Chapter XXIV. From Human Examples. From the Same

‘How are we to bear with them when they assert that the wise and therefore beautiful works of creation are accidental coincidences? Works, of which each as it came into being by itself, and likewise all of them taken together, were seen to be good by Him who commanded them to be made. For the Scripture says, “And God saw all things that He had made, and behold, they were very good.” [1]

‘Nay, they will not even be taught by the small and familiar examples lying at their feet, from which they might learn that no useful and beneficial work is made without a special purpose, or by mere accident, but is perfected by handiwork for its proper service: but when it begins to fall off and become useless and unserviceable, then it is dissolved and dispersed in an indefinite and casual way, inasmuch as the wisdom by whose care it was constructed no longer manages nor directs it.

‘For a cloak is not woven by the warp being arranged without a weaver, or the woof intertwined of its own accord; but if it be worn out, the tattered rags are cast away. A house too or a city is built up not by receiving some stones self-deposited at the foundations, and others jumping up to the higher courses, but the builder brings the well-fitted stones and lays them in their place: but when the building is overthrown, however it may occur, each stone falls down and is lost.

‘Also while a ship is being built, the keel does not lay itself, and the mast set itself up amidships, and each of the other timbers of itself take any chance position;[2] nor do the so-called hundred pieces of the wagon fit themselves together each in any vacant place it finds: but the carpenter in either case brings them together fitly.

‘But should the ship go to pieces at sea, or the wagon in its course on land, the timbers are scattered wherever it may chance, in the one case by the waves, and in the other by the violent driving. Thus it would befit them to say that their atoms, as remaining idle, and not made by hands, and of no use, are driven at random. Be it for them to see the invisible atoms, and understand the unintelligible, unlike him who confesses that this had been manifested to him by God saying to God Himself, “Mine eyes did see Thy unperfected work.” [3]

‘But when they say that even what they assert to be finely-woven textures made out of atoms are wrought by them spontaneously without wisdom and without perception, who can endure to hear of the atoms as workmen, though they are inferior in wisdom even to the spider which spins its web out of itself?’