Theism or Atheism: The Great AlternativeCohen, Chapman
Religion
Theism or Atheism: The Great Alternative
Cohen, Chapman
Atheism; Theism
The greater part of his
subsequent history is equally unedifying: having made the world his
prey, he says that God made the world to that end, and those who
have preyed upon their fellows, and enslaved them, and flourished
upon it, have declared that to have been the intention of nature.
(_The Metaphysics of Nature_; pp. 344-5).
A perpetual pulling down and building up, and the building altogether
dependent upon the demolition. The tiger built with tastes and
capacities for catching the gazelle: the gazelle built with capacities
that enable it to escape the tiger. There is no evidence here of the
existence of a single mind working out an intelligent plan. At most we
have either the proof for a number of warring powers, each one striving
to destroy what the other is striving to create, or a single mind that
has deliberately fashioned things so that each part may work for the
destruction of the other part, the whole to presently end in a grand
catastrophe.
But that is not all. If we limit our attention to man, can it be said
that we find in the human structure what we might reasonably expect to
find if man be indeed the crown of the divine plan, the event to which,
for untold ages, all things were designedly tending? What we actually do
find is that the structure of man, physically and mentally, is such as
to altogether negative the notion of complete or harmonious adjustment
to environment. That the human has within it a large number of vestigial
structures--some scientists place it as high as one hundred and
seventy--is now well known, and forms at the same time one of the
evidences of evolution and an impeachment of the theistic theory. There
is only need to instance now the vermiform appendage, which forms the
seat of appendicitis, the "wisdom" teeth, of very little use, and one of
the most fruitful of causes of disease of the teeth, the hair which
covers the human body, now of no use whatever, except to form a lodgment
for microbes, and so makes the acquisition of disease the more certain.
In addition to the number of rudimentary organs that actually encourage
disease--Metchnikoff counts among these the larger intestine--the body
is full of rudimentary muscles and structures that when not positively
harmful, impose a tax on the organism for which no corresponding service
is performed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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