The Creator, and what we may know of the method of creation

by W. H. Dallinger

That will happen, on the assumption of a Creative Mind as the origin of all, which is needful, to complete the universe; and what happens need be no interruption, no turning aside, of the course of nature, but only sublime compliance with it.

But more: one of the gravest conflicts of sheer material philosophy with Theism and Theology is, that by mechanical evolution design is swept clean from the universe; that teleology has received its death-blow.

Science finds that phenomena are self-acting, and self-adjusting. The energy is competent; the method is perfect for bringing about the result investigated. Science can find no more; it asks no more; and materialism says, there is no more. There is no design in it; it is, because to be at all, it must be that. There is no design in the form of the river-bed which the mighty waters have engraved for themselves in their irresistible movement down the mountain slope and along the windings of the valley to the sea. It is the result of the force of gravity. Such is the argument.

But while science as such, in strict obedience to its canons, must stop at the self-adjustment of immediate phenomena, and materialism will stop there, the reasoning faculties of the race, as we have seen, will not stop there. They must come at last, by the laws of reason, upon the power and the intelligence by which the methods of nature were made self-acting. Gravitation and the properties of water will account for the perfect adaptation of the river to its bed, and the bed to the purpose of a river. But how came gravity? How came the properties of water? There may be, there is, no direct design in the path of the Amazon or the Danube; but surely there is magnificence in the design that caused the great, the cosmic methods of nature so to co-operate as to cause those rivers inevitably to carve their perfect paths? The dynamics of nature are self-acting up to the very limit of our power of research; but after that, and beyond it, what? Why is the direction of nature’s dynamical methods always and everywhere, through all time and space, beneficent and beautiful?

It is only the design, the teleology, of the old school, touched by the Ithuriel spear of modern knowledge, and changing into a conception of universal design, that can only have originated in an infinite mind.

The ‘law of evolution’ and that of ‘variation and the survival of the fittest’ may, if you will, be held to account for all that narrower knowledge had attributed to direct design. But evolution, like gravitation, is only a method; and the self-adjustments demonstrated in the ‘origin of species’ only make it, to reason, the clearer, that variation and survival is a method that took its origin in mind. It is true that the egg of a moth, and the eye of a dogfish, and the forearm of a tiger must be what they are to accomplish the end of their being. But that only shows, as we shade our mental eyes, and gaze back to the beginning, the magnificence of the design that was involved in nature’s beginning, so as to be evolved, by the designed rhythm of nature’s methods.

Whatever matter may be; whatever force is; or whether or not both are the one inseverable product of omnipotent volition; the first affection of matter by force carried with it, potentially, the finished purpose of the All-wise, whatever that may be. Every instance of what such writers as Darwin are obliged to write of as ‘contrivance’ or ‘adaptation’ throughout this universe as it now is, or that shall yet arise in it through all duration, are, and will be, but factors of related harmony in a stupendously vast interlocked ‘mosaic’ of design, which in its entirety has a ‘final purpose’ too great for man to see.

It is admitted by the fullest and farthest thinkers, that the teleological, and the mechanical views, of phenomena and their origin, are not antagonistic. Instead of mutually excluding each other in thought, they are the complement of each other.

To argue, that because we can by analysis and research, discover and demonstrate the physical conditions or antecedents, that, apparently automatically, bring about a manifest contrivance, therefore, we have excluded the possibility of any universal primal design, is a mode of reasoning, the fallacy of which, surely, needs no great logical acumen to lay bare.

Because we discover the molecular shapes and movements that determine the structure of a beautiful crystal, it would be surely illogical and unwarranted to say that there was no design, no arrangement in the primary order of things, out of which these very conditions arose. It is conceivable that there may be infinitely more mind in the origination of that which automatically gives rise to a manifest ‘contrivance,’ than in directly originating it.