The Sixth Day’s Work. The creation of land-animals and man.
“And God said, ‘Let the earth bring forth the living creature after its kind, cattle and creeping things, and beast of the earth after its kind’.” The fifth day animals began to _swarm_ the seas; the sixth day, to cover the land. “And God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness’,” in “knowledge after the image of him that created him,” (Col. 3:10) and “in righteousness and true holiness,” (Eph. 4:24). Yet a professor in a great university was so dense as to insist that the Scriptures taught that the likeness was not in “knowledge, righteousness and true holiness,” but in the bodily form. “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him.” The last of all creation as both revelation and science testify. The image is mental and moral and spiritual. No such image in any other species.
The body chosen was higher and better than the form of any animal. It resembles the bodies of mammals of the highest type. Why should it not? The vast number of animal species, of almost every conceivable size and shape, could not furnish a form so well adapted to the use of man as that which the Creator gave him. Would it have been better if man had been created in the form of a fish, a lizard, a serpent, a dog, or a horse, or a bird? How could the body have been created without bearing resemblance to some form of the million species of animals? A resemblance can be traced through the whole creation, the material as well as the animal, but it does not follow that one species is descended from another, but that there was one general plan, and one God. The existence of man, who can not be otherwise accounted for, proves the existence of the Creator.
Analogy raises a presumption against evolution. Analogy is not a demonstration. It is an illustration that strengthens and confirms other arguments. Both the science of mathematics and all physical laws must have come into being in an instant of time. Evolution is not God’s usual method of creation.
1. Mathematics.—There is no evolution in the science of mathematics. There is no change or growth or development. God is the author of all mathematical principles. The square described on the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle is equal to the sum of the squares described on the other two sides, because he made it so. The circumference of a circle is approximately 3.1416 times the diameter because he made it so. The wonderful calculations by logarithms, whether by the common system with a base of 10, or the Napierian system with a base of 2.718+ a decimal that never terminates, are possible and reliable only because God made them so. Think what great intelligence is required by the Napierian system, to raise a decimal that never terminates, to a decimal power that never terminates, in order to produce an integral number. Yet God has computed instantaneously every table of logarithms, and every other mathematical table,—no matter how difficult. Thus we have positive proof of the presence everywhere of a great intelligent Being, and we catch a glimpse of that mind that must be infinite. He created the whole system of mathematics, vast beyond our comprehension, at once. A part could not exist without the whole. No growth; no change; no evolution; no improvement, because the whole system was perfect from the first. Reasoning from analogy, is it not reasonable to say that the God who flashed upon the whole universe, the limitless system of mathematics in an instant, also created man as Moses said? Analogy supports the doctrine of the special creation of man in a day.