be no doubt, unless there are other grounds for it to rest upon.
Such ground there must be, or seem to be, to justify or excuse a veteran
divine and scholar like Dr. Hodge in his deduction of pure atheism from a
system produced by a confessed theist, and based, as we have seen, upon
thoroughly orthodox fundamental conceptions. Even if we may not hope to
reconcile the difference between the theologian and the naturalist, it may
be well to ascertain where their real divergence begins, or ought to begin,
and what it amounts to. Seemingly, it is in their proximate, not in their
ultimate, principles, as Dr. Hodge insists when he declares that the whole
drift of Darwinism is to prove that everything "may be accounted for by the
blind operation of natural causes, without any intention, purpose, or
cooperation of God." "Why don't he say," cries the theologian, "that the
complicated organs of plants and animals are the product of the divine
intelligence? If God made them, it makes no difference, so far as the
question of design is concerned, how he made them, whether at once or by
process of evolution." But, as we have seen, Mr. Darwin does say that, and
he over and over implies it when he refers the production of species "to
secondary causes," and likens their origination to the origination of
individuals; species being series of individuals with greater difference.
It is not for the theologian to object that the power which made individual
men and other animals, and all the differences which the races of mankind
exhibit, through secondary causes, could not have originated congeries of
more or less greatly differing individuals through the same causes.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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