The Churches and Modern Thought An inquiry into the...

The argument from design is one which appeals perhaps more than any other to the average man. As he looks around and reflects, he feels that there must be design, and, therefore, a Designer. He feels also that God must be constantly present directing the carrying out of His design. He is in accord with the Theist who maintains that purpose and plan are manifest throughout the cosmos, and that, although it might be conceded that every step of the process has been achieved by the forces of Evolution, it is impossible to exclude the presiding activity of a mind which has planned the whole and predetermined the movements of every portion. We are to believe, then, that the Designer Himself put the forces in motion for the first time, that He knew exactly what would be the product of those forces down to the minutest detail and for all time, and yet, in face of the undeviating law-regulated cosmos which He has created, He in some way continues to guide these forces. From the very first step, the making of the electron and thence the atom, to the last, the making of man’s brain, the Theist sees the finger of God. The mystery of life is thus taken to be explained or diminished by asserting that it is produced and controlled by some other mystery. The only alternative to this belief, so he maintains, is a universe of random chance and capricious disorder.

But “Haeckel and his colleagues hold that the direction which the evolutionary agencies take is not ‘fortuitous’; that they never could take but the one direction which they have actually taken.”7 While “the Theist says the ultimate object must have been foreseen and the forces must have been guided, or they would never have worked steadily in this definite direction, the Monist says that these forces no more needed guiding than does a tramcar; there was only one direction possible for them.”8 To refute this the apologist gravely replies that, “if you cast to the ground an infinite (or a finite) number of letters, they might after infinite gyrations make a word here and there; but we should think the man an enthusiast who expected even a short sentence, and a fool if he ever expected them to make a poem.” We are expected, it seems, to regard it as a miracle that natural forces should not lose their uniform character, and act miraculously! Evidently, either the question is begged or the analogy is absurd. An argument of this kind is worse than useless, for it only serves to demonstrate the hopelessness of the teleologist’s position. Spinoza’s position is more reasonable; for he conceives that all is the outcome of inexorable necessity—that neither chance nor purpose governs the eternal and the infinite.