Religion and Science
3. The Mechanical Interpretation of the Universe
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universe, which were necessary to life and
civilization? And what is the logic, which maintains
the continuum of these conditions? Is just the
coming about of one chance event sufficient reason
for all these events to go on flawlessly, unceasingly,
for millions and millions of years, without the
slightest aberration? Are there any real grounds for
accepting that an allegedly chance or accidental
event can spontaneously develop the attribute of
continuous evolution?
In spite of these suppositions resting on such shaky
premises, they have been almost universally
accepted as an ‘answer’ to the question of the origin
of the universe. This is a question whose answer
leads to another, more important question:
“Who
makes this great machine move with such perfect
regularity?” The creator — chance — cannot be held
to be the Lord of the Universe. Such an explanation
would, by its very nature, require two ‘gods’. The
first movement might conceivably be attributed to
chance, but not so the subsequent continuous
motion. We should have to find another ‘god’ to fit
that explanation.
