07. The Reign of Law and Order
The Reign of Law and Order To go a little further into this thought, the whole created universe is seen to be under the absolute reign of law, from the electron and the atom to the sum total of all material things. There is order and method in every process of nature, and there is neither exception nor deviation. It is the absolutely infallible and uniform operation of natural law that makes it possible to get any given results in any realm of nature’s processes. If any natural law could ever be made to deviate from its proven normal operation, there would then always be such uncertainty as to results by following that law that only confusion would hover over its use. These facts are matters of common and universal observation that no one will dispute. But the atheist, refusing to accept belief in an intelligent First Cause, is thus compelled to leave everything to chance, which forces him to abandon all rational thinking. For chance means a total lack of order, and therefore a complete absence of all law. And so he is forced to prove either that there are no such things as universal, harmonious and unchangeable laws in operation throughout the universe, or else to show how something can come from nothing, before he can prove that the phenomena of undeviating order and infallible operation in all natural law came into existence of itself, either out of non-existence or out of chaos, without an intelligent First Cause.
Chance could produce nothing but chaos and confusion; for as no effect can be greater than its cause, so no effect can be different in essential nature from its cause. Certainly, therefore, no effect could be of such a nature as to destroy its cause in the act of coming into being. So the chaos and disorder of chance could not produce fixed natural law and order, for all such law destroys even the possibility of the existence of chance.
These clues and others like them are, however, but the introduction to the one major clue, both to the existence, and to the nature and character of God, the following of which is so infallible in its results, that no one who has ever followed it honestly has ever failed to come into unshakable first-hand knowledge of and personal relations with God.