THE Faithful Slave periodically includes an article on evolution in the The Watchtower or Awake! and consistently claims to have opposed this teaching since the days of Russell.
But is this truly the case?
On page 37 of the book The New Creation we read,
We will concede that, if God chose, he could have brought all the different species of animal life into being by a development of one from the other, or he could have developed each from the protozoan slime".
While two pages previously it says,
It is not for us to dispute that even the protoplasm of the Paleozoic slime may not have come into existence through chemical action of the highly mineralized waters of those seas"
and that,
From the same original protoplasm different orders of creatures may have developed under differing conditions."
This position is called Theistic evolution.
In the Photo-drama of creation the fifth day or epoch is said to have seen,
amphibious developments of animal life, such as the crocodile"
and
in the latter part of it appeared the mammoths and sloth."
Todays JWs know enough biology not to call a crocodile an amphibian, or class mammoths and sloths as birds flying in the expanse of heaven or living things with which the waters teem.
While their biology has improved, their geological concepts have not.
In their eagerness to pit science against the concept of creation of the world in six days they neglect to add that on the same grounds 48,000 years is equally unscientific as an age for the earth.
Nevertheless this double think persuades the vast majority of interested ones who have little or no acquaintance with science.
Their contention, that the days of creation are 7,000 years long ties in with the end of the world mess they are managing to stay afloat in, for now.
Six thousand years are supposed to have passed since Adam's creation but this assessment is based on a fictitious date for the Babylonian capture of Jerusalem.
In Victorian times it may have been a legitimate guess to put this event in 607 BC, but as archaeology has uncovered so much since it is inexcusable to place the event then.
It is universally recognized as having occurred in 586 BC.
Once again the Watch Tower Society proves that it cannot take the Bible at face value and that a day simply means a 24-hour day.
A mistake it makes with other important parts of the Bible relating to the deity of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Article first printed in Concern Newsletter 1993