In modern times the form of objection has been somewhat changed. We are told by some writers that, when we seek to explain the existence of Fossil Remains by the action of natural laws, we seem to forget the Omnipotence of God. They urge upon us, with much solemnity, that He could have made bones, and shells, and skeletons, and petrified wood, though there had been no living animal to which these bones belonged, and no living tree that had been changed into stone. And if He made them, might He not disperse them up and down through His creation, on the lofty mountains, in the hidden valleys, and in the profound depths of the sea? and buried them in limestone rocks and in the soft clay? and arranged them in groups, or scattered them in wild confusion as He best pleased?
To this line of argument we must be content to reply, that we have no wish to limit the power of God. But we have learned from our daily experience that in the physical world He is pleased to employ the agency of secondary causes; and when we know that for many ages a certain effect has been uniformly produced by a certain cause, and not otherwise, then if we again see the effect, we infer the cause. When a traveller in the untrodden wilds of Western America, comes upon a forest of great trees, or a herd of unknown animals, surely he never thinks of supposing that the wild beasts and the forest trees came directly from the hand of the Creator, in that state of maturity in which he beholds them. And why? for it might be argued that the power of God is unbounded, and he might have created them as they now are if He had so pleased. Is it not that the traveller is impelled, by an instinct of his nature, to interpret the works of God which he now sees for the first time, according to the analogy of those with which he has been long familiar? Now this is just the principle for which we are contending. According to all our experience of the works of God in the physical world, the living body comes first, and the skeleton afterward; the living tree comes first, and afterward the prostrate trunk and the splintered branches. Therefore when we meet with a skeleton, we conclude that it was once a living body; and when we find the petrified stems, and branches, and leaves of trees, we have no doubt that they are the remains of an ancient vegetation.