CORRESPONDENCE WEEK 6

CORRESPONDENCE WEEK 6

The Existence of Sex a Proof of God.

(R) You remember our conversation last week?

(J) Yes, it was defective, I think, on one point.

(R) What was that?

(J) It disposed fairly of the idea of man being the evolution of a gradually ascending chain of development, but it did not allow for the possibility of man spontaneously coming into being under some chance combination of laws and forces, that produced a superior creature, not seen on earth before.

(R) Oh dear! You will excuse me, I am sure, if I say that strikes me as the most absurd of all wild suggestions to which atheistic pre-disposition has driven the cleverest of men.

(J) Why should it strike you so?

(R) Because of its inconsistency with the fundamental axiom of this very class of men everywhere, an axiom on which they base all their objections to the evidences of Divine revelation having taken place, however strong.
They lay down as their first principle, in their mode of thought, that Nature is immutable in her ways, and therefore miracle is impossible; and yet they ask us to believe that Nature has changed her mode of producing men.

(J) Not that exactly, is it?

(R) That is what it amounts to. She now produces them by generation, and the suggestion is that she first produced them by what shall we call it? By freak?

(J) No, not by freak, but by special conjunction of forces.

(R) An accident?

(J) Well, it would be accidental, of course.

(R) What evidence is there of such an accident ever having occurred?

(J) None that I know of: there is only the fact that man is here, and that once he was not here. And if there is no God, he must have come by accident.

(R) But if there was no God at the beginning, there is no God now; and Nature being immutable in her operations, the accident ought to happen now.

(J) Not necessarily.

(R) What? Think. Has nature lost her power then, to produce a man by spontaneous generation?

(J) No, no; Nature has lost nothing. What she has done, she can do.

(R) If she produced man at the beginning in the way suggested, it is no extravagance to insist that she ought to do so now. Did you ever hear of a case?

(J) Of course I never have.

(R) A man, whose mother should be the rock or the peat bog, and his father the suns rays, or some other blind energy?

(J) You put the thing too extremely.

(R) No, no. That is just what it would be, wouldn’t it, if it happened. What other mode do you conceive in the case?

(J) Oh, I do not make myself responsible for the suggestion at all. I place it before you as a hypothesis to be dealt with.

(R) Yes, but a hypothesis must have some shape and features before you can deal with it. It is not a hypothesis. It is a wild venture. Would not such a thing be a miracle if it happened, which the very men suggesting it declare themselves incapable of receiving?

(J) Ah, but a miracle is what God is supposed to do.

(R) Oh, and this is would be a thing that did itself! Why that would be a greater miracle still?

(J) The difficulty is about God you see.

(R) But you have the difficulty if you put away God. You have more difficulty without him than with him: is it not so?

(J) Well I am not championizing the atheistic view.

(R) It is a senseless view altogether, the more and more you think of it. Look at this element in the case: men are multiplied by the natural process of generation; but it takes two: man and woman. Now, if human population began with an accident it must have been a double accident. There must have been a woman as well as a man. Do you really think it is possible that blind nature, happening to brew a man in some vapour or pond, or rocky depth, should brew a woman at the same time? Is it a conceivable hypothesis that force without mind, impulse without plan, germinating energy without purpose should produce two instead of one, and each one different from the other, and both, between them, possessing power to re-produce their kind, a power which they did not require for themselves, and the possession of which was indicative of purpose with regard to the future?

(J) The difficulties are very great, I confess.

(R) Are they not insuperable?

(J) They look that way.

(R And we are to receive this incredible imagination without evidence, in order to dispense with God, whose existence is a mathematically involved necessity, and of which actual and irrefragable evidence has transpired in the history of mankind?

(J) Well, you see, they don’t now say there is no God. They say they don’t know.

(R) Well, well, well! They say they don’t know, and yet they reject the evidence, because they cannot imagine Him! They cannot imagine God doing wonders, but they can imagine nothing doing wonders! Extraordinary! It comes to this, by their own confession; they don’t know there is no God. Therefore there may be, and they have no reason at all for rejecting the evidence of His existence, except an invincible intellectual prejudice, which the Bible well describes as “an evil heart of unbelief,” which says God, “Depart from us; we desire not the knowledge of thy ways.”