282 ORGANIC EVOLUTION CONSIDERED 



the earth cannot have taken place without the guid- 

 ance of a Supreme Intelligence. 



Let him who believes in the doctrine of chance in 

 creation, calculate the probabilities for and against 

 the proposition that matter, assuming it to exist, 

 could be collected by chance, of such kinds and in 

 such relative quantities that life of any kind would be 

 possible, and then let him calculate the additional 

 contingencies that are involved in the existence of 

 man as an animal, and then of man as a being of 

 lofty intelligence with many desires to gratify, and 

 then let him add the difficulties involved in the exist- 

 ence of the sun at the proper temperature for mill- 

 ions of years, and of the earth's motions and rela- 

 tions to the sun, and I think that he will agree that 

 the probabilities of creation by chance are few com- 

 pared to those in favor of creation by an Intelligent 

 Cause. 



It will be noticed that I have been speaking of a 

 very complex condition of things that must exist be- 

 fore living organisms, such as those with which we are 

 acquainted, could originate and continue to live on 

 the earth. These complex inanimate conditions 

 could not have been evolved from each other. We 

 know of no method by which any one of the seventy 

 elements found in the structure of the earth can be 

 produced from any other one. 



The kinds of primary building materials and their 

 relative quantities, as found in the earth, could not 

 have been determined by the process of evolution. 

 If the doctrine of evolution is true aside from a con- 

 trolling Intelligence in the creation of the earth, then 

 evolution must account for both the kinds and the 

 quantities of the elements that exist in the earth — a 

 thing which, I think, it is totally incapable of doing. 

 I cannot too strongly emphasize my conviction that 



