Chapter V: Is There Design in Nature?

We cannot put to Nature the direct questions we put to ourselves. Namable purposes and designs rule our lives. Not so with the All. I told Father Goodman the other day, much to his bewilderment, that I did not think the air was made for us to breathe, nor the water for us to drink, nor food for us to eat. We breathe and drink and eat because our organization is adjusted to these things. The shoe is made over the last, not the last to fit the shoe. The organization is fitted, or fits itself, to its environment. Nature is first, man is afterwards. Is the notch in the mountain made for the road to go through? Is the land-locked harbor made to protect our shipping? Would it not be as true to say that the wind was made to fill the ship’s sails, as that air was made to fill our lungs? In dealing with this question of design many persons get the cart before the horse.

Of course there is purpose or design in living things in a sense that there is not in the non-living. Every part of a living organization is purposeful. There is purpose in our lungs, our hearts, our kidneys, in short in every part of our bodies. There is purpose in the varnish on leaves, in the down and resin on buds, in the wings and hooks of seeds, in the colors of flowers and of animals, in fact, in everything that makes for the well-being of living things. But not in the same sense is there purpose in the wind, the rain, the snow, the tides, the heat, the cold, the rocks, the soil, the fountains. Animate nature struggles; inanimate nature passively submits. Dead matter forever seeks an equilibrium; living matter forever struggles against an equilibrium. The waters separate the clay and the sand and the pebbles from the soil and deposit each in its own place; but it is not a struggle or an effort; it is mechanical adjustment. It is not an effort for certain liquids to form crystals, or for certain elements to combine with certain other elements and form new compounds, but it is an effort for a tree to resist the wind, to lift up tons of water and minerals against gravity, to force its roots through the soil or grip the rock, and it is an effort for the mother to bear and nurse her young. For anything to live and grow, effort is needful; not commonly a painful effort, but a joyous one.

So, when we ask, Is there design in Nature? we must make clear what part or phase of Nature we refer to. Can we say that the cosmos as a whole shows any design in our human sense of the word? I think not. The Eternal has no purpose that our language can compass. There can be neither center nor circumference to the Infinite. The distribution of land and water on the globe cannot be the result of design any more than can the shapes of the hills and mountains, or Saturn’s rings, or Jupiter’s moons. The circular forms and orbits of the universe must be the result of the laws of matter and force that prevail in celestial mechanics; this is not a final solution of the riddle, but is as near as we can come to it. One question stands on another question, and that on another, and so on, and the bottom question we can never reach and formulate. The earth rests on nothing and floats as lightly as a feather. All matter is probably only a phase of the ether, but the ether defies all proof and all negation.

How quickly we get where no step can be taken! We cannot step off the planet, though we may step off from every object on its surface. There is no heat in sunlight till it reaches the earth; heat is an experience of our bodies, and beings on the remotest planets, if there are any, may and must receive adequate heat, and beings on Mercury and Venus no more. Terrestrial physics and celestial physics must be the same, and yet celestial mechanics find no place on the surface of our planet. The laws of the cosmos bring to naught our mundane conceptions. Where are up and down, east and west, over and under, out in sidereal space? We balk at perpetual motion, yet in the heavens, and in the interior of matter, behold perpetual motion! Behold motion without friction and energy without waste or dissipation! On the earth every visible body rests on some other body, everything has a beginning and an end, but where is the beginning or the ending of the cosmos? Where, then, in this quest do we touch bottom? Nowhere. There is no bottom. Only measurable, finite things have bottoms and bounds. The immeasurable, the Infinite, is over us and under us, and our lives are like sparks against the night. But, just as we live in the heavens and do not know it, so we live and move and have our being in the Eternal. It is not afar off; it is here; we are a part of it, and as inseparable from it as from gravity.

We are not like beings who have moved into a house, made and furnished and provisioned in anticipation of our coming. We are creatures born in a house, or amid an environment to which we must slowly and more or less painfully fit ourselves. We are the consequent, not the antecedent. In a different world we should have been differently constituted. In a bigger world no doubt our bodies would have been bigger and our strength greater; with less or with more oxygen in the air, no doubt our lungs would have been different. With less light no doubt our eyes would have been larger, and with more light they would probably have been smaller. We do not feel the pressure of the atmosphere, but make the pressure more or less, and we are at once disturbed. The deep-sea fishes fairly explode when brought to the surface, and no doubt the surface fishes would be crushed in the deep sea bottoms. Just as we adjust our flying machines to the tenuity of the air, and our oversea and undersea boats to the density and weight of the water, so Nature adjusts her organisms to their environment.

Man avails himself of all possible aids. His voluntary conquests of nature are many and are constantly increasing, but his involuntary dependencies upon her are many also. He did not launch himself into this world, and he did not give his body, with all its wonderful organs and powers, the shape it has, or elect to breathe or see or hear or breed or eat or sleep. Something else determined all these things for him. What is that something else? Our fathers called it God; we call it Nature, because we live in a scientific and not in a theological age. We are pantheistic and not theistic. Our gods are everywhere, in everything created. Our minds are no longer hampered by the idea of a maker and a thing made, a ruler or a governor and a thing ruled or governed. The unity of Nature and God is a conception fostered by science. We are compelled to adjust our minds to the idea of a causeless universe, to a universe without beginning and without ending, without a maker or a designer.

Our conception of cause and effect, or beginning and ending, applies only on the surface of the earth; where currents and counter-currents, action and reaction and interaction, are in perpetual see-saw; where every body rests upon some other body, and every cause has its antecedent cause; where we can live only by dealing with parts and fragments, and by separating one thing from another. The astronomic laws and conditions, or our conceptions of them, are thrown into confusion the moment we try to apply them in our practical mundane lives. In vain we try to abolish friction and achieve perpetual motion, but the heavenly bodies move without friction, and move forever and ever. Motion is the prime condition of the universe. It is the condition or necessity we are under in this world, on the surface of this planet, that sets us on the quest of final causes and gives rise to our conceptions of the made and the maker, the good and the bad, the end and the beginning. We cannot say that we are watched over by the gods--our personification of the universal mind that pervades nature--nor that we are not watched over by them, because that were to use the language of our surface existence. All we can say is that we are a part of the cosmos, fragments of the total scheme of things, and share its laws and conditions, and that the more perfectly we adjust the nature within us to the nature without us, the better we fare. With the Infinite there is no time and no space, only an everlasting here, an everlasting now.

Yet how can puny man interpret the universe or say aught of it in terms of his mundane experiences?