God and the World Part 2

CHAPTER IV

THE COUNTER-ARGUMENTS

It must not be imagined that all the arguments were on one side. Far from it. The defenders of the old faith were many, and not the least able of them were drawn from the ranks of the men of science. The list of scientific leaders who avowedly ranged themselves on the Christian side, if it were made out, would be a long one. It would include distinguished names such as those of Faraday, Joule, the Duke of Argyll, Lord Kelvin, Stokes, Tait, Adams, Clerk Maxwell, Salmon, Cayley, and Pasteur. And others would have to be added who, after contending for a while as materialists or agnostics, ultimately changed their att.i.tude and joined the supporters of Theism. Haeckel frankly admitted that there were such defaulters from his cause in Germany, giving the names of "two of the most famous of living scientists, R.

Virchow and E. Du Bois Raymond," amongst others. On the other hand he recommended his readers to study "the profound work of Romanes," {38} without, it would seem, being aware of the transformation that took place in that thinker's opinions towards the end of his life.

We have now to indicate the nature of the replies that were made to the difficulties of which we spoke in our last chapter. Let us follow the order in which they were presented.

About the necessity for a First Cause not much had to be said. Even if the whole course of organic development could be proved to have been continuous without a break from the first movements of matter, through all the changes of physical life, up to the highest exhibition of human powers--and no one ventured to say that this had been proved--there would still be the necessity for an initial impulse to set the process in action. Spencer, as we have seen, declared that there must have been a First Cause, and Tyndall agreed that "the hypothesis" of Evolution "does nothing more than transport the conception of life's origin to an indefinitely distant past."[1]

Darwin himself never hesitated on this point. "The theory of evolution," he insisted, "is quite compatible with the belief in G.o.d."[2] The words which he expressly added to the conclusion of the {39} _Origin of Species_ are well known. After describing once again the production of the innumerable forms of being as the result of natural selection, he said: "There is a grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one."

It is well also to keep on record the striking dictum of Lord Kelvin, addressed to the students of University College.[3] "Science," he told them, "positively affirmed creative power."

It will be remembered that we quoted Mill as speaking of "permanent causes." We may be grateful to him for the suggestion. We could not readily think of a better term than the great "Permanent Cause" by which to describe, in modern language, the "I AM" of the Biblical Theology.[4]

But, if on this point there was no serious conflict of opinion, it was otherwise in regard to the next. Here it did look as if the new discoveries might have {40} changed the whole situation. Huxley acknowledged that what struck him most forcibly on his first perusal of the Origin of Species, was that "teleology, as commonly understood, had received its death-blow at Mr. Darwin's hands."[5] But Huxley was a born fighter, and he could turn his weapons with facility and effect against his friends when he thought they had overstated their case. It is interesting to find him, in 1867, criticising Haeckel for his repudiation of the principle of Design.

"The Doctrine of Evolution," he says, "is the most formidable opponent of the commoner and coa.r.s.er forms of teleology."

"The teleology which supposes that the eye such as we see it in man, or one of the higher vertebrata, was made with the precise structure it exhibits, for the purpose of enabling the animal which possesses it to see, has undoubtedly received its death-blow. Nevertheless, it is necessary to remember that there is a wider teleology which is not touched by the doctrine of evolution, but is actually based upon the fundamental proposition of evolution." Then, referring to the appeal which had been made to the existence of rudimentary organs as discrediting teleology, he says in his {41} characteristic way: "Either these rudiments are of no use to the animals, in which case they ought to have disappeared; or they are of some use to the animal, in which case they are of no use as an argument against teleology."[6]

Darwin himself felt the grave difficulty in which the ordinary arguments had become involved; but he was most unwilling to abandon his belief in Design.

