Paley's favourite word is "Contrivance"; and for him contrivance is
most certain where production is most obscure. He points out the
physiological advantage of the _valvulae conniventes_ to man, and the
advantage for teleology of the fact that they cannot have been formed
by "action and pressure." What is not due to pressure may be
attributed to design, and when a "mechanical" process more subtle than
pressure was suggested, the case for design was so far weakened. The
cumulative proof from the multitude of instances began to disappear
when, in selection, a natural sequence was suggested in which all the
adaptations might be reached by the motive power of life, and
especially when, as in Darwin's teaching, there was full recognition
of the reactions of life to the stimulus of circumstance. "The
organism fits the niche," said the teleologist, "because the Creator
formed it so as to fit." "The organism fits the niche," said the
naturalist, "because unless it fitted it could not exist." "It was
fitted to survive," said the theologian. "It survives because it
fits," said the selectionist. The two forms of statement are not
incompatible; but the new statement, by provision of an ideally
universal explanation of process, was hostile to a doctrine of purpose
which relied upon evidences always exceptional however numerous.
Science persistently presses on to find the universal machinery of
adaptation in this planet; and whether this be found in selection, or
in direct-effect, or in vital reactions resulting in large changes, or
in a combination of these and other factors, it must always be opposed
to the conception of a Divine Power here and there but not everywhere
active.
For science, the Divine must be constant, operative everywhere and in
every quality and power, in environment and in organism, in stimulus
and in reaction, in variation and in struggle, in hereditary
equilibrium, and in "the unstable state of species"; equally present
on both sides of every strain, in all pressures and in all
resistances, in short in the general wonder of life and the world. And
this is exactly what the Divine Power must be for religious faith.
The point I wish once more to make is that the necessary readjustment
of teleology, so as to make it depend upon the contemplation of the
whole instead of a part, is advantageous quite as much to theology as
to science. For the older view failed in courage. Here again our
theism was not sufficiently theistic.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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