258 PROFESSOR R. L. DABNEY, D.D., LL.D. 



natural lens in a human eye, we have a sufficient cause to 

 account for the formation of the spectrum, the function from 

 which theists infer their final cause; and the logical mind has 

 no need to resort to a theory of " contrivance " and " final 

 cause " for this organ. Function is not the determining 

 cause, but only the physical result of the existence of the 

 organ. Birds did not get wings in order to fly; but they 

 simply fly because they have wings. As to the complex 

 structures called organs, the evolutionist thinks his theory 

 accounts for their existence, without any rational agent pur- 

 suing purposed ends. That just this configuration of a 

 nniverse, with all its complicated structures, is physically 

 possible (i.e. possible as the result of physical causes), is 

 sufficiently proved by the fact that it exists as it is. For 

 theists themselves admit that it is the physical causes which 

 contain the efficient causation of it. These are, as interpreted 

 by evohitionists, slight differentiations from the parent types, 

 in natural reproductions (variations which may be either 

 slightly hurtful to the progeny, slightly beneficial, or neutral): 

 the plastic action of environment in developing rudimental 

 organs, and the survival of the fittest. Allow, now, a time 

 sufficiently vast for these causes to have exhibited, countless 

 numbers of times, all possible variations and developments ; 

 under the rule of the survival of the fittest; the actual configura- 

 tions we see may have become permanent, while all the agencies 

 bringing them to pass acted unintelligently and fortuitously. 



9. Such, as members of this Institute well know, is the latest 

 position of anti-theistic science, so called. The whole plausi- 

 bility is involved in a confusion of the notions of fortuity and 

 causation. This we now proceed very simply to unravel. The 

 universal, necessary, and intuitive judgment, that every effect 

 must have an adequate cause, ensures every man^s thinking 

 that each event in a series of 'phenomena must have such a 

 cause preceding it, however we may fail in detecting it. In 

 this sense, we cannot believe that any event is fortuitous. 

 But the concurrence or coincidence of two such events, each 

 in its place in its own series caused, may be thought by us 

 as uncaused, the one event by the other or its series, and 

 thus the concurrence, not either event, may be thought as 

 truly fortuitous. Thus, the coincidence of a comet's nearest 

 approach to our planet, with a disastrous conflagration in a 

 capital city, may be believed by us to be, so far as the concur- 

 rence in time is concerned, entirely by chance. We no longer 

 believe that comets have any power to '' shake war, pestilence 

 or fire from their horrent hair,'' on our earth. Yet we have 

 no doubt that a physical cause propels that comet in its o^-bit 



