Not in A fuit, Infidelity Answered BY The Father-God AND His Family. BY REV. JOHN B. ROBINSON, A. M., BOSTON. FOR SALE BY JAMES P. MAGEE, 38 Bromfield Street. PUPLICHIBRARY 230735 ASTOOR, LENOX AND 1903 Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1875, BY J. B. ROBINSON, in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. PREFACE. Much error, claiming to be both scientific and religious, is neither. True science and religion discover the fallacy and reject these spurious claims. Such, for illustration, is Darwin's Origin of Species. It is a book of 437 pages. Each page, upon a fair average, has ten probabilities and possibilities, and each of these hypotheticals has no more than fifty per cent, or a half chance of certainty. His argument is so conducted that each proposition must stand or fall upon the validity of all that precede it combined. Then with 437 pages and ten half chances on each page, if it is desirable to know the fraction of truth in the final assertion on the last page, we have only to regard that there are 10 X 437 half chances, in other words that one half must be raised to the 4370th power. The numerator, which would be one unit, would represent the only chance in Darwin's favor, while the denominator, minus one, will represent the chances against him. But that denominator becomes overwhelming; it would require a round number of more than fourteen hundred digits to express it, and a blackboard of one hundred and twenty feet in length to write it, allowing one inch to a figure. Thus does human reason, diverging but a little from the straight line of truth, finally separate from it into infinite distances of error. Thus the author of the Mode of Man's Immortality, a book just published at Indianapolis, makes but a slight departure from Orthodoxy and reaches finally very erroneous conclusions. When we leave God and the Bible to follow human theories, however ingenious, we tend surely to the lowest horizon of error. The following pages indirectly combat the errors of the books just alluded to, but their higher mission is to assist in directing the doctrines and faith of many a seeker of truth in these fields. Many standard authors have been consulted, and their thoughts sometimes used, in passing, without special credit, except as now named. Among authors thus consulted are Hagenback, Watson, Angus, Butler, Clark, Henry, and Bishops Clark, Thompson, and Kingsley, to all of whom obligation is hereby expressed. TILTON, N. H., Jan. 1, 1875. J. B. R. |
