Religion and Science
3. The Mechanical Interpretation of the Universe
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great conviction. Though claiming to have
discovered the first cause of the universe, to which
it gives the name of chance, it cannot say who or
what caused the first motion in the universe. And
that is its greatest weakness. The question is, when
there was supposed to be only static matter in the
universe, and presumably nothing else existed, how
did this strange kind of chance come into existence,
which set the whole universe in motion? When the
causes of this event were neither within nor without
the imagined matter, how did this event come to
occur? This is a very strange and contradictory
contention, for it postulates one event leading on to
another, and so on, ad infinitum, but it makes no
mention of the primary cause which is supposed to
have set off the whole chain reaction. It begins,
ostensibly, with an event, which has no cause. On
this baseless supposition stands the whole edifice of
the chance origin of the universe.
Suppose we accept that the universe came into
existence in a purely fortuitous way. Were events
then bound to take the exact course that they did?
Was no other course open to them? Is it not
conceivable that the stars could have collided with
