Mr. Mivart remarks, “There are abundant instances to prove that considerable modifications may suddenly develop themselves, either due to external conditions or to obscure internal causes in the organisms which exhibit them.[1]” If it is not so, granted to the full the imperfection of the Geologic record, but remembering the cases where we do find intermediate forms; we ask why should they not be preserved in other cases?  If they ever existed we should surely see more changing forms; not only such as are more or less uncertainly divided species, but whole orders running one into another.  No evidence exists to show that any bird has gradually passed into an animal, nor a carnivorous beast become ruminant, or vice versa.

[Footnote 1:  P. 112] [Transcriber’s note:  Chapter VIII]

The analogy of changes that are known will not bear extension enough to prove, even probably, any such change.

Surely if our conclusion in favour of a Divine Design to be attained, and a Providential Intelligence directing the laws of development, is no more than a belief, it is a probable and reasonable belief:  it certainly meets facts and allows place for difficulties in a way far more satisfactory than the opposite belief which rejects all but “secondary” and purely “natural” causes.

So clear does this seem to me, that I cannot help surmising that we should never have heard of any objection to Divine creation and providential direction, if it had not been for a prevalent fixed idea, that by “creation” must be meant a final, one-act production (per saltum) of a completely developed form, where previously there had been nothing.  Such a “creation” would of course militate against any evolution, however cautiously stated or clearly established.  And no doubt such an idea of “creation” was and still is prevalent, and would naturally and almost inevitably arise, while nothing to the contrary in the modus operandi of Creative Power was known.  What is more strange is that the current objection should not now be, “Your idea of creation is all wrong,” rather than the one which has been strongly put forward (and against which I am contending), “There is no place for a Creator.”

(5) This is the only other general point that remains to be taken up in connection with the theory that all living forms are due to the gradual accumulation of small favourable changes without creative intervention.  The objection is that we cannot obtain the inconceivably long time required for the process of uncontrolled and unaided evolution.

I am not here concerned to argue generally for the shortness or longness of the periods of geological time; let us, for the purposes of argument, admit a very wide margin of centuries and ages; but some limit there must be.  The sun’s light and heat, for one thing, are necessary, and though the bulk of combustible material in the sun is enormous, there must be some end to it.  Sir William Thomson has calculated (and his calculations have never been answered) that on purely physical grounds, the existence of life on the earth must be limited to some such period as 100 millions of years; and this is far too short for uncontrolled evolution.