And Mr. Pope suggests that man was so ignorant, so childlike, or so
weak in those days that it was necessary to disguise plain facts in
misleading symbols.

But the man, Moses or another, who wrote the Book of Genesis was a
man of literary genius. He was no child, no weakling. If God had
said to him: "I made the world out of the fiery nebula, and I made
the sea to bring forth the staple of life, and I caused all living
things to develop from that seed or staple of life, and I drew man
out from the brutes; and the time was six hundred millions of years"--
if God had said that to Moses, do you think Moses would not have
understood?

Now, let me show you what the Christian asks us to believe. He asks
us to believe that the God who was the first cause of creation, and
knew everything, inspired man, in the childhood of the world, with
a fabulous and inaccurate theory of the origin of man and the earth,
and that since that day the same God has gradually changed or added
to the inspiration, until He inspired Laplace, and Galileo, and
Copernicus, and Darwin to contradict the teachings of the previous
fifty thousand years. He asks us to believe that God muddled men's
minds with a mysterious series of revelations cloaked in fable and
allegory; that He allowed them to stumble and to blunder, and to
quarrel over these "revelations"; that He allowed them to persecute,
and slay, and torture each other on account of divergent readings of
his "revelations" for ages and ages; and that He is still looking on
while a number of bewildered and antagonistic religions fight each
other to achieve the survival of the fittest. Is that a reasonable
theory? Is it the kind of theory a reasonable man can accept? Is
it consonant with common sense?