Something else that came along in the 19^th Century world was something that, well, I think we may have a tendency to think about this primarily as a contemporary issue. That is, organic evolution. It’s been around for a long time. When Charles Darwin’s book, The Origin of the Species, was published in 1859, there were probably few people who realized the great impact that his work and this theory would have on religion.

We understand what this theory is, that the Darwinian Theory holds that the higher forms of life descend from simpler forms of life. This way of thinking contradicts the Genesis account of creation that, heretofore, was all that people knew. And so, Darwin’s theory provided for some people what seemed to be a very sophisticated-sounding basis, a “scientific basis,” for rejecting creation—that special creation of God—and even rejecting God Himself. Others found a way of accepting evolution while still holding on to a belief in God by reducing the Genesis account of creation to a myth.

Well, the evolutionary hypothesis had application beyond the biological realm. You’ve heard the term, “survival of the fittest.” Well, this is an outgrowth of that evolutionary hypothesis. And it would be that this idea that “only the strong survive,” and “the species that is the strongest will survive to spawn the next generation,” and so on, actually began to be believed and to be practiced in business and industry. The thought was, well, if this works in nature, if this works in the biological realm, why won’t it work in the industrial realm? And so it was that many leaders of business and industry adopted this kind of thinking. And thus, there was a great deal of this backbiting, backstabbing, get it all, “dog eat dog” kind of interaction in the world. Again, it can be seen that its roots go back to this evolutionary hypothesis.

Something else that I hadn’t really thought about, but I was reading that for some historians, this dominate thinking of the “stronger species” may have given rise to the two World Wars that we fought—the feeling of supremacy on the part of some people in the world. It also had, and continues to have, an effect on morality. The thinking was, and continues today, if, after all, man is but a project of a long evolutionary process, the “survival of the fittest,” and so on, then any ethical system, any moral system, that he might have is also the product of evolution. And, since one of man’s basic concerns is survival, then any actions that man takes to protect himself, to protect the “species,” if you will, can be justified. Well, think about it. That is what we have seen in history; that’s what we continue to see in our day.

There’s something else that became very popular in the 19^th Century, and that was Bible criticism. We have seen where the “spiritual world,” so to speak, was sort of fighting a war on at least two fronts to this point, the matter of evolution and the matter of the Industrial Revolution and all of things that went along with those, but even as people were defending their beliefs, defending the Bible, and so on, there were those who began what is called biblical criticism.

Now, there are actually two types of biblical criticism, and you may have heard of these. One is called “lower criticism.” Lower criticism is actually something that has been, and even today continues to be, beneficial, because the aim, the goal, of lower criticism is to actually examine the text, and examine the accuracy of the word usage, the translation, and this kind of thing, with the goal in mind of improvement, of making the text that we have the most accurate.

Well, “higher criticism” can be of benefit, as well. Higher criticism looks not specifically at the text, but looks at the authorship, the time of writing, these kinds of things. And while that has some value, what began to occur in the 19^th Century was the practice of individuals coming at this higher criticism with preconceived notions—preconceived notions that what we really have isn’t what we have at all. And thus, there were challenges that were made to the text. For example, from all biblical and extra-biblical evidence we have, we believe that the first five books of the Old Testament (the Pentateuch) were written by Moses. Well, that began to be questioned. And because of this “higher criticism”—Bible criticism—that was taking place, many began to question, and a belief developed that Moses didn’t write all five of those books, that they were actually authored by several authors, and that they were written over a much longer period of time, even after the time that Moses lived upon the earth.

Well, there were also attacks on the New Testament, as well. Some “scholars,” so called, undermined the faith in the historicity of the Gospels. In other words, they claim that the Gospels are really not historically accurate, and that they were written at a much later time than we originally believe, and this sort of thing.

And so, the Bible, the Word of God, is literally under attack during this 19^th Century.