The Christian Faith Under Modern Searchlights Part 4

It does not appear, then, that biological evolution at all necessitates the acceptance of a mechanical view of the universe from which the action of purpose is excluded. Protests against such a view have, in fact, been coming of late from the scientific philosophers and the philosophical scientists. Bergson, a type of the former, insists that spontaneity, movement, indeterminateness are the differentia of life.

Among the scientists, Ostwald thinks that an absolutely determined world is not the real world, but an ideal world;[70] and Sir O. Lodge speaks of the theory that everything in the world is mechanically determined as a "modern superst.i.tion."[71] How is the southward flight of the bird and its return in the spring to its own nest, or the journey of an eel thousands of miles up an inland river and its return thence to sp.a.w.n in the deep waters of the ocean, to be explained as the result of purely mechanical causes? Driesch insists that the chemical-physical processes "do not const.i.tute life, they are _used_ by life."[72]

70: "Natural Philosophy," p. 50.

71: _Hibbert Journal_, October, 1911, p. 704.

72: See J. A. Thomson, _ibid._, p. 116.

The mechanical interpretation of things, however useful for some purposes it may be, appears increasingly thin and ghostly as we advance into the realms of life, consciousness and freedom. It becomes a caricature of reality. It is not merely a colourless photograph as over against a portrait--everything reduced to black and white; but it is like an X-ray photograph of a living man, a mere skeleton without flesh and blood. Mechanism is independent of time, but time is, in a sense, of the essence of the organism. The mechanical movement can be reversed, while life processes are irreversible.

The life and career of a great scientist such as Pasteur, it has been said, is a more impressive evidence of design than any adduced by Paley and the Bridgwater treatises.[73] Man has been called "Nature's rebel,"

and the endowments of man and his achievements in controlling nature and understanding nature are a disturbing element in any theory which would exclude the operation of intelligence from the course of evolution.

Romanes tells us: "When I wrote the preceding treatise ["The Candid Examination"], I did not sufficiently appreciate the immense importance of _human_ nature, as distinguished from physical nature, in an inquiry touching Theism."[74]

73: S. Paget: "Another Device," p. 101.

74: "Thoughts on Religion," p. 164.

The drama of evolution as unfolded by science inevitably suggests that in the fortunes and life of humanity is to be heard the _motif_ of nature's music, unless indeed all is chaos and discord. The diapason ends full in man, or rather begins in man and the history of his life upon the earth. It may still be believed--because of evolution avowedly, or in spite of evolution--that man is a happy or an unhappy accident, a sport, a monstrosity, the miscarriage of an ape, a _faux pas_ of nature, the strangest event in a purposeless series; or man may be regarded, with much to support such an interpretation, as the intended goal of evolution, giving significance, rationality and purpose to the whole history. However slow and gradual the steps by which man has been produced, and however mechanical in one aspect the process, it may be insisted that a mechanism so perfect as to produce the varied forms of organic life, culminating in man, with his mental and moral endowments, is as strong evidence as could be produced of purpose as the ultimate and only explanation of the mechanism.

Certainly the difficulty of evolving the fit from the fortuitous becomes accentuated when man is included within the series. Man, a purposive and moral being, sees in himself and the structure of his mind and the experience of his life the crowning evidence of the action of purpose.

If the cause must be adequate to produce the effect, man cannot regard himself as the product of an accidental or mechanical process from whose inception and operation the action of intelligence is excluded. In a word, a purposive being cannot have been the result of a purposeless process.

It is significant that those who have interpreted evolution to the ma.s.ses have quite uniformly done so in terms of progress. But progress is a teleological conception. In a world where atoms shift unceasingly, but without the guidance of intelligence or will, there may be change but there will be no progress; for one arrangement of atoms will be as high in the scale of values as another. Evolutionists who, as evolutionists, are inspired with an ideal of human progress must in some sense be finalists. If the history of the world and of man presents any real progress, it can only be because it is in so far an expression of purpose.

2. It is an example of what Cardinal Newman called the development of doctrine that the theory of Evolution has come to mean, in popular regard, quite the opposite of what it meant etymologically or in the mind of its early advocates. Evolution means the unfolding of what was enfolded, either in primordial living germs or, to go still further back, in the primitive star-dust. Whatever is in the product must be read back into the elements from which it emerged, and a complete knowledge of these elements and their properties would thus disclose potencies for the production, under suitable conditions, of the completed development.

A glance, almost at random, at current literature in which the conception of evolution is employed in philosophical and theological discussion, shows that the theory has suffered a sea-change. It has now come to mean, to many who use it freely, not the unfolding of the implicit, but the production or appearance of something essentially new, a creative synthesis or epigenesis. Bergson, James Ward, Baron von Hugel and Loisy are among those who use the term in this sense. Thus the last named writer says: "That which const.i.tutes man as a human being is that which he possesses more than the beasts, and not that which he possesses in common with them. From the fact that humanity proceeds from animality, it does not follow that it is explained and defined altogether by animality, otherwise evolution must be denied."[75]

75: "Histoire des Religions," 1911, pp. 61 f.

