The Birmingham age-herald., 1923-08-17
PEOPLES FORUM
Afnrn on Eprnlntion

AeE1 BM EaN@ANhA@M
 To the Editor of The Age-Heraidi
 Tn justice to the many intelli- gent and progressive persons who oppose the teaching of evolution in the schools, your editorial on the subject in last Saturdays is- sue ought not gd unchallenged. This opposition is not based on Ignorance and intellectual dark ness." as you would have us be- lioye,
 You say evolution never did teach that man descended from monkeys. To say that evolution teaches or does not teach anything ia as intelligiblo as would be an attempt to tell what religion teaches. Proportionate to the num- Der who believe in 1t, there are, perhaps as many different hypO- these of evolution as thero are re- ligions. Some eYOlutionists do teach that man Is descended from apes. Red the International Book Review for July. On page the descent of man from the gorilla is illustrated according to the teach Ings of The Evolution and Prog ress of Mankind" by Prof. Herr man Klaatch, M. D. On Page 10 the following sentence is quoted from the book mentioned: Neither in body nor in mind Is there a Ques- ton of 8 direct descent of man from the apes or monkeys"
 Any well-informed person knows that the opposition to the teach ing of evolution in the schools has little in common with the old teaching about the earth being flat, etc. Science has never dis proved any Bible teaching; but the Bible does not teach all of the things some mistaken zeslots claim it does. And evolutionlsts expose their appalling ignorance of the book, and it appears quite often of the English language.
 If sectarian doctrines arg not to be taught in schools supported by the public, but in sectariau schools, may we not insist that infidel doctrines be restricted to infidel Schools? I do not here re- fer to the teaching of evolution, but to the manifestly infidel teach ings of certain eTolutionists.
 But one does not need to go to the Bible to disprove evolution; a study of nature is sufficient to explode the hypothesis. The work of Luther Burbank Is cited to prove the truth of a very weak hypothesis. This proves you have a very hard case to defend, for a 5afAa4e NA example of self development in nature is cited, and probably none can be found. Since plants and animals do not develop themselves, but are dependent for their devel- opment upon mans intelligence, 1t follows that man could not have reached unalded his present state. I do not know by what process God formed man out of the dust of the ground" nor how long it took, but I am sure God formed him. The teaching that man formed himself is preposterous.
 There appears to be no reliable proof that man of today Is funda- mentally superior to the man of four thousand years ago. He knows more, perhaps, being "the heir of all the ages" If we could resurrect ancient Babylon and other famous cities of the olden time, we might astonish them with our fruits and flowers and our great inventions, but it Is doubtful ifeour most intelligent children would impress them. A moron of the present day can learn many things Socrates did not know; does that prove him fundamentally superior to So- crates? Of course evolutionistS will say that they are going back much farther than the periods l have named, but 1t seems to mo that if mankind improved funda- mentally, we could detect some evidence of 1t in four thousand years. As to mans antiquity. I am not at all sure that some an- cient beings called men really were, men. Persons who teach that men descended from gorillas can not be depended on to give the right names every time.
 I suggest that all evolution sup porters read the Bible and learn what 1t really teaches. It is not such an out-of date book as some imagine. R. c. CONNER.
 Jasper, Ala, Aug. 12, 1928.