"The old argument from design in nature as given by Paley," he wrote, "which formerly seemed to me so conclusive, fails now that the law of natural selection has been discovered. We can no longer argue that, for instance, the beautiful hinge of a bivalve sh.e.l.l must have been made by an intelligent being, like the hinge of a door by a man." On the other hand, he could not shut his eyes to the fact that there are "endless beautiful adaptations which we everywhere meet with,"[7] and to the further fact that "the mind refuses to look at this universe, being what it is, without having been designed."[8]

A few years later, when Dr. Asa Gray had sent him from America a review in which he had written of "Mr. Darwin's great service to natural science {42} in bringing back teleology," on the ground that in Darwinism usefulness and purpose come to the front again as working principles of the first order, Darwin replied, "What you say about teleology pleases me especially."[9] Later still, in 1878, Romanes sent him a copy of his _Candid Examination_. Darwin in his letter of acknowledgment wrote more than half seriously, in the person as it were of an imaginary correspondent, to this effect:

"I should like to hear what you would say if a theologian addressed you as follows:

"'I grant you the attraction of gravity, persistence of force (or conservation of energy), and one kind of matter, though the latter is an immense addition, but I maintain that G.o.d must have given such attributes to this force, independently of its persistence, that under certain conditions it develops or changes into light, heat, electricity, galvanism, perhaps into life.

"'You cannot prove that force (which physicists define as that which causes motion) would invariably thus change its character under the above conditions. Again, I maintain that matter, though it may be in the future eternal, was created by G.o.d with the most marvellous affinities, leading to {43} complex definite compounds, and with polarities leading to beautiful crystals, etc., etc. You cannot prove that matter would necessarily possess these attributes. Therefore you have no right to say that you have "demonstrated" that all natural laws necessarily follow from gravity, the persistence of force, and existence of matter. If you say that nebulous matter existed aboriginally and from eternity, with all its present complex powers in a potential state, you seem to me to beg the whole question.'

"Please observe it is not I, but a theologian, who has thus addressed you, but I could not answer him."[10]

The alternatives to Design, _i.e._, to the recognition of directive activity, would be Necessity or Chance. From both of these the deepest instincts of humanity--which in such matters are as fully to be relied on as its logical faculty--strongly recoil. No one has spoken out more strongly about the first than Huxley did.

"What is the dire necessity and 'iron' law under which you groan?" he asks. "Truly, most gratuitously invented bugbears. I suppose if there be an 'iron' law, it is that of gravitation; and if {44} there be a physical necessity, it is that a stone, unsupported, must fall to the ground.... But when, as commonly happens, we change _will_ into _must_, we introduce an idea of necessity which most a.s.suredly does not lie in the observed facts, and has no warranty that I can discover.

For my part, I utterly repudiate and anathematise the intruder.... The notion of necessity is something illegitimately thrust into the perfectly legitimate conception of law; the materialistic position that there is nothing in the world but matter, force, and necessity, is as utterly devoid of justification as the most baseless of theological dogmas."[11]

But a dogma of Necessity would be more tolerable than a doctrine of Chance. In Lord Kelvin's address, to which reference has been made, he declared his conviction that "directive power" was "an article of belief which science compelled him to accept."

There was nothing, he said, between such a belief and the acceptance of the theory of a fortuitous concourse of atoms. And, in a letter to the _Times_ justifying this a.s.sertion, he told how forty years before he had asked Liebig, when walking with him in the country, whether he believed that the gra.s.s {45} and flowers they saw around them "grew by mere chemical forces." "No," he answered, "no more than I could believe that a book of botany describing them could grow by mere chemical forces."

Discussions may continue as to whether what Huxley called "the wider teleology," or some other form of the doctrine of Design is to be preferred; but thoughtful men are likely to agree with the judgment given by Sir George Stokes--that recognised master of masters--when he said: "We meet with such overwhelming evidence of design, of purpose, especially in the study of living things, that we are compelled to think of mind as being involved in the const.i.tution of the universe."[12]

[1] _Fragments of Science_, p. 166.

[2] _Life and Letters_, I., p. 307.

[3] May 2nd, 1903.

[4] The debate as to the accuracy of the Mosaic account of Creation does not come directly within the scope of our survey; but, nevertheless, it may be worth while to recall the following statement in view of the very confident a.s.sertions that have often been made, by no less an authority than Romanes. "The order in which the flora and fauna are said by the Mosaic account to have appeared upon the earth corresponds with that which the theory of evolution requires and the evidence of geology proves."--(_Nature_, August 11th, 1881.)

[5] _Lay Sermons_.

[6] _Critiques and Addresses_, pp. 305, 308.

[7] _Life and Letters_, I., p. 309.

[8] I., p. 314.

