We do not get rid of God by any such dictum, but we get rid of the anthropomorphic views which we have so long been wont to read into the processes of nature.  We dehumanize the universe, but we do not render it the less grand and mysterious.  Professor Moore points out to us how life came to a cooling planet as soon as the temperature became low enough for certain chemical combinations to appear.  There must first be oxides and saline compounds, there must be carbonates of calcium and magnesium, and the like.  As the temperature falls, more and more complex compounds, such as life requires, appear; till, in due time, carbon dioxide and water are at hand, and life can make a start.  At the white heat of some of the fixed stars, the primary chemical elements are not yet evolved; but more and more elements appear, and more and more complex compounds are formed as the cooling process progresses.

“This note cannot be too strongly sounded, that as matter is allowed capacity for assuming complex forms, those complex forms appear.  As soon as oxides can be there, oxides appear; when temperature admits of carbonates, then carbonates are forthwith formed.  These are experiments which any chemist can to-day repeat in a crucible.  And on a cooling planet, as soon as temperature will admit the presence of life, then life appears, as the evidence of geology shows us.”  When we speak of the beginning of life, it is not clear just what we mean.  The unit of all organized bodies is the cell, but the cell is itself an organized body, and must have organic matter to feed upon.  Hence the cell is only a more complex form of more primitive living matter.  As we go down the scale toward the inorganic, can we find the point where the living and the non-living meet and become one?  “Life had to surge a long way up from the depths before a green plant cell came into being.”  When the green plant cell was found, life was fairly launched.  This plant cell, in the form of chlorophyll, by the aid of water and the trace of carbon dioxide in the air, began to store up the solar energy in fruit and grain and woody tissue, and thus furnish power to run all forms of life machinery.

The materialists or naturalists are right in urging that we live in a much more wonderful universe than we have ever imagined, and that in matter itself sleep potencies and possibilities not dreamt of in our philosophy.  The world of complex though invisible activities which science reveals all about us, the solar and stellar energies raining upon us from above, the terrestrial energies and influences playing through us from below, the transformations and transmutations taking place on every hand, the terrible alertness and potency of the world of inert matter as revealed by a flash of lightning, the mysteries of chemical affinity, of magnetism, of radio-activity, all point to deep beneath deep in matter itself.  It is little wonder that men who dwell habitually upon these things and are saturated with the spirit and traditions of laboratory investigation, should believe that in some way matter itself holds the mystery of the origin of life.  On the other hand, a different type of mind, the more imaginative, artistic, and religious type, recoils from the materialistic view.