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of God’s existence, from any source of evidence, just so much 
evidence is there of this defect in the naturalistic argument. 
Or, in other words, to make it conclusive, its advocate must 
demonstrate (not surmise) the truth of atheism. But John 
Foster has shown that this is impossible. 
Third. The argument is peculiarly conclusive as to living 
creatures. If there was a Creator, he created the first 
individuals of a species to be, by reproduction, the heads of 
the species. But in order to do this, these first parents must 
have been created natural. What are the qualities connoted 
by any name of species? The most accurate answer which 
the science of natural history itself can make is: they are 
precisely those which are transmitted regularly from parents 
to progeny in the propagation of the species. Then, these 
first individuals, in order to fulfil their final cause, to be the 
heads of their species, must have been, while supernatural in 
origin, as thoroughly natural in qualities, as any of their 
natural offspring. 
Fourth. If this be denied, then we must assign a natural 
parent before the first parent of each species. ‘T'hus we should 
be involved in infinite series, in a multitude of instances, with- 
out cause external to themselves, a result which science herself 
has discarded as an impossible absurdity. Suppose, for expla- 
nation, that an observer has found some part of the very 
organism of one of those first heads of species, which, on the 
theistic scheme, was directly created by God. He would, of 
course, find in this fossil every property of the natural 
structure. Yet he cannot infer thence a natural origin for it, 
because on the hypothesis it is absolutely a first thing. But 
suppose that he may assign for it a natural origin. That 
origin then will be, propagation by birth from prior parents. 
And should a fossil organ of that parent be found, the same 
argument would apply again! Thus we should be driven to 
a ridiculous regressus. It is concluded, therefore, with the 
most perfect logical rigidity, that the argument from natural- 
ress of structure to a natural origin is mconclusive, until the 
impossibility of creative agency in any age prior to authentic 
human testimony is demonstrated. 
Fifth. This absurd regressus may be shown in a general 
way, by testing this analogical argument upon the “nebular 
hypothesis,” that guess which the atheist Laplace suggested 
as only a possible hypothesis for the origin of the universe, 
and which some Christian physicists now seem so ready to 
adopt, without proof, as the real account of the matter. Let 
us suppose the scientific observer from some other system 
watching this vast incandescent mass of “ star-dust,”’ rotating 
