In the first place, it is manifest that organic life is neither
self-explanatory nor eternal. Hence it must have had its origin in the
action of some external agency. Life as it exists today depends upon
the precedence of numerous unbroken chains of consecutive cells that
extend backward into a remote past. It is, however, a logical necessity
to put an end to this retrogradation of the antecedents upon which the
actual existence of our present organisms depends. The infinite cannot
be spanned by finite steps; the periodic life-process could not be
relayed through an unlimited temporal distance; and a cellular series
which never started would never arrive. Moreover, we do not account for
the existence of life by extending the cellular series interminably
backward. Each cell in such a series is derived from a predecessor,
and, consequently, no cell in the series is self-explanatory. When it
comes to accounting for its own existence, each cell is a zero in the
way of explanation, and adding zeros together indefinitely will never
give us a positive total. Each cell refers us to its predecessor for
the explanation of why it exists, and none contains within itself the
sufficient explanation of its own existence. Hence increasing even to
infinity the number of these cells (which fail to explain themselves)
will give us nothing else but a zero in the way of explanation. If,
therefore, the primordial cause from which these cellular chains are
suspended is not the agency of the physicochemical forces of inorganic
nature, it follows that the first active cause of life must have been a
_supermaterial_ and _extramundane agency_, namely, the Living God and
Author of Life.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account