Religion, then, could not be the evolution of what has no existence.
We have now considered the theory of the atheistical evolution of man, and of all plants and animals from one primeval germ, by the unintelligent operation of the powers of nature.

We have seen that there are as many contradictory applications of the theory as there are advocates of it; that in any shape it is incoherent, illogical, and absurd; that it is destitute of any support from facts; that the alleged analogy of embryology fails to give it countenance; that the order of nature in its gradations is contradictory of the theory; that it utterly fails to account for the origin of life, for the distinctness of the four classes of the animal kingdom, for the distinctness of species which refuse to breed together, for the absence of the intermediate forms necessary to the theory; and, above all, that it can give no satisfactory account of man's bodily, mental, and moral superiority to all other animals, nor for his possession of a knowledge of God.
Its tendency, moreover, is inevitably to degrade man, to destroy that sense of his dignity which is the principal security of human life, to obliterate a belief in the divine origin and sanction of morality, and in the existence of a future life of rewards and punishments, and so to promote the disorganization of society, and the degradation of men to the level of brutes, living only under the laws of their brutal instincts.

For all these reasons we reject the theory as unscientific, absurd, degrading to man, and offensive to the God who made him.
FOOTNOTES: [5] The Descent of Man, p.

198, American Edition.
[6] The Descent of Man, p.

191, Am.