Correspondence week 1

IS THERE A GOD?

The reproductive Faculty indicative of Purpose

(Robert) Man, there must be. You ask, Why?-Because creation shows purpose.
(John) Do you mean design?
(Robert) Not exactly. Design and purpose are no doubt the same thing in some connections; but I use "purpose" in a sense different from the meaning usually attached to "design" in arguments about God. I mean a purpose invested in creation itself.

(John) I don't understand you.

(Robert) Well, look here: when men say creation shows design, they mean that it is so wisely made that it must have had a maker: that as the hand is so exactly adapted for prehension, it must have had an adapter: that the eye is so exquisitely contrived for sight, it must have a contriver.

(John) Well, isn't that what you mean?

(Robert) No.

(John) What do you mean?

(Robert) I mean that creation shows a purpose that it should be carried on.

(John) You are no more lucid than before.

(Robert) Well, see; I am referring to the capacity for re-production attaching to every plant and animal under the sun. You know the contention of the evolutionist: that the various existing forms of life have been evolved and shaped through what might be called the stress of necessity blindly acting upon them through circumstances; thus, the birds were supposed to have gradually got their wings through wanting to fly: and the fishes their fins through wanting to swim and men their legs and arms through wanting to walk and handle things: and so on. Exercise is supposed to have developed them more and more through long ages.

There are tremendous difficulties in the way of those suppositions; e.g., how could a wing exercise itself in flying till it was a wing, and how did it become a wing in the first place? But, nevertheless, in a rough way, it is barely conceivable (at least as an hypotheses) that life has been developed by blind necessity, acting without purpose or intelligence in the stupendous laboratory of the universe, through the exigency of what is called "environment."
But how can the mechanism of re-production be brought into this conception?
Re-production has no relation to the creature itself. It has reference to successors. It is a thing of futurity. It cannot be the product of "environment." There is no necessity in the creature itself that it should be replaced by a similar form of life when it dies. There is no acting tendency, therefore, such as Evolutionists suppose have blindly produced fins, wings, arms, legs, etc. Yet here is the fact, that every form of life, animal and vegetable, is endowed with a mechanism of re-production which it does not require for it's own use.
Here is evidence of a purpose that living creation should be perpetuated.
On no principal recognized by Evolution can the existence of this re-productive apparatus be accounted for. It not only exists in all forms of organized life, but in every earliest forms, and in forms so simple that the supposed law of evolution has not had time to develop it, supposing such a thing could be developed by Evolution-that is, by the pressure of necessity. It is provision for futurity; it is the indication of purpose. The purpose is embodied in things as they are. This goes deeper than what is called "the design argument." Consider it well. The more you think of it, the more it will show you the truth of what I said at the start.
There must be a God.
Here is His manifest footprint.
Evolutionists exclude "purpose" from the action of "force"; and here is " purpose" - a purpose that the forms of life produced shall be re-produced.

(John) But what do you mean by God?

(Robert) It does not matter what specific view I may desire to express by that term. I believe in the God revealed in the Bible, but it is sufficient for my present argument if I say that by God I mean Intelligence somewhere operative through power. The study of nature cannot inform us of the seat or nature of this intelligence; but it is a great matter that it shews us its existence which it undoubtedly does in the particular which I press upon your attention. Revelation does the rest.

(John) There is force in what you say; but there is something I can never get over.

(R) What is that?

(J) This: if the existence of contrivance proves a contriver, then, call that contriver what you like; he also must have been contrived, because his power to contrive must be the highest contrivance of all.

(R) There, my good friend, you reason smartly, but not soundly.

(J) Where is the flaw?

(R) In the assumption that the eternal power of contrivance must have been contrived. That which has always been cannot have been contrived.

(J) But how do I know it has always been?

(R) Consider, my friend ; the initial power of all-what our modern scientific friends call "the primordial force," must have always been-MUST: there is no escape from this. Consider!

(J) Well, suppose I admit it?

(R) Then its capacities, whatever they are (and creation shows them stupendous in wisdom and power) cannot have been contrived.

(J) Very well then here are wisdom and power without contrivance

(R)Granted.

(J) Well , why may it not be so in the smaller things you speak of?

(R) because my friend, it self-evidently is not so. Take the smallest mollusc; will you affirm that power and wisdom are in it, to make itself; and that it has always been? You cannot do so. Therefore, there must be power and wisdom exterior to the mollusc to account for it. The proof of contrivance it contains must in its case involve a contriver, because it has come into existence and could not have contrived itself. But by what argument would you make eternal power and wisdom evidence of eternal power and wisdom before it? Besides look at the dilemma you are in. If it is to be an objection to believe in God that he could not make himself, why do you find it so easy to believe that the finite objects of creation have created themselves, by power by however slow a process? If you can believe that things that have had a beginning and that shew marks of an intelligence exterior to themselves, have been equal to the amazing feat of self-contrivance, you ought to be able to receive the simpler and more apparently inevitable conclusion that self existent power and wisdom (centralized in the father, revealed by Christ) is the efficient Cause of all things. Man, there must be a God: and man, by the Bible and history and many other things when fairly studied, we may see clearly there is.

More next week.