Up to this time science has discovered
nothing to contravene the assurance that God, or some one, 'created every
living creature that moveth, and every herb yielding seed after his
kind.' After a series of most careful and accurate experiments, Professor
Tyndall could find no proof of the spontaneous production of even
microscopic life, and found much proof to the contrary. How far original
creations are changed or modified by evolution, natural selection, is a
question that is to be settled neither by dogmatism on the one hand, nor
by baseless theories on the other, but by facts, and plenty of them."
"Do you think there is anything atheistical in evolution?" his mother
asked, and with some solicitude in her large eyes, for, like all trained
in the old beliefs, she felt that the new philosophies led away into a
realm of vague negations. Webb understood her anxiety lest the faith she
had taught him should become unsettled, and he reassured her in a
characteristic way.
"No, mother," he said. "If evolution is the true explanation of the world,
as it now appears to us, it is no more atheistical than some theologies I
have heard preached, which contained plenty of doctrines and attributes,
but no God. If God with his infinite leisure chooses to evolve his
universe, why shouldn't he? In any case a creative, intelligent power is
equally essential. It would be just as easy for me to believe that all
the watches and jewelry at Tiffany's were the result of fortuitous causes
as to believe that the world as we find it has no mind back of it.
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