efore God made nature out
of no materials at all. Unassisted nature cannot produce the phenomena
we behold, therefore such phenomena clearly prove there is something
supernatural. Not to believe in a God who designed Nature, is to close
both ears and eyes against evidence, therefore Atheists are wilfully
deaf and obstinately blind.

These are samples of the flimsy stuff, our teachers of what nobody
knows, would palm upon us as argument for, yea demonstration of, the
Being and Attributes of God.

Design, said Shelley, must be proved before a designer can be
inferred--the matter in controversy, is the existence of design in the
universe, and it is not permitted to assume the contested premises and
thence infer the matter in dispute. Insidiously to employ the words
contrivance, design and adaptation, before these circumstances are
apparent in the universe, thence justly inferring a contriver, is a
popular sophism against which it behoves us to be watchful.

To assert that motion is an attribute of mind, that matter is inert,
that every combination is the result of intelligence, is also an
assumption of the matter in dispute.

Why do we admit design in any machine of human contrivance? simply
because innumerable instances of machines having been constructed by
human art are present to our mind--because we are acquainted with
persons who could construct such machines; but if having no previous
knowledge of any artificial contrivance, we had accidently found a watch
upon the ground, we should have been justified in concluding that it was
a thing of nature, that it was a combination of matter with whose cause
we were unacquainted, and that any attempt to account for the origin of
its existence would be equally presumptuous and unsatisfactory. [64:1]

The acuteness and, accuracy of this reasoning can only be disputed by
persons wedded to system, who either lack capacity to understand what is
advanced in opposition to it, or,

Being convinced against their will,
Are of the same opinion still.

Experience, the only safe guide on religious as well as other topics,
lends no sanction to belief in design apart from material agency. By
artfully taking for granted what no Atheist can admit and assuming cases
altogether dissimilar to be perfectly analogous, our natural theologians
find no difficulty in proving that God is, was, and ever will be; that
after contemplating His own perfections, a period sufficien