mpotent
monster. They will recognise as clearly as they ever did the old
familiar facts which seemed to them evidences of God's wisdom,
love, and goodness; but they will find that these facts, when taken
in connection with the others, only supply us with a standard in
the nature of this Being himself by which most of his acts are
exhibited to us as those of a criminal madman. If he had been
blind, he had not sin; but if we maintain that he can see, then his
sin remains. Habitually a bungler as he is, and callous when not
actively cruel, we are forced to regard him, when he seems to
exhibit benevolence, as not divinely benevolent, but merely weak
and capricious, like a boy who fondles a kitten and the next moment
sets a dog at it, and not only does his moral character fall from
him bit by bit but his dignity disappears also. The orderly
processes of the stars and the larger phenomena of nature are
suggestive of nothing so much as a wearisome Court ceremonial
surrounding a king who is unable to understand or to break away
from it; whilst the thunder and whirlwind, which have from time
immemorial been accepted as special revelations of his awful power
and majesty, suggest, if they suggest anything of a personal
character at all, merely some blackguardly larrikin kicking his
heels in the clouds, not perhaps bent on mischief, but indifferent
to the fact that he is causing it....

The truth is, if we consider the universe as a whole, it fails to
suggest a conscious and purposive God at all; and it fails to do so
not because the processes of evolution as such preclude the idea
that a God might have made use of them for a definite purpose, but
because when we come to consider these processes in detail, and
view them in the light of the only purposes they suggest, we find
them to be such that a God who could deliberately have been guilty
of them would be a God too absurd, too monstrous, too mad to be
credible. (_Religion as a Credible Doctrine_; pp. 176-8).

As we have already seen, the attempt to find a plan in the processes of
evolution breaks down hopelessly. On analysis, the supposed plan turns
out to be nothing more than a perception of some sort of regularity, and
as regularity is an inescapable condition of existence, all that it
proves _is_ existence. On that point