Page:The Garden of Eden (Doughty).djvu/15

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.

The Garden of Eden.


I.

THE GARDEN.

And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed.—Gen. ii. 8.


THE figures of the Bible put together by the rigid rules of arithmetic, inform us that the world was created about six thousand years ago; but science with its unanswerable logic fixes the time of its creation some hundreds of thousands of years earlier. The letter of Genesis declares that it was spoken into existence by the fiat of an almighty God, and completed in seven days; but science asserts that countless ages elapsed from the beginning of the earth to the period when it became fit for human life. The Bible seems to teach that we are all, of whatever color or conformation, descendants of the one man, Adam; but science casts a doubt upon this apparent teaching, which almost amounts to certainty. Hence religion and science are in conflict; and the skeptical mind which is born to

9