We hence conclude that the marks of design in the eye afford, at all events, what seems to be a very strong argument in favour of a Designer. And if only one eye existed in the universe, and there were no other mark of design in nature, this conclusion would be none the less clear.
(3.) The evidence cumulative.
But the argument is far stronger than this. It is cumulative in a triple sense. To begin with, an eye is found not in one man only, but in millions of men, each separately showing marks of design, and each separately requiring a designer. Secondly, the human eye is only one example out of hundreds in the human body. The ear or the mouth would lead to the same conclusion, and so would the lungs or the heart. While, thirdly, human beings are but one out of many thousands of organisms in nature, all bearing marks of design, and showing in some cases an even greater ingenuity than in the human eye. Of course, as a rule, the lower organisms, being less complicated than the higher ones, have less striking marks of design, but their existence is equally clear; the flowers of plants affording some well-known examples.
Nor is this all, for even the world itself bears traces of having been designed. Had it been a mere chaos, we might have thought that the Creator was unaware of what would be the result of His action. But a planet like our earth, so admirably adapted for the support of life, can scarcely have been brought about by accident.
We conclude then, on reviewing the whole subject, that there are countless objects in nature, more especially organs like the eye, which bear strong marks of having been designed. And then the Unity of Nature, and the fact that all its parts act on one another in so many ways (the eye for instance being useless without light), shows that if anything has been designed, everything has been designed. Now there are two, and only two, important objections to this argument, which may be called the Evolution and the Free Will objection.
(B.) The Evolution Objection.
The first objection is that the whole of nature has been brought about in accordance with fixed laws by the process of Evolution. Therefore, though it is possible the Creator may have foreseen everything that exists; yet the apparent marks of design in nature, being all the necessary results of these laws, do not afford any evidence that He actually did so. And before discussing this objection we must first consider what we mean by laws of nature and natural forces.
Now by a law of nature is meant any regular, or uniform action which we observe in nature. For example, it is called a law, or rule of nature that (with certain exceptions) heat should expand bodies, which merely means that we see that it does so. In other words, we observe that heat is followed by expansion, and we therefore assume that the one is the cause of the other. But calling it a law of nature for heat to expand bodies, does not in any way account for its doing so. And the same is true in other cases, so that a law of nature explains nothing, it is merely a summary of the facts to be explained.
It should also be noticed that a law of nature effects nothing. It has no coercive, or compelling power whatever. The law of gravitation, for instance, has never moved a planet, any more than the rules of navigation have steered a ship. In each case it is some power or force acting according to law which does it. And natural forces are those which, as far as we know, always act according to some fixed law. They have no freedom of choice, they cannot act or not as they like; they must always and everywhere act the same under the same circumstances. We pass on now to the subject of Evolution, first considering its meaning, and then its effect on the present argument.