This is absurd, and Diderot, as we have seen, rapidly passed away from that to the real strength of the position.

All the rest of the contention against final causes would have come just as fitly from the lips of a man with vision, as from Saunderson.

The hypothetical inference of a deity from the marvels of adaptation to be found in the universe is unjustified, among other reasons, because it ignores or leaves unexplained the marvels of mis-adaptation in the universe.

It makes absolute through eternity a hypothesis which can at its best only be true relatively--not merely to the number of our senses, but--to a few partially chosen phenomena of our own little day.
It explains a few striking facts; it leaves wholly unexplained a far greater number of equally striking facts, even if it be not directly contradicted by them.

It is the invention of an imaginary agency to account for the scanty successes of creation, and an attribution to that agency of the kind of motives that might have animated a benevolent European living in the eighteenth century.