This
is the assumption of the Boston reviewers, and of Mr. Agassiz, who
insists that the only alternative to the doctrine, that all organized
beings were supernaturally created as they are, is, that they have
arisen _spontaneously_ through the _omnipotence of matter_.[4]
As to all this, nothing is easier than to bring out in the conclusion
what you introduce in the premises. If you import atheism into your
conception of variation and natural selection, you can readily exhibit
it in the result. If you do not put it in, perhaps there need be none
to come out. While the mechanician is considering a steamboat or
locomotive engine as a material organism, and contemplating the fuel,
water, and steam, the source of the mechanical forces and how they
operate, he may not have occasion to mention the engineer. But, the
orderly and special results accomplished, the _why_ the movement is in
this or that particular direction, etc., are inexplicable without him.
If Mr. Darwin believes that the events which he supposes to have
occurred and the results we behold were undirected and undesigned, or
if the physicist believes that the natural forces to which he refers
phenomena are uncaused and undirected, no argument is needed to show
that such belief is atheism. But the admission of the phenomena and of
these natural processes and forces does not necessitate any such
belief, nor even render it one whit less improbable than before.
Surely, too, the accidental element may play its part in Nature
without negativing design in the theist's view.
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