I
We need not here attempt to discuss the existence or even the nature of
God. The Infinite One in all His attributes is above and beyond
discussion. But there are some things that we can very profitably gather
together as the net results of modern scientific investigation regarding
the origin of things; and to this task we must now address ourselves in
a very brief way.
We shall not attempt to deal with the astronomical aspects of the
question, or the origin of our world as a planet or the origin of the
solar system. This would lead us too far afield. We shall make more
progress in dealing with the questions nearest at hand, namely, the
origin of the present order of things on our globe.
First we must summarize the facts as we now know them in the five
departments of knowledge with which we have had to deal.
1. Both matter and energy seem now to be at a standstill, so far as
creation is concerned; no means being known to science whereby the fixed
quantity of both with which we have to deal in this world can be
increased (or diminished) in the slightest degree.
2. The origin of life is veiled in a mist that science has not dispelled
and does not hope to dispel. By none of the processes that we call
natural can life now be produced from the not-living.
3. Unicellular forms can come only from preexisting cells of the same
kind; and even the individual cells of a multicellular organism, when
once differentiated, reproduce only other cells after their own kind.
4. Species of plants and animals have wonderful powers of variation; but
these variations seem to be regulated and predestined in accordance with
definite laws, and in no instance known to science has this variation
resulted in producing what could properly be called a distinct new kind
of plant or animal.
5. Geology has been supposed to prove that there has been a long
succession of distinct types of life on the globe in a very definite
order extending through vast ages of time. This is now known to be a
mistake. Most living forms of plants and animals are also found as
fossils; but there is no possible way of telling that one kind of life
lived and occupied the world before others, or that one kind of life is
intrinsically older than any other or than the human race.