180 THE CASE AGAINST EVOLUTION 



to-day depends upon the precedence of numerous unbroken 

 chains of consecutive cells that extend backward into a re- 

 mote past. It is, however, a logical necessity to put an end 

 to this retrogradation of the antecedents upon which the 

 actual existence of our present organisms depends. The in- 

 finite cannot be spanned by finite steps; the periodic life- 

 process could not be relayed through an unlimited temporal 

 distance; and a cellular series which never started would 

 never arrive. Moreover, we do not account for the existence 

 of life by extending the cellular series interminably back- 

 ward. Each cell in such a series is derived from a predecessor, 

 and, consequently, no cell in the series is self-explanatory. 

 When it comes to accounting for its own existence, each cell 

 is a zero in the way of explanation, and adding zeros to- 

 gether indefinitely will never give us a positive total. Each 

 cell refers us to its predecessor for the explanation of why 

 it exists, and none contains within itself the sufficient expla- 

 nation of its own existence. Hence increasing even to infinity 

 the number of these cells (which fail to explain themselves) 

 will give us nothing else but a zero in the way of explanation. 

 If, therefore, the primordial cause from which these cellular 

 chains are suspended is not the agency of the physicochemical 

 forces of inorganic nature, it follows that the first active cause 

 of life must have been a supermaterial and extramundane 

 agency, namely, the Living God and Author of Life. 



As a matter of fact, no one denies that life has had a be- 

 ginning on our globe. The physicist teaches that a beginning 

 of our entire solar system is implied in the law of the de- 

 gradation of energy, and various attempts have been made to 

 determine the time of this beginning. The older calculations 

 were based on the rate of solar radiation; the more recent ones, 

 however, are based on quantitative estimates of the disintegra- 

 tion products of radio-active elements. Similarly, the geol- 

 ogist and the astronomer propound theories of a gradual 

 constitution of the cosmic environment, which organic life re- 

 quires for its support, and all such theories imply a de novo 



