We thus see that evolution as an hypothesis has no basis in experience or in scientific fact, and that its imagined series of transmutations has breaks which cannot be filled. We have now to consider how it stands with the belief that man has been created by a higher power. Against this supposition the evolutionists try to create a prejudice in two ways. First, they maintain with Herbert Spencer that the hypothesis of creation is inconceivable, or, as they say, "unthinkable;" an assertion which, when examined, proves to mean only that we do not know perfectly the details of such an operation, an objection equally fatal to the origin either of matter or life, on the hypothesis of evolution. Secondly, they always refer to creation as if it must be a special miracle, in the sense of a contravention of or departure from ordinary natural laws; but this is an assumption utterly without proof, since creation may be as much according to law as evolution, though in either case the precise laws involved may be very imperfectly known.
How absurd, they say, to imagine an animal created at once, fully formed, by a special miracle, instead of supposing it to be slowly elaborated through, countless ages of evolution. To Darwin the doctrine of creation is but "a curious illustration of the blindness of preconceived opinion." "These authors," he says, "seem no more startled at a miraculous act of creation then at an ordinary birth; but do they really believe that at innumerable periods in the earth's history, certain elemental atoms have been commanded suddenly to flash into living tissues?" Darwin, with all his philosophic fairness, sometimes becomes almost Spencerian in his looseness of expression; and in the above extract, the terms "miraculous," "innumerable," "elemental atoms," "suddenly," and "flash," all express ideas in no respect necessary to the work of creation. Those who have no faith in evolution as a cause of the production of species, may well ask in return how the evolutionist can prove that creation must be instantaneous, that it must follow no law, that it must produce an animal fully formed, that it must be miraculous. In short, it is a portion of the policy of evolutionists to endeavour to tie down their opponents to a purely gratuitous and ignorant view of creation, and then to attack them in that position.