II - THE CONCESSIONS OF EVOLUTIONISTS

Summary

“If everything is governed by law, and if all the power is in the physical universe that ever was there, where is God? In the intention.”

—Professor Benjamin Pierce, Unitarian Review, June 1877, p. 665.

“In regard to the physical universe, it might be better to substitute for the phrase ‘government by laws’ ‘government according to laws,’ meaning there by the direct exertion of the Divine Will, or operation of the First Cause in the Forces of Nature, according to certain constant uniformities which are simply unchangeable, because, having been originally the expression of Infinite Wisdom, any change would be for the worse.”

—Dr. W. B. Carpenter, Mental Physiology, chap. xx.

Aristotle said of Socrates that he invented the arts of definition and induction. But Socrates, we know, was not a teacher of logic; he was the investigator of ethical truth; and it was in the endeavour to satisfy a distinctively theological thirst that he smote the rocks at the foot of the Acropolis, and caused to gush forth there these crystalline headsprings of the scientific method. Unless we think boldly, north, south, east, and west, and syllogistically, and on our knees, we do not think at all. A Greek teacher of morals first taught us to think in this manner, and, as instruments of ethical research, invented definition and induction. The scientific method thus had a theological origin.