It is scarcely credible that the evidences of God's wisdom should have been argued to be proofs of His weakness. And yet this has happened. "It is not too much to say," wrote Mr J. S. Mill, "that every indication of design in the Kosmos is so much evidence against the omnipotence of the Designer. For what is meant by design? Contrivance: the adaptation of means to an end. But the necessity for contrivance—the need of employing means—is a consequence of the limitation of power. Who would have recourse to means if to attain his end his mere word was sufficient? The very idea of means implies that the means have an efficacy which the direct action of the being who employs them has not. Otherwise they are not means, but an encumbrance. A man does not use machinery to move his arms. If he did, it could only be when paralysis had deprived him of the power of moving them by volition. But if the employment of contrivance is in itself a sign of limited power, how much more so is the careful and skilful choice of contrivances? Can any wisdom be shown in the selection of means when the means have no efficacy but what is given them by the will of him who employs them, and when his will could have bestowed the same efficacy on any other means? Wisdom and contrivance are shown in overcoming difficulties, and there is no room for them in a being for whom no difficulties exist. The evidences, therefore, of natural theology distinctly imply that the author of the Kosmos worked under limitations."[30]
This, it seems to me, is very strange and worthless reasoning. According to it, the ability of God to form and execute a purpose is evidence not of power but of weakness. I wonder if Mr Mill imagined that the inability of God to form and carry out a purpose would have been evidence not of His weakness but of His power. Or did he suppose, perhaps, that both ability and inability were signs of weakness, and that, consequently, for once opposites were identical? Or did he not think on the subject at all, and so reasoned very much at random? I confess I cannot see how ability to contrive things is weakness, or inability to contrive them power. I hold to Bacon's maxim that "knowledge is power," and refuse to admit that wisdom is weakness. But God, if omnipotent, it is said, did not need to contrive: His mere word must have been sufficient. Yes, is the obvious answer; His mere word, His mere will, was sufficient to produce all His contrivances, and has produced them all. There is no shadow of reason for suspecting that anything was difficult to Him or for Him. No such suspicion is entertained by those who employ the design argument; and those who would rationally object to that argument must find something else to insist on than the power of God's mere will. The will of God is everywhere as efficacious as He in His omnipotence and omniscience chooses that it should be. At the same time, if He desire certain ends, His will cannot remain mere will and dispense with the contrivance of appropriate means. If He wish to bestow happiness on human beings, He must create human beings, and contrive their bodies and minds. To speak of His will as able to "bestow the same efficacy on any means" is no less contrary to reason than it would be to speak of it as able to make the part greater than the whole. It is only in the world imagined by Mr Mill—one in which two and two might be five—that a sunbeam could serve the same purpose as a granite pillar or a steam-engine; and such a world, most people will assuredly hold, even omnipotence could not create. Infinite power and wisdom must necessarily work "under limitations" when they originate and control finite things; but the limitations are not in the infinite power and wisdom themselves—they are in their operations and effects. According to Mr Mill's argument, infinite power could not create a finite world at all: only a finite power could do so. That surely means that a finite power must be mightier than an infinite power; and that, again, is surely a plain self-contradiction, a manifest absurdity.
There is another objection which, although in itself unworthy of answer, has been urged so often and presented in so many forms, some of which are rhetorically impressive, that it cannot be wholly passed over. The design argument has been censured as "assuming that the genesis of the heavens and the earth was effected somewhat after the manner in which a workman shapes a piece of furniture"—as "converting the Power whose garment is seen in the visible universe into an Artificer, fashioned after the human model, and acting as man is seen to act"—as "transforming the First Cause into a magnified mechanist who constructs a work of art, and then sits apart from it and observes how it goes," &c. Now the heavens and the earth are to such a wonderful extent exemplifications both of mechanical laws and æsthetic principles, that no man of sense, I think, will deny that they may most justly be compared to machines or works of art, or even pronounced to be machines and works of art. They are that, although they are more than that. An animal is a machine, although an organism too. Every organism is a machine, although every machine is not an organism. Art and nature are not antagonistic and exclusive. Man and all man's arts are included in nature, and nature is the highest art. While, however, it is legitimate and even necessary to illustrate the design argument by references to human inventions, the numerous and immense differences between the works of man's art and the processes of nature must not be overlooked; and there is no excuse for saying that they have been overlooked. It is precisely because the universe is so above anything man has made or can make, and because vegetable and animal organisms are so different from watches and statues, that the argument in question leads us to a divine and not to a merely human intelligence. It implies that both the works of God and the works of man are products of intelligence; but it does not require that they should have anything else in common. It recognises that the most elaborate and exquisite contrivances of man fall immeasurably below "nature's most minute designs." So far from requiring, it forbids our carrying any of the limitations or peculiarities of human contrivance over to that which is divine. Besides, the belief in design is held in conjunction with the belief in creation out of nothing. The same persons who recognise that there is a divine wisdom displayed in the constitution and course of nature believe the universe to have been called into being by the mere volition of the Almighty. But among all theories of the genesis of the heavens and the earth, that is the only one which does not represent the First Cause as working like a man. Man never creates—he cannot create. To produce anything he must have something to work on—he must have materials to mould and modify.[31]
II.
