Thus, for instance, it
is doubtless illogical, as Professor Flint points out, in any Darwinian to
argue that because his theory of natural selection supplies him with a
natural explanation of the process whereby organisms have been adapted to
their surroundings, therefore this process need not itself have been
designed. That is to say, in general terms, as insisted upon in the
foregoing essay, the discovery of a natural law or orderly process cannot
of itself justify the inference that this law or method of orderly
procedure is not itself a product of supernatural Intelligence; but, on the
contrary, the very existence of such orderly processes, considered only in
relation to their products, must properly be regarded as evidence of the
best possible kind in favour of supernatural Intelligence, _provided that
no natural cause can be suggested as adequate to explain the origin of
these processes_. But this is precisely what the persistence of force,
considered as a natural cause, must be pronounced as necessarily competent
to achieve; for we can clearly see that all these processes obviously must
and actually do derive their origin from this one causative principle. And
whether or not behind this one causative principle of natural law there
exists a still more ultimate cause in the form of a supernatural
Intelligence, this is a question altogether foreign to any argument from
teleology, seeing that teleology, in so far as it is _teleology_, can only
rest upon the observed facts of the cosmos; and if these facts admit of
being explained by the action of a single causative principle inherent in
the cosmos itself, teleology is not free to assume the action of any
causative principle of a more ultimate character.
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