CREATION BY EVOLUTION
or old suns. Along with these evolutionary changes in the general character of the individual sun there is a parallel evolution of the elements. Thus it appears that evolution in the most minute units is definitely linked with evolution in the largest units. One evolution is obviously causally related to the other.
This conclusion leads me to venture upon the bolder statement that all evolution is in the end one vast universal coördinated process. We may be able to view one or two of its various aspects as though they were set apart from the rest, but any adequate study of one phase of evolution sooner or later leads to the conviction that it cannot be understood as a self-contained process or mechanism but can be made intelligible only by considering its relation to other processes or mechanisms. In the end we are inevitably driven to the conclusion that all nature is an organized system and that whatever happens in one realm is related to all other realms, and thus to the whole. Such a view as this leaves one with a feeling of awe in the presence of that vast unity we call Nature. There is room here, if anywhere, for a scientific concept of Deity, a central immanent power back of all these coördinated activities, from the smallest to the greatest.
If, as the astronomers, physicists, and chemists tell us, all lifeless nature is engaged in a ceaseless swing of intense activities; if the sun is growing older and changing its character with every succeeding day; if the earth has had its ups and downs, with numerous radical changes of climate; if, as the rocks tell us, life originated prior to a long series of these great environmental upheavals, it is indeed difficult to believe that living organisms, the most plastic of all natural units, should have remained fixed amidst the vast flux of world changes. In fact, there is between the records of geologic
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