[9] _Life and Letters_, III., p. 189.

[10] _Life and Letters_ of Romanes, pp. 88.

[11] Essay on "The Physical Basis of Life" (1868).

[12] _Gifford Lectures_ (1891), p. 196.

{46}

CHAPTER V

THE COUNTER-ARGUMENTS (_continued_)

But though Materialism had to go, there was a time when it seemed to many by no means unlikely that Agnosticism might have to be accepted as its subst.i.tute. And if that had been so the case would have been scarcely less desperate. We might have been left with a philosophy of a kind, but we should have been deprived of any object which could evoke within our hearts the trust and affection that are needed to sustain a religion. However, as it proved, there was no great cause for fear. Agnosticism was subjected in its turn to the ordeal of criticism, and the result proved that it had not in it the substance and force that could give it any permanent hold upon the best intelligence of the age.

If Agnosticism could have been content to confine itself to positive a.s.sertions, there might have been less cause to find fault with it.

But its name stood for negation, and its temper was in accord with its name. The exponents of Agnosticism were not {47} satisfied with affirming that the Power behind phenomena is beyond all thought mysterious. They insisted that it is unknowable, and that not merely in the sense that it is incomprehensible, not to be fully grasped, but unknowable in the sense that nothing at all can be known about it. And then, having laid down this as their fundamental principle, they proceeded at once, with a strange inconsistency, to a.s.sert that we can know what it is _not_. This above all else, they said, it is not: it is not personal. True, Herbert Spencer maintained that it is as far raised above personality as personality is raised above unconsciousness; but the stress was laid not upon the affirmation of super-personality, but upon the denial and rejection of anything like personality as we understand it.

The position was really untenable. Possibly, if we could detect no more in Nature than power, we might be content, intellectually, to stop at the affirmation of inscrutable force. But if there is also design, then we are bound to go a step further. Bishop Harvey Goodwin expressed this exactly when he said: "Purpose means person." No doubt personality in the Creator must be something far higher and fuller than personality in the creature. The German philosopher Lotze was speaking the truth when he declared that "to all finite minds {48} there is allotted but a pale copy" of personality; "the finiteness of the finite," being "not a producing condition of personality," as has often been maintained, "but a limit and hindrance of its development."

"Perfect personality," he said, "is in G.o.d alone."[1]

To most of us it may sound paradoxical to urge that the full Christian doctrine of the Three Persons in the G.o.dhead is really less difficult intellectually than the doctrine that the Divine Being consists of an isolated unit.

This was the contention of the Greek Fathers of the Church, whose acute and subtle minds antic.i.p.ated not a few of the objections which we have had to encounter in our days. We cannot elaborate the statement here,[2] but it is to the point to observe that the doctrine of the Trinity in Unity removes from the Christian believer that which to Spencer was one of the greatest obstacles in the way of the acceptance of the idea of a Divine Personality; for it relieves him from the necessity of imagining a subject without an object, since in the Christian view the highest life in the universe is a social life, {49} in which thought is for ever communicated with unbroken harmony of feeling and will.

But the inadequacy of Agnosticism was to be seen not only on the intellectual side. Its practical effects were necessarily determined by its negations. Since we could know nothing of the ultimate power, it was plainly our wisdom to turn our attention elsewhere. It followed that, if morality was to be upheld, it must be based upon other than the familiar sanctions. For awhile it was enthusiastically promised that this could and should be done. But the event proved otherwise.

Towards the end of his life, Herbert Spencer was constrained to admit this. "Now that ... I have succeeded in completing the second volume of _The Principles of Ethics_ ... my satisfaction is somewhat dashed by the thought that these new parts fall short of expectation. The doctrine of Evolution has not furnished guidance to the extent that I had hoped."[3]

And this moral failure of the system pointed yet deeper to its essential weakness. It deliberately ignored the profoundest needs and capacities of our nature. The need is the need for G.o.d, and for One who, though greatly above us, is yet within our reach, and ready to give us His friendship. "Thou {50} hast made us for Thyself, and our heart is restless until it rests in Thee." That cry of St. Augustine has found its echo in unnumbered souls, and our humanity will never be satisfied while it is offered no more than an impalpable abstraction for the contentment of its craving.