Those who refuse to refer the order and adaptations in the universe to a designing intelligence are bound to account for them in some other way. Has this been done? Has any person succeeded in tracing them back to any other principle which can be reasonably regarded as their cause, or as adequate to their production? This is the question which we have now to consider.
Matter, some would have us believe, is the origin of the order of the universe. Grant it, and there is still the question—What is the origin of matter?—to be disposed of. We have seen that this is a question which we are bound to raise; we have seen that there are strong reasons for holding that matter had an origin, had a beginning in time, and none whatever for regarding it as self-existent and eternal. The very existence of order and system, of mechanical adjustments and organic adaptations in the universe, seems to prove that matter must have had a beginning. If certain collocations of matter evince design, and must have had a beginning, the adaptation of the parts to form the collocation evinces design, and implies a beginning. And if matter had a beginning, its cause can only have been mind. To say that it originated with chance or necessity is plainly absurd. Chance and necessity are meaningless terms unless mind or matter be presupposed. There can be no accidents where neither mind nor matter exists. There can be no chance where there is no law. Chance or accident is what occurs when two or more independent series of phenomena meet, without their meeting having been premeditated and provided for. When one series of causes leads a man to pass a house at a given moment of a given day, and another series of causes, coexistent with but wholly independent of the former series, determines that a heavy body shall fall from the roof of that house at that moment of that day and kill that man, the consequence—his death—is what may be properly called an accident, or matter of chance. One who believes, indeed, in the omniscience and universal foreordination and government of God, will hold that even in such a case the accident or chance is merely apparent; but he will not deny the right of the atheist to speak of chance or accident in this way, or to explain as matters of chance whatever he can. The word chance, or accident, can have no intelligible sense, however, unless there be such independent series of phenomena—unless there be mental and material existences, mental and material laws. Chance cannot be conceived of, even by the atheist, as the origin of existence. The same may be said of necessity. Matter or mind may act necessarily, but necessity cannot act without matter or mind. If it be requisite, therefore, to seek a cause for matter, mind alone can be assigned as its cause. If we are justified in seeking for the origin of matter at all, our choice of an answer lies between mind and absurdity, between a real and sufficient cause and an imaginary and inconceivable cause. Besides, how could matter of itself produce order, even if it were self-existent and eternal? It is far more unreasonable to believe that the atoms or constituents of matter produced of themselves, without the action of a Supreme Mind, this wonderful universe, than that the letters of the English alphabet produced the plays of Shakespeare, without the slightest assistance from the human mind known by that famous name. These atoms might, perhaps, now and then, here and there, at great distances and long intervals, produce, by a chance contact, some curious collocation or compound; but never could they produce order or organisation, on an extensive scale or of a durable character, unless ordered, arranged, and adjusted in ways of which intelligence alone can be the ultimate explanation. To believe that their fortuitous and undirected movements could originate the universe, and all the harmonies and utilities and beauties which abound in it, evinces a credulity far more extravagant than has ever been displayed by the most superstitious of religionists. Yet no consistent materialist can refuse to accept this colossal chance-hypothesis. All the explanations of the order of the universe which materialists, from Democritus and Epicurus to Diderot and Lange, have devised, rest on the assumption that the elements of matter, being eternal, must pass through infinite combinations, and that one of these must be our present world—a special collocation among the countless millions of collocations, past and future. Throw the letters of the Greek alphabet, it has been said, an infinite number of times, and you must produce the Iliad and all Greek books. The theory of probabilities, I need hardly say, requires us to believe nothing so absurd. Throw letters together without thought through all eternity, and you will never make them express thought. All the letters in the Iliad might have been tossed and jumbled together from morning to night by the hands of the whole human race, from the beginning of the world until now, and the first line of the Iliad would have been still to compose, had not the genius of Homer been inspired to sing the wrath of Achilles and the war around Troy. But what is the Iliad to the hymn of creation, and the drama of providence? Were these glorious works composed by the mere jumbling together of atoms, which were not even prepared beforehand to form things, as letters are to form words, and which had to shake themselves into order without the help of any hand? They may believe that who can. It seems to me that it ought to be much easier to believe all the Arabian Nights.
