without any regard to the time when each of these animals first appeared on earth. Perhaps the largest and the smallest skeletons in the group may be those of animals which actually lived contemporaneously; yet the artificial arrangement of them by the museum managers leads visitors to suppose that the first animal in the group must have lived millions of years prior to the last and largest one in the group, since that much time apparently would be needed for one to evolve into the other by slow, successive steps.

But what may seem to be evolutionary proof to school children is far from proof to the studious scientists themselves. Professor Morgan, mentioned earlier, in his “Critique of the Theory of Evolution,” page 9, says: “Because we can often arrange the ‘series’ of structures in a line extending from the very simple to the most complex, we are apt to become unduly impressed by this fact and conclude that if we found the complete series we would find all the intermediate steps, and that they have arisen in the order of their complexity. This conclusion is not necessarily correct.”

Professor Johannes P. Lotsy, the late Dutch scientist, also seems to see the utter hopelessness of trying to prove Darwinism by these artificially arranged fossil displays and by guesswork reconstructions made from fragmentary remains. And he should have known what he was talking about, for he was a leading phylogenist who had made reconstructions and fossil exhibits for many years. In “Evolution by Hybridization,” page 140, he says: “Phylogeny, that is, construction of what has happened in the past, is no science but a product of fantastic speculations. Those who know that I have spent a considerable part of my life in efforts to trace the phylogeny of the vegetable kingdom will know that this is not written down lightly; nobody cares to destroy his own efforts.”

Such statements as these by scientists plainly indicate that the modem scientific trend is to agree with the late Dr. Etheridge, who for many years was the great fossil expert of the British Museum and who is quoted by Professor Townsend in “Collapse of Evolution” as saying: “Nine-tenths of the talk of evolutionists is sheer nonsense, not founded on observation and wholly unsupported by facts. The museum is full of proofs of the utter falsity of their views. In all this great museum there is not a particle of evidence of the transformation of species.”

Professor J.B. Warren, the University of California, is another scientist who seems to agree fully with the foregoing. He is quoted by Dr. Williams in “Evolution Disproved” as remarking frankly that during the course of human history “there should certainly be known at least a few instances of the evolution of one species from another,” but that “no such instance is known.”

Before we leave this phase of the subject, let us examine the views of scientists relative to three groups of fossil remains, known as (1) the Trinil bones; (2) the Heidelberg jaw; and (3) the Piltdown fragments. These have been considered by some as being evidence that at one time there existed on this earth a race of creatures which, as species, were midway between man and the fictional tertiary apes. No evidence has yet been discovered that these latter ever existed, so in reality there are at least two missing links between ape and man.

(1) The Trinil Bones: It is from these bones that the ‘Java man’ has been imagined. This group of fossil remains consists of an ape-like skull, two ape-like teeth, and part of a human-like thighbone, which were found in 1891 at Trinil, Java, in an excavation forty feet below the surface. They were not lying together when found. The teeth were three feet from the skull; and the thighbone, discovered a year later, was nearly fifty feet away.

These bones were found by the late Dr. Eugene Dubois, and from these he built his Java man. But, as related by Dr. William Howells, Research Associate, American Museum of Natural History, in his book published in 1944 entitled, “Mankind So Far,” authorities have ever since 1891 agreed and dissented, accepted and rejected, and quarreled over, the real significance of the Trinil bones.

Dubois, having fairly well established his opinion that he had found the remains of a missing link—scientifically designated Pithecanthropus, meaning ‘erect ape-man’—withdrew from the controversy. Twenty years later, however, he reappeared with a radical change of opinion. He had reconstructed his Trinil bones into a true ape instead of an ape-man, supporting his later convictions by several new fragments of fossil femurs.

Dubois died in 1940, convinced that he had not discovered the fossil remains of an ape-man at all. Since then, however, a young geologist, Dr. Von Koenigswald, has made further explorations in Java, with the result that scientists now have no less than three adult skulls in fair shape, and parts of the upper and lower jaws with a number of teeth. These, it is claimed, are of the same species as were the fossils found by Dubois.

