Such are the limits imposed by the very nature of the evidence itself,
and the scientists, who transgress these limits, by attempting to
correlate the primary phyla, are on a par with those unconvincible
geniuses, who continually besiege the Patent Office with schemes ever
new and weird for realizing the chimera of “perpetual motion.”
Thus scientific transformism is unable to simplify the problem beyond a
certain irreducible plurality of forms, lesser only in degree than the
plurality postulated by fixism. This being the case, the attempts of
Wasmann and Dorlodot to prune the works of Creation with Occam’s Razor
are not only presumptuous, but precarious as well. _Qui nimis probat,
nihil probat!_ If it be unworthy of God to multiply organic origins
in space, then monophyletic descent is the only possible alternative,
and polyphyletic transformism falls under the same condemnation as
fixism. Yet the polyphyletic theory of descent is that to which both
Wasmann and Dorlodot subscribe, as it is, likewise, the only kind of
transformism which science can ever hope to plausibleize. Besides, too
close a shave with Occam’s Razor would eliminate creation altogether,
since all theologians cheerfully admit that it was the result of a free
and unnecessary act on the part of God. When we apply our _rationes
convenientiae_ to the Divine operations, we must not make the mistake
of applying them to the Divine action itself instead of the created
effects of that action. We may be competent to discern disorder and
irregularity in finite things, but we are wholly incompetent to
prescribe rules for Divine conduct. To say that God is constrained
by His infinite Wisdom to indirect, rather than direct, production,
or that He must evolve a variety of forms out of living, rather than
non-living, matter, is to be guilty of ridiculous anthropomorphism.
There is no _a priori_ reason, founded upon the Divine attributes,
which restricts God’s creative action to the production of this, or
that, number of primordial organisms, or which obliges him to endow
primitive organisms with the power of transmutation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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