sents
to reason is the indication of the process by which the order has been
realised. From Democritus to the latest Darwinian there have been men who
supposed they had completely explained away the evidences of design in
nature when they had described the physical antecedents of the arrangements
appealed to as evidences. Aristotle showed the absurdity of this
supposition more than 2200 years ago."

Now this is a perfectly valid criticism on all such previous non-theistical
arguments as were drawn from an "indication of the process by which the
order has been realised;" for in all these previous arguments there was an
absence of any physical explanation of the _ultimate_ cause of the process
contemplated, and so long as this ultimate cause remained obscure, although
the evidence of design might by these arguments have been excluded from
particular processes, the evidence of design could not be similarly
excluded from the ultimate cause of these processes. Thus, for instance, it
is doubtless illogical, as Professor Flint points out, in any Darwinian to
argue that because his theory of natural selection supplies him with a
natural explanation of the process whereby organisms have been adapted to
their surroundings, therefore this process need not itself have been
designed. That is to say, in general terms, as insisted upon in the
foregoing essay, the discovery of a natural law or orderly process cannot
of itself justify the inference that this law or method of orderly
procedure is not itself a product of supernatural Intelligence; but, on the
contrary, the very existence of such orderly processes, considered only in
relation to their products, must properly be regarded as evidence of the
best possible kind in favour of supernatural Intelligence, _provided that
no natural cause can be suggested as adequate to explain the origin of
these processes_. But this is precisely what the persistence of force,
considered as a natural cause, must be pronounced as necessarily competent
to achieve; for we can clearly see that all these processes obviously must
and actually do derive their origin from this one causative principle. And
whether or not behind this one causative principle of natural law there
exists a still more ultimate cause in the form of a supernatural
Intelligence, this is a question altogether foreign to any argument from
teleology, seeing that teleology, in so far as it is _teleology_, can only
rest upon the observed