Page:The Monist Volume 2.djvu/103

91. THE CONTINUITY OF EVOLUTION. QI is conceived as an actual break in the order of the world and this break is supposed to be a special revelation of God! If we trust in truth, we need not shun the light of science and the God of science—in contradistinction to the pagan notion of God—reveals himself in the discoveries of science. God lives not in darkness but in light, and his existence is proved not through the breaks in nature (which we can be sure do not exist, and wherever they appear are due to our ignorance) but through the order of nature, for God is the order of nature. God is that power through which we exist as living, thinking, and aspiring beings, and to which we have to conform in order to live.

When Darwin speaks of "life as having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one by the Creator," he either uses allegorical language or he means that the beginning of life was an act of special creation. He apparently means the latter and is in this respect not a consistent evolutionist. Darwin was great as a reformer of natural science, but in theology he still stood upon the old stand-point. He calls God to rescue where science fails. The Creator did not originally breathe life into the organism, but his breath is constantly ensouling all living beings. Now suppose there were or there could be exceptions to the law of causation, to the conservation of matter and energy, or to the continuity of evolution, would that not rather be a drawback in nature ? Are the patches on a coat better proof that it was made by a tailor than the whole coat? Any kind of theology which still recognises special-creation acts, or miracles, or breaks in evolution, we do not hesitate to say, is not yet free from paganism, for it still sticks to the religious conception of the medicine-man that God is a great magician. The God of the medicine-man lives in the realm of the unknown and he appears in man's imagination where the light of science fails. The God of science however is the God of truth, and evidence of his existence is not found in the darkness of ignorance but in the light of knowledge. God's being is not recognised in the seeming exceptions to natural laws, but in the natural laws themselves. God's existence is not proved by our inability to trace here or there the order of cause and effect, as if a disorder in the world made it divine; on the