Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/129

Rh complete set of teeth, together with rudimentary hind-legs, furnished with bones, joints, and muscles, of which there is no trace externally. Both teeth and legs disappear before birth. On the theory that the whale is a descendant of a land-animal, which used both legs and teeth, they are intelligible as survivals in a creature to which they are apparently useless. But that God should have created these structures in a new being, which had no organic relation with other created forms of life, seems almost inconceivable. We can neither believe that they were created "for mere sport or variety," nor that they are "Divine mockeries," nor as an ingenious but anthropomorphic writer in the "Spectator" suggested, that God economically kept to the old plan, though its details had ceased to have either appropriateness or use. The difficulties are even stronger in the case of man and the now well-known facts of his embryonic life. How is it possible, in the face of these, to maintain that we have in man a creation independent of the rest of God's creative work? Of course, if the theory of "special creation" existed either in the Bible or in Christian antiquity, we might bravely try and do battle for it. But it came to us some two centuries ago from the side of science with the imprimatur of a Puritan poet. And, though scientific men are now glad to palm off upon theologians their own mistakes, religion is not bound to wear, still less to be proud of, the cast-off clothes of physical science.

(b) On the other hand, and again apart from the scientific evidence in favor of evolution, as a theory it is infinitely more Christian than the theory of "special creation." For it implies the immanence of God in Nature, and the omnipresence of his creative power. Those who opposed the doctrine of evolution, in defense of "a continued intervention" of God, seem to have failed to notice that a theory of occasional intervention implies as its correlative a theory of ordinary absence. Arid this fitted in well with the deism of the last century. For deism, even when it struggled to be orthodox, constantly spoke of God as we might speak of an absentee landlord, who cares nothing for his property so long as he gets his rent. Yet anything more opposed to the language of the Bible and the Fathers can hardly be imagined. With St. Athanasius, the immanence of the divine Logos is the explanation of the adaptations and unity of Nature, as the fact that man is logikos is the explanation of the truth that man is made in the image of God. Cataclysmal geology and special creation are the scientific analogue of deism. Order, development, law, are the analogue of the Christian view of God.

We may sum up thus: For Christians the facts of Nature are the acts of God. Religion relates these facts to God as their author; science relates them to one another as integral