ans any event for which natural
causes are insufficient to account. "We philosophers and critical
theologians," he says, "have spoken well when we decreed the abolition
of miracles; but our decree (macht-spruch) remained without effect,
because we could not show them to be unnecessary, inasmuch as we were
unable to indicate any natural force to take their place. Darwin has
provided or indicated this natural force, this process of nature; he has
opened the door through which a happier posterity may eject miracles
forever." Then follows the sentence just quoted, "He who knows what
hangs on miracle, will applaud Darwin as one of the greatest benefactors
of the human race." With Strauss and others of his class, miracles and
design are identical, because one as well as the other assumes
supernatural agency. He quotes Helmholtz, who says, "Darwin's theory,
that adaptation in the formation of organisms may arise without the
intervention of intelligence, by the blind operation of natural law;"
and then adds, "As Helmholtz distinguishes the English naturalist as the
man who has banished design from nature, so we have praised him as the
man who has done away with miracles. Both mean the same thing.[47]
Design is the miracle-worker in nature, which has put the world upside
down; or as Spinoza says, has placed the last first, the effect for the
cause, and thus destroyed the very idea of nature. Design in nature,
especially in the department of living organisms, has ever been appealed
to by those who desire to prove that the world is not self-evolved, but
the work of an intelligent Creator." (p. 211) On page 175, he refers to
those who ridicule Darwin, and yet are so far under the influence of the
spirit of the age as to deny miracles or the intervention of the Creator
in the course of nature, and says: "Very well; how do they account for
the origin of man, and in general the development of the organic out of
the inorganic? Would they assume that the original man as such, no
matter how rough and unformed, but still a man, sprang immediately out
of the inorganic, out of the sea or the slime of the Nile? They would
hardly venture to say that; then they must know that there is only the
choice between miracle, the divine hand of the Creator, and Darwin."
What an alternative; the Creator or Darwin! In this, however, Strauss is
right. To banish design from nature, as is done by Darwin's theory, is,
in the language of the Rev. Walter Mitchel