The Expositor's Bible: The Book of GenesisDods, Marcus
Religion
The Expositor's Bible: The Book of Genesis
Dods, Marcus
Bible. Genesis -- Commentaries
What then are the truths taught us in these chapters? The first is that
there has been a creation, that things now existing have not just grown
of themselves, but have been called into being by a presiding
intelligence and an originating will. No attempt to account for the
existence of the world in any other way has been successful. A great
deal has in this generation been added to our knowledge of the
efficiency of material causes to produce what we see around us; but when
we ask what gives harmony to these material causes, and what guides them
to the production of certain ends, and what originally produced them,
the answer must still be, not matter but intelligence and purpose. The
best informed and most penetrating minds of our time affirm this. John
Stuart Mill says: "It must be allowed that in the present state of our
knowledge the adaptations in nature afford a large balance of
probability in favour of creation by intelligence." Professor Tyndall
adds his testimony and says: "I have noticed during years of
self-observation that it is not in hours of clearness and vigour that
[the doctrine of material atheism] commends itself to my mind--that in
the hours of stronger and healthier thought it ever dissolves and
disappears, as offering no solution of the mystery in which we dwell and
of which we form a part."
There is indeed a prevalent suspicion, that in presence of the
discoveries made by evolutionists the argument from design is no longer
tenable. Evolution shows us that the correspondence of the structure of
animals, with their modes of life, has been generated by the nature of
the case; and it is concluded that a blind mechanical necessity and not
an intelligent design rules all. But the discovery of the process by
which the presently existing living forms have been evolved, and the
perception that this process is governed by laws which have always been
operating, do not make intelligence and design at all less necessary,
but rather more so. As Professor Huxley himself says: "The teleological
and mechanical views of nature are not necessarily exclusive. The
teleologist can always defy the evolutionist to disprove that the
primordial molecular arrangement was not intended to evolve the
phenomena of the universe." Evolution, in short, by disclosing to us the
marvellous power and accuracy of natural law, compels us more
emphatically than ever to refer all law to a supreme, originating
intelligence.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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