, is inexplicable without him.
If Mr. Darwin believes that the events which he supposes to have
occurred and the results we behold were undirected and undesigned, or
if the physicist believes that the natural forces to which he refers
phenomena are uncaused and undirected, no argument is needed to show
that such belief is atheism. But the admission of the phenomena and of
these natural processes and forces does not necessitate any such
belief, nor even render it one whit less improbable than before.
Surely, too, the accidental element may play its part in Nature without
negativing design in the theists view. He believes that the earths
surface has been very gradually prepared for man and the existing
animal races, that vegetable matter has through a long series of
generations imparted fertility to the soil in order that it may support
its present occupants, that even beds of coal have been stored up for
mans benefit Yet what is more accidental, and more simply the
consequence of physical agencies than the accumulation of vegetable
matter in a peat bog and its transformation into coal? No scientific
person at this day doubts that our solar system is a progressive
development, whether in his conception he begins with molten masses, or
aeriform or nebulous masses, or with a fluid revolving mass of vast
extent, from which the specific existing worlds have been developed one
by one What theist doubts that the actual results of the development in
the inorganic worlds are not merely compatible with design but are in
the truest sense designed re suits? Not Mr.
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