CHAPTER I 



EVOLUTION UNDER PROVIDENCE 



I. TENTATIVE RECONCILIATIONS OF EVOLUTIONARY AND 



DOGMATIC IDEAS 



AFTER having struggled long and desperately against 

 the evolutionary idea, some partisans of theological and 

 dogmatic philosophy, have come, little by little, willingly 

 or unwillingly, to admit it. They are aware, in fact, that 

 the dogma of creation is not more satisfying than 

 materialist teaching. 



As Vogel very well says, 1 



* From a strictly rational point of view it comes 

 to much the same to proclaim that man is the result 

 of chance, or to affirm that his creation is due to 

 the arbitrary act of a personal God. From the 

 moral point of view, that a human being, after a life 

 determined by chance, and without any sanction for 

 his acts, should cease to be, is equivalent to his 

 judgment by absolute and eternal decree on the 

 basis of material acts of infinitesimally small import 

 and duration proceeding from an equally limited 

 freedom of action. But this equipoise of proba- 

 bilities and absurdities which the materialist schools 

 and the Western religions bring to the solution of 

 the cosmic problem vanishes before the evolutionary 

 theory.' 



According to religious believers who have accepted 

 evolutionism, the universe has evolved by the will and 

 under the guidance of a supremely powerful, supremely 



1 Vogel : La Religion de I' Evolutionnisme (Fischlin, Brussels). 



144 



