The issues of fact at stake in the debate are of course vaguely enough conceived by us at present.  But spiritualistic faith in all its forms deals with a world of promise, while materialism’s sun sets in a sea of disappointment.  Remember what I said of the Absolute:  it grants us moral holidays.  Any religious view does this.  It not only incites our more strenuous moments, but it also takes our joyous, careless, trustful moments, and it justifies them.  It paints the grounds of justification vaguely enough, to be sure.  The exact features of the saving future facts that our belief in God insures, will have to be ciphered out by the interminable methods of science:  we can study our God only by studying his Creation.  But we can enjoy our God, if we have one, in advance of all that labor.  I myself believe that the evidence for God lies primarily in inner personal experiences.  When they have once given you your God, his name means at least the benefit of the holiday.  You remember what I said yesterday about the way in which truths clash and try to ‘down’ each other.  The truth of ‘God’ has to run the gauntlet of all our other truths.  It is on trial by them and they on trial by it.  Our final opinion about God can be settled only after all the truths have straightened themselves out together.  Let us hope that they shall find a modus vivendi!

Let me pass to a very cognate philosophic problem, the question of design in nature.  God’s existence has from time immemorial been held to be proved by certain natural facts.  Many facts appear as if expressly designed in view of one another.  Thus the woodpecker’s bill, tongue, feet, tail, etc., fit him wondrously for a world of trees with grubs hid in their bark to feed upon.  The parts of our eye fit the laws of light to perfection, leading its rays to a sharp picture on our retina.  Such mutual fitting of things diverse in origin argued design, it was held; and the designer was always treated as a man-loving deity.

The first step in these arguments was to prove that the design existed.  Nature was ransacked for results obtained through separate things being co-adapted.  Our eyes, for instance, originate in intra-uterine darkness, and the light originates in the sun, yet see how they fit each other.  They are evidently made for each other.  Vision is the end designed, light and eyes the separate means devised for its attainment.

It is strange, considering how unanimously our ancestors felt the force of this argument, to see how little it counts for since the triumph of the darwinian theory.  Darwin opened our minds to the power of chance-happenings to bring forth ‘fit’ results if only they have time to add themselves together.  He showed the enormous waste of nature in producing results that get destroyed because of their unfitness.  He also emphasized the number of adaptations which, if designed, would argue an evil rather than a good designer.  Here all depends upon the point of view.  To the grub under the bark the exquisite fitness of the woodpecker’s organism to extract him would certainly argue a diabolical designer.