Note 14 — Chapter VI · THE FAILURE OF THEISTIC ARGUMENTS

Father Waggett offers us interesting information regarding this argument in his little book, Religion and Science.14 He considers that Paley and others of the old teleologists were wrong in leaning upon a narrow argument from design. “It need not here be repeated,” he says, “that the evidence of such workmanship cannot prove God in the true sense of an infinite and all-wise Cause; but only a cause possessed of immense wisdom and immense though limited power, a Demiurgus of the greatest force and the most minute care, but not a Creator in the sense of theology.”15 Father Waggett, who is a biologist, and, therefore, necessarily an Evolutionist, would not be disconcerted if living things were manufactured in the laboratory to-morrow. In his opinion, “If anywhere we catch nature in the making, if we surprise the sequence by which even man himself gained his difference from other things, we shall not by this find reverence lowered.... It is a theological readjustment which is required, and not one in ‘natural science.’”16 The position here taken up is wise, and one that all who remain Theists will eventually have to adopt. But for most of us these theological readjustments are no easy matter. We reason that Paley’s Evidences have in their time assisted men to be Theists, and now his arguments are condemned by the better informed. How do we know that the same fate may not await the new arguments of the Christian evolutionist? How is it that God allowed earnest and learned divines to commit themselves to arguments in proof of His existence, the subsequent overthrow of which has been a potent cause for unbelief?