3. The progress of astronomical discovery has utterly refuted the notion of creation by natural law, known as the Development Theory, or the Nebular Hypothesis.
Scientific Infidels knew that there was too much order and regularity in the motions of the planets to allow any rational mind to ascribe these motions to accident, according to Buffon's notion. They saw that these movements must be regulated by law. La Place, an eminent mathematician, saw that there are at least five great regularities pervading the system, for which Buffon's theory gave no reason:
1. The planets all move in elliptical orbits, nearly circular. They might, on the contrary, have been as elongated as those of comets.
2. They revolve in orbits nearly in the plane of the sun's equator. They might have revolved in orbits inclined to it at any angle, or even in the plane of his poles.
3. They revolve around the sun all in the same direction, which is the direction of his rotation on his axis.
4. They rotate on their axes, also, so far as known, in the same direction.
5. The satellites (with the exception of those of Uranus) revolve around their primary planets, and also rotate on their axes, in the same normal direction.
It was evident, even to the believers in chance, that so many regularities were not produced by accident. La Place found, by computing the chances by the formula of probabilities, that the chances were two millions to one against these regularities happening by chance, and four millions to one in favor of these motions having a common origin. The grand phenomenon being a motion of rotation in the whole system, of which the rotation of the sun is the central part, he thought if he could account for this, he could explain all the rest.
He set out by supposing, that the sun and planets originally existed as a vast cloud of gaseous matter, intensely heated—a vast fire-mist—placed in a region of space much cooler, and that this cloud, by gradual cooling, and the pressure of its parts, settled down into solid forms. It was supposed that some portions of this cloud would begin to cool sooner than others, and so become solid sooner, and that the hot gas, rushing to the solid part, would form a vortex, which would set the cloud in motion around its center. As the speed of its rotation would increase, and the outside condense and grow solid before the inside, the cloud would whirl off the rings of solid matter, which would keep revolving in the same orbits in which they were cast off, and would revolve faster and faster as they grew cooler and more solid, till they broke up, by the force of their velocity, into smaller pieces; which fragments, in their turn, repeated the process, until the present number of planets and their satellites was produced.[199]