Ontology, or the Theory of Being

by P. Coffey

Nature, red in tooth and claw

With ravine[528]

is, however, the product of a morbid and distraught imagination rather than a sane view of the facts. The undeniable existence of disorder, of physical evils, defects, failures, frustrations of natural tendency in the universe, does not obscure or conceal from the normal, unbiassed mind the equally undeniable evidences of a great and wide and generally prevailing order. Nor does it conceal from such a mind the fact that the existence of order in any measure or degree implies of necessity the existence of plan or design, and therefore of intelligent purpose also. Inferring from this fact of order the existence of a Supreme Intelligence, and inferring by other lines of reasoning from the [pg 432] data of experience the dependence of the universe on this Intelligence as Creator, Conserver and Ruler, the theist is confronted with the reality of moral and physical evil ([52]), i.e. of disorder in the universe. But he does not see in this disorder anything essentially incompatible with his established conclusion that the universe is a finite creation of Infinite Wisdom, and a free manifestation of the latter to man. If the actual universe is imperfect, he knows that God created it freely and might have created a more perfect or a less perfect one. Knowing that God is All-Powerful as He is All-Wise, he knows that the actual universe, though imperfect absolutely, is perfect relatively, in that it infallibly reveals the Divine Wisdom and Goodness exactly in the measure in which God has willed to reveal Himself in His works. Conscious on the one hand that his finite mind cannot trace in detail all the purposes of God in nature, or assign to all individual events their divinely appointed ends, he is confident on the other hand that the whole universe is intelligible only as the working out of a Divine plan, and not otherwise. To his mind as a theist these lines are a clearer expression of rationally grounded optimism than they were perhaps even to the poet who penned them:—

I trust in nature for the stable laws

Of beauty and utility. Spring shall plant

And Autumn garner to the end of time.

I trust in God—the right shall be the right

And other than the wrong, while He endures;

I trust in my own soul, that can perceive

The outward and the inward, Nature's good