ology and science.
It must be pointed out, however, that Christian theology has
increasingly accepted modern mechanistic doctrines, including
the doctrine of evolution. But it has attempted to show
that, granting all the facts of physical science, the universe
does still exhibit the divine purpose and its essential beneficence.
The very order and symmetry of physical law have
been taken as testimony of divine instigation. Mechanism
was set in motion by God. In answer to this, it is pointed
out by the non-theologian that then God's goodness cannot
be maintained. Mechanical processes are indiscriminate in
their distribution of goods and evils to the just and the unjust:

All this Nature does with the most supercilious disregard both of
mercy and of justice, emptying her shafts upon the best and noblest,
indifferently with the meanest and worst; upon those who are
engaged in the highest and worthiest enterprises, and often as the
direct consequence of the noblest acts; and it might almost be imagined
as a punishment for them. She mows down those on whose
existence hangs the well-being of a whole people; perhaps the
prospects of the human race for generations to come, with as little
compunction as those whose death is a relief to themselves, or a blessing
to those under their noxious influence.[1]

[Footnote 1: Mill: _Three Essays on Religion_ (Holt), p. 29.]

Modern theology sometimes grants the apparent reality of
the evils which are current in a mechanistic world, but insists
that they are making for goods which we with our finite
understanding cannot comprehend. Were our intelligence
infinite, as is God's, we should see how "somehow good
will be the final goal of ill."

Evolution has also been explained as God's method of
accomplishing his ends. By some evolutionists, Driesch and
Bergson for example, evolution itself, in its steady production
of higher types, has been held to be too purposive in character
to permit of a purely mechanical explanation. The process of
evolution has itself thus come to be taken by some theologians
as a clear manifestation of God's beneficent power at work
in the universe.

But theology, in the more spiritualistic religions, has always
insisted on the primacy of God's goodness. There has
been, therefore, in certain theological quarters the tendency
to surrender the conception of divine omnipotence in the face
of the genuine human evils that are among the fruits of blind
mechanical