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Show 68 DARWINIAN A. apparently, designed ends ! Imagine a mind of this ·skeptical character, in all honesty and undm~ its best reason, after finding itself obliged to reject the evidence of revelation, to commence a search after the Creator, in the light of natural theology. He goes through the proof for :final cause and design, as given in a suinmary though clear, plain, and convincing form, in the paO'es of Paley and the "Bridgewater Treatises." The eye5 and the hand, those perf ect m. struments of optical and mechanical contrivance and adaptation, 'without the least waste or surplusage-these, say Paley and Bell, certainly prove a designing maker as much as the palace or the watch proves an architect or a watchmaker. Let this mind, in this ~tate, cross ,Darwin's work, and find that, after a s.ensitive nerve or a rudimentary hoof or claw, no design is to be found. -From this point upward the development is the mere necessary result of natural selection; and let him receive this law of natural selection as true, and where does he find himself~ Before, he could refer the existence of the eye, for example, only to design, or chance. There was no other alternative. He rejected chance, as impossible. It must then be a design. But Darwin brings up another power, ;namely, natural selection, in place of this impossible chance. This not only may, but, according to Darwin, must of necessity produce an eye. It may indeed coexist .with design, but it must exist and act and produce its results, even without design. Will such a mind, under such circumstances, infer the existence of the designer-Godwhen he can, at the same time, satisfactorily account for the thing produced, by the operation of this natural se- DESIGN VERSUS NECESSITY. 69 lection 1 It s·eems to me, therefore, perfectly evident that the substitution of natural selection, by necessity, for design in the formation of the organic world, is a step decidedly atheistical. It is in vain to say that Darwin takes the creation of organic life, in its simplest forms, to have been the work of the Deity. In giving up design in these highest and most complex forms of organization, which have always been relied ·upon as the crowning proof of the existence of an intelligent Creator, without whose intellectual powm· they could not have been brought into being, he takes a most decided step to banish a belief in the intelligent action of God from the organic world. The lower organisms will go next. The atheist will say, Wait a little. Some future Darwin will show how the simple forms came necessarily from inorganic matter. This is but another step by which, according to Laplace, "the discoveries of science throw final causes further back." A. G.-It is conceded that, if the two players in the supposed case were ignorant of each other's presence, the designs of both were frustrated, and from necessity. Thus far it is not needful to inquire whether this necessary consequence is an unconditional or a conditioned necessity, nor to require a more definite statement of the meaning attached to the word necessity as a supposed third alternative. But, if the players knew of each other's presence, we could not infer from the result that the design of both or of either was frustrated. One of them may have intended to frustrate the other's design, and to 4 |