Upon the basis of these additional discoveries, it has now been quite generally decided that the creatures to which the bones once belonged were not apes at all, but men. The scientists attempt to say, of course, that they were halfway between apes and men, but, nevertheless, men. The ‘halfway’ theory is deduced from the brain capacity indicated by the size and shape of the skull—900 to 1,000 cubic centimeters. The average man of today has about 1,450 cubic centimeters of brain space in his skull. But this is the average, and often it is much less. In his book, “Mankind So Far,” Dr. Howells says: “Now there is one point about this which should be made plain, and it is that the size of one’s brain is not an exact index of one’s mental powers. There is only slight relation among modem men between the two, and individuals with normal intelligence occur whose cranial capacity is less than 1,000 cubic centimeters, or halfway back to the ape.”

The Java men, it is admitted, were small in stature—about five feet, six inches in height. Naturally their heads would be somewhat smaller than the average of today, and if there are men now with normal intelligence having a brain capacity ‘halfway back to the ape’, why would it not be possible for the creatures to which the Trinil bones belonged, who had the same brain capacity, to be true men?

(2) The Heidelberg Jaw: This is a massive jawbone which resembles an ape’s jaw, but has human-like teeth. It was found near Heidelberg, Germany, in 1907, in a shaft sixty-nine feet below the surface. No other part of the skeleton was found; yet from this one bone the scientific plastic artists have pretended to ‘reconstruct’ the whole creature, just as they have reconstructed the Trinil ape-man from equally flimsy evidence. This Heidelberg jaw may be that of an extinct and rare species of ape, whose teeth were straight instead of slanting; or it might be that of an abnormal man—a monstrosity or ‘freak of nature’.

The late Henry Fairfield Osborn, former president of the New York Zoological Society, seems to eliminate this Heidelberg jaw entirely as a ‘missing link’ between ape and man; for on page 99 of his book, “Men of the Old Stone Age,” he says concerning this jaw and teeth: “It is absolutely certain that these remains are human. They bear no trace of being intermediate between man and the anthropoid ape.”

Dr. Howells, in “Mankind So Far,” says concerning the Heidelberg jaw, “It is, of course, not safe to conjecture what the rest of the Heidelberg skull might have been like.”

(3) The Piltdown Fragments: This fossil exhibit consists of a small piece of skull, part of a jawbone, three teeth, and two small bones from the nose. These bones were found scattered through a gravel pit, at Piltdown, England, but not all at one time. The finds were made during 1910, 1911 and 1912, and it is not known that they all belong to the same creature or type of creatures.

The accuracy of the reconstructed Piltdown skeleton still remains in question according to Dr. William Howells who, in 1944, again took up the cudgel on behalf of the theory of evolution in his book, “Mankind So Far.” He describes at length the circumstances surrounding the scattered fragments of the few Piltdown fossils and the furor it has caused. He explains that of the manner in which these specimens were found and the structural differences of the bones, two main controversies have arisen and are still unsettled. He says that the dilemma rests on the incongruous mixture of the skull of a man and the jaw of an ape, “a combination of two extremes rather than a mingling.” Says Dr. Howells: “The first controversy has the incongruous mandible for its theme. In this, the question at issue is whether Eoanthropus represents a single creature or two different ones. Half of the body scientific accepted the find at its face value, but to others the idea of so human a skull having so simian a jaw was too great an outrage to credulity, and they rebelled with justice.”

Experienced morphologists felt that “the Piltdown Man represented a greater illogicality than they had ever seen in their work; that it looked like a sort of immorality in nature.” The other controversy arose out of the fact that in the skeleton reconstruction at no point did any fragments of the skull, except in one dubious instance, touch each other and fit. Says Dr. Howells, “The anatomists were somewhat taken aback to find that two qualified experts could reach such different ends, and began to doubt as to whether any valid reconstruction could be made from four such ill-fitting fragments as the remains of the Piltdown brain case.”*

(*NOTE: Late in 1953, several years after the above was written, scientists discovered that the Piltdown fragments had been deliberately faked by some unknown trickster. It seems that the jawbone and teeth were those of an ape, the teeth having been filed to give them the appearance of being human, and the jawbone discolored to give it the appearance of age. It is now believed that the small piece of skull belonged to a human being.)

