These illustrations make it clear that the evidence of design from
structure and adaptation is furnished complete by the individual animal or
plant itself, and that our knowledge or our ignorance of the history of its
formation or mode of production adds nothing to it and takes nothing away.
We infer design from certain arrangements and results; and we have no other
way of ascertaining it. Testimony, unless infallible, cannot prove it, and
is out of the question here. Testimony is not the appropriate proof of
design: adaptation to purpose is. Some arrangements in Nature appear to be
contrivances, but may leave us in doubt. Many others, of which the eye and
the hand are notable examples, compel belief with a force not appreciably
short of demonstration. Clearly to settle that such as these must have been
designed goes far toward proving that other organs and other seemingly less
explicit adaptations in Nature must also have been designed, and clinches
our belief, from manifold considerations, that all Nature is a preconcerted
arrangement, a manifested design. A strange contradiction would it be to
insist that the shape and markings of certain rude pieces of flint, lately
found in drift-deposits, prove design, but that nicer and thousand-fold
more complex adaptations to use in animals and vegetables do not a fortiori
argue design.
We could not affirm that the arguments for design in Nature are conclusive
to all minds. But we may insist, upon grounds already intimated, that,
whatever they were good for before Darwin's book appeared, they are good
for now. To our minds the argument from design always appeared conclusive
of the being and continued operation of an intelligent First Cause, the
Ordainer of Nature; and we do not see that the grounds of such belief would
be disturbed or shifted by the adoption of Darwin's hypothesis. We are not
blind to the philosophical difficulties which the thoroughgoing implication
of design in Nature has to encounter, nor is it our vocation to obviate
them It suffices us to know that they are not new nor peculiar
difficulties--that, as Darwin's theory and our reasonings upon it did not
raise these perturbing spirits, they are not bound to lay them. Meanwhile,
that the doctrine of design encounters the very same difficulties in the
material that it does in the moral world is Just what ought to be expected.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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