To ascribe the origination of order to law is a manifest evasion of the real problem. Law is order. Law is the very thing to be explained. The question is—Has law a reason, or is it without a reason? The unperverted human mind cannot believe it to be without a reason. "The existence of a law connecting and governing any class of phenomena implies a presiding intelligence which has preconceived and established the law. The regulation of events by precise rules of time and space, of number and measure, is evidence of thought and mind." So says Dr Whewell; and the statement is amply justified by the fact, that all laws and rules in the universe imply that existences are related to one another in a way of which intelligent adjustment alone is the adequate and ultimate explanation. The existence of a law uniformly involves the coexistence of several conditions, and that is a phenomenon which, whenever the conditions and law are physically ultimate, and consequently physically inexplicable, clearly presupposes mind. Laws, in a word, are not the causes but the expressions of order. They are themselves the results of delicately accurate adjustments, which indicate the operation of a divine wisdom. There are chemical laws, for example, simply because there are chemical elements endowed with affinities, attractions, or forces the most diverse, yet so balanced and harmonised as to secure the welfare of the world. Besides, laws do not act of themselves. No law produces of itself any result. It is the agents which act according to the law that produce results, and the nature of the result produced depends on the number and character of the agents, and how each is situated and circumstanced. If the agents oppose each other, or are inappropriately distributed, they bring about disorder and disaster in conformity to law. There is no calamity, no evil, no scene of confusion, in the known world, which is not the result of the action of agents which operate in strictest accordance to law. The law of gravitation might rule every particle of matter, and yet conflict and confusion and death would prevail throughout the entire solar system were harmony and stability and life not secured by very special arrangements. Matter might have all its present inherent and essential laws, and yet remain for ever a chaos. Apart from a designing and superintending intelligence, the chances in favour of chaos and against cosmos, even allowing matter to have uncreated properties and laws, were incalculable. The obvious inference is that which Professor Jevons expresses in these words—"As an unlimited number of atoms can be placed in unlimited space in an unlimited number of modes of distribution, there must, even granting matter to have had all its laws from eternity, have been at some moment in time, out of the unlimited choices and distributions possible, that one choice and distribution which yielded the fair and orderly universe that now exists." Only out of rational choice can order have come.
The most common mode, perhaps, of evading the problem which order presents to reason, is the indication of the process by which the order has been realised. From Democritus to the latest Darwinian there have been men who supposed that they had completely explained away the evidences for design in nature when they had described the physical antecedents of the arrangements appealed to as evidences. Aristotle showed the absurdity of the supposition more than 2200 years ago. But those who deny final causes have gone on arguing in the same irrational manner down to the present time. They cannot, in fact, do otherwise. They are committed to a false position, and they dare not abandon the sophism on which it rests. Nothing else can explain how any sane mind should infer that because a thing is conditioned it cannot have been designed. The man who argues that the eye was not constructed in order to see because it has been so constructed as to be capable of seeing, is clearly either unable to reason correctly, or allows his reasoning faculty to be terribly perverted by prejudice. That a result is secured by appropriate conditions can seem to no sound and unprejudiced intellect a reason for regarding it to have been undesigned. And yet what other reason is involved in all the attempts to explain away final causes by means of the nebular, Darwinian, and other development hypotheses?