The more we investigate the evidence found in fossil remains which is supposed to prove the Bible untrue, the more apparent it becomes that this evidence is wholly unconvincing. Man is a direct creation of God, and no fossils yet found disprove this well-established Scriptural truth.

We are not, of course, unmindful of the theories which have been developed upon the basis of discovered fossils concerning ‘Neanderthal’ and other ‘dawn men.’ We wish to emphasize that they are only theories, and are freely admitted as such by many of the world’s leading scientists. These theories have been made to mean more to the general public than the weight of evidence back of them warrants, by the cleverness of reconstruction artists. Their ‘reconstructions’, as we have seen, are wholly artificial, and they invariably represent early man as bearing a very close resemblance to the ape.

But the plastic artists who made them knew no more about what early man looked like than does anyone else—they simply drew upon their vivid imaginations. Dr. Howells now has decided that Neanderthal man was as intelligent as we of today, which, he states, is a compliment to us! He also had a religion, Dr. Howell asserts—probably crude—but it emphasizes his wide separation from the brute creation.

Structural Similarities

Much literature has been written under this head in an attempt to prove the alleged law of natural evolution. Such books point out various anatomical similarities in the different species of animals—also structural similarities in the many plant families. They contend that this suggests kinship through evolution; for example, man’s arm and hand bear a resemblance to that of the ape, and indeed are somewhat like the forefoot of the dog, rat, or cat.

There is also the general similarity in the construction of the backbone of nearly all vertebrate animals. There are resemblances between the heart, stomach, and other organs and structures in nearly all the animal species including man. Some scientists argue that it is not reasonable to believe that such complex, yet similar, things have arisen independently. But this is only an opinion, and proves nothing.

To those who accept the Bible account of creation it seems reasonable that there should be structural similarities, for the simple reason that the same mechanical and biological principles are commonly involved. The same thing is true in mechanics generally, and in architecture, or in any of the arts. Buildings frequently employ the same architectural principles because they are intended to perform similar functions, but this does not imply that the one has evolved from the other.

Common anatomic resemblances no more prove that man was evolved from the ape than architectural resemblances prove a kinship between St. Peter’s in Rome and a Masonic temple. There are close anatomic resemblances between a dog and a lion, yet evolutionists do not even place them in the same group, for the one is a canine and the other a feline. Neither should man be grouped with the anthropoid ape simple because of certain anatomical similarities.

But why stress resemblances and overlook the enormous divergencies? There are quite as many differences as there are similarities between them. Is it not just as reasonable to suppose that the differences disprove the theory of evolution as it is to conjecture that the similarities prove it? In any event, the one theory at least offsets the other, and we are left again without real proof that the Bible is in error in stating that man was created directly by God and in the divine image.—Gen. 1:26

Evolutionists also rely on genetics as one means of proving their theory. This phase of the subject will be discussed in Part 5 of this series, and found to be void of any actual proof that one species of either plant or animal life has ever evolved into another. Hence, no matter which way the evolutionist turns, he finds himself still a theorist, and a very unreasonable one at that.

The Bible story of creation, on the other hand, is harmonious with the actual discoveries of science. It also accords most fully with reason: Adam and Eve were created perfect, in the mental and moral image of God—so much so that even in his fallen state, God can say to him, “Come now, and let us reason together.” (Isa. 1:18) Adam and Eve could have lived here on the earth forever had they obeyed divine law.

Many scientists say it should be possible for living cells to rebuild or multiply themselves indefinitely if given a perfect environment. The Scriptures assure us that this great boon, which was lost by Adam, will be restored by Christ, that all mankind will be provided with the necessary perfect environment, which will enable them to live forever.—Acts 3:19-21

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