Tarzan And The Ape Men
By JOHN YOUNG
How did the world reach its present stage, with all its vast complexity? The current orthodoxy is that it happened by chance. Billions of years ago primitive non-living entities evolved into primitive living beings, and through vast reaches of time they advanced to the almost infinitely complex universe of today.
Take the human brain. An article in New Scientist (May 26, 1988) by Michael Recce and Philip Treleavan stated: “In crude terms, the human brain is a natural computer composed of 10 to 100 billion neurons, each of which connects to about 10,000 others, and all of which function in parallel….Neuronal systems take about 100 processing steps to perform a complex task of vision or speech which would take an electron computer billions of processing steps.”
To say, as the secular orthodoxy does, that this and all the other almost inconceivably complex things in the universe arose without an intelligent Creator is to posit an effect with no proportionate cause — and that is irrational.
An important thing I want to consider here is an implication of current evolutionary hypotheses, an implication about which evolutionists usually remain silent. I’ll illustrate this by reference to the Tarzan stories of Edgar Rice Burroughs.
Tarzan encountered creatures of varying levels of intelligence, and he learned to communicate with them in their own languages. He was especially familiar with the great apes among whom he was raised. In the second novel in the series, The Return of Tarzan, he encounters a group consisting of humans and apes, and including some who were the offspring of an ape and a human.
The high priestess La, who is more human than the others, laments the decline of her people. “In time we will no longer banish those of our people who mate with apes, and so in time we shall descend to the very beasts from which ages ago our progenitors may have sprung.”
These stories, with a variety of living creatures possessing different degrees of knowledge, and no sharp division between them, is consistent with evolutionary theory as currently understood. Man, from this standpoint, is different in degree from other animals, but not in kind. Which is an understandable assumption from the premise that higher living things developed blindly from lower life forms.
Sound philosophy, on the contrary, shows two irreducible kinds of knowledge — sense knowledge and intellectual knowledge. It shows, further, that intellectual knowledge is rooted in a spiritual principle — the human soul, which transcends matter and can’t be the product of evolution. It can come into existence only by a creative act of God, who brings it into existence from nothing. That philosophical conclusion is confirmed by divine Revelation.
The materialistic view has an implication which most of its proponents don’t want to think about, and which is illustrated by the Tarzan stories. But I’ll return to that after a little more on the weaknesses of arguments proposed by evolutionists.
Charles Darwin saw that his hypothesis would fail if it were found to be contradicted by the fossil record. He knew, also, that the fossil record in his day didn’t confirm his conclusions, but he explained this by saying that further exploration would establish the links that were so obviously missing.
But that hasn’t happened. Take a detailed study done by the Geological Society of London and the Palaeontological Association of England. Dr John N. Moore, professor emeritus of natural sciences at Michigan State University, commented on the findings:
“Each major form or kind of plant and animal is shown to have a separate and distinct history from all the other forms or kinds. Groups of both plants and animals appear suddenly in the fossil record. . . . Whales, bats, horses, primates, elephants, hares, squirrels, etc., all are as distinct at their first appearance as they are now. There is not a trace of a common ancestor, much less a link with any reptile, the supposed progenitor” (New Scientist, Letters, September 15, 1983, p. 798).
As Arnold Lunn said many years ago, it is not a question of missing links, but of missing chains.
It is sometimes said that the many resemblances between different animals — and man — can only reasonably be explained by common descent. For instance, similar blood groups and similar DNA across a wide range of animals.
But that argument proves nothing. If God brought the main types into being by His direct action, it is not surprising if He chose to give them many common characteristics.
There is this difference between evolution and most other hypotheses considered by scientists: If evolution is not the explanation of living things, then the alternative is direct production by God. But even scientists who believe in God will be reluctant to see Him as the cause, because their job is to find natural explanations; and atheists have no alternative explanation.
Coming back to Tarzan: The stories abound in incredible happenings, and the reader has to exercise a willing suspension of disbelief. In reality a boy raised by apes wouldn’t mature into a highly gifted adult who could take his place in sophisticated society, and who had a remarkable talent for learning languages — including the Latin he picked up from a lost civilization in the jungle! Nor would he have the combined physical strength of several ordinary men.
That’s all part of the entertaining fiction that made Edgar Rice Burroughs one of the most successful bestselling authors. But the fantastic character of the stories, so remote from what is possible in real life, is more like sober fact if we contrast it with belief that our ordered universe all came about by chance.
I mentioned earlier that there is an implication in evolutionary theory that evolutionists don’t want to think about. In the Tarzan books, as we noted, there is no clear distinction between the human race and creatures of less intelligence. It’s a matter of degree, not of kind.
Now that is not only perfectly compatible with evolution as generally understood, but is demanded by it. The premise is that living beings developed to their present state by degrees, with the survival of the fittest as a guiding principle. But if that were so, some races of men today should be genetically superior to others.
The secularists who are firm evolutionists are also usually firmly anti-racist. But to be consistent they should be racists, proclaiming some races of people to be superior to others.
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(John Young is a graduate of the Aquinas Academy in Sydney, Australia, and has taught philosophy in four seminaries. His book The Scope of Philosophy was published by Gracewing Publishers in England in 2010. He has been a frequent contributor to The Wanderer on theological issues since 1977.)