This modification of meaning is important when the doctrine of evolution is extended downward into the inorganic sphere. Since species are derived from one another, it used to be argued, life must be derived from the lifeless; and it is obvious that if this process is pursued it will lead to an infinite regress. We go back from the civilized to the savage, from the conscious to the unconscious, from the organic to the inorganic, till finally the evolution of the atom becomes the problem of problems. We go back in an infinite regress, approaching the ideal limit: In the beginning, nothing. The goal would seem to be the evolution of primitive matter out of nothing, as Alfred Noyes has suggested in his poem, "The Origin of Life":

In the beginning?--Slowly grope we back Along the narrowing track, Back to the deserts of the world's pale prime, The mire, the clay, the slime; And then ... what then? Surely to something less; Back, back, to Nothingness!

Will you have courage, then, to bow the head, And say, when all is said-- "Out of this Nothingness arose our thought!

This blank abysmal Nought Woke, and brought forth that lighted city street, Those towers, that armoured fleet"?

Will you have courage, then, to front that law (From which your sophists draw Their only right to flout one human creed) That nothing can proceed-- Not even thought, not even love--from less Than its own nothingness?

The law is yours! But dare you waive your pride, And kneel where you denied?

The law is yours! Dare you rekindle, then, One faith for faithless men, And say you found, on that dark road you trod, In the beginning--G.o.d?

The principle of continuity urges the evolutionist to extend his theory downward into the inorganic world and upward into the sphere of the moral and the spiritual. At the crucial points of the origin of life and of the human race, the advocate of preformation has greater difficulty than the supporter of epigenesis or creative evolution, which is a sort of _rapprochement_ between evolutionism and creationism. Let us see how the case stands at present as regards the origin of life and the origin of man.

Life may be generated any day in the laboratory, but as yet this has not been done.[76] In fact so great are the difficulties that Arrhenius thinks that there was no beginning of life, life being eternal and persisting, in spite of acknowledged scientific difficulties in the conception, amid the vicissitudes of cosmic changes and flights through interstellar s.p.a.ce.[77] Weismann does not think that a living germ could be conveyed in the crevices of meteorites to our planet, because "it could neither endure the excessive cold nor the absolute desiccation to which it would be exposed in cosmic s.p.a.ce, which contains absolutely no water. This could not be endured even for a few days, much less for immeasurable periods of time."[78]

76: Jacques Loeb says that "whoever claims to have succeeded in making living matter from inanimate will have to prove that he has succeeded in producing nuclein material which acts as a ferment for its own synthesis and thus reproduces itself. n.o.body has thus far succeeded in this, although nothing warrants us in taking it for granted that this task is beyond the power of science."--"Darwin and Modern Science," p. 270.

77: "Worlds in the Making," 1908, Chapter VIII.

78: "The Evolution Theory," II, p. 365.

Lord Kelvin will not go as far as Arrhenius, but believes that a meteorite brought the first living germs to this planet. K. Pearson thinks that under favourable conditions in the remote past life arose, but arose only once, out of the non-living.[79] The bridge was so slender that it was crossed but once under imaginary conditions not controllable by experiment; and as a unique event even in imaginary history it cannot be said to be subject to any general law. It is questionable, in fact, whether in scientific merit the hypothesis is superior to that of special creation.

79: "Grammar of Science," one volume edition, pp. 410 ff.

Dr. Schafer sees this and points it out very clearly in his Presidential Address.[80] A scientific account of the origin of life must refer it to causes operating to-day; so, instead of Arrhenius' eternity of life, or of Pearson's spontaneous production of life but once under inaccessible conditions, or Lord Kelvin's meteoric conveyance of life, he believes that life is constantly being produced, and has always been produced, from certain colloidal substances which he describes. But what has become of all this life, constantly generated? He admits there is trace of only one paleontological series. While a.s.suming that it is the nature of life to evolve, he admits that there is no evidence accessible to the senses or discerned as yet by the most delicate instruments for the existence of these countless beginnings of life. The real question then concerns not this kind of life, which eye hath not seen, but the origin of the life which we know, and whose marvellous development evolution traces. Ostwald thinks that "it is undecided whether originally there were one or several forms from which the present forms sprang, nor is it known how life first made its appearance on earth. So long as the various a.s.sumptions with regard to this question have not led to decisive, actually demonstrable differences in the results, a discussion of it is fruitless, and therefore unscientific."[81]

80: _Science_, September 6, 1912, pp. 294 ff.

81: "Natural Philosophy," p. 175.

A comparison has often been drawn between the birth of the individual and that of the race. Theologians have discussed the question whether the child in his spiritual nature is to be referred to a special act of creative power, or whether all of his endowments are derived from his parents.

To the poet the birth of the child suggests the presence of forces other than those of the seen and temporal. The new life is "out of the deep, from the true world, within the world we see." Its roots are in another dimension of being than that of nature or the world of time and sense.

In moments of insight, "though inland far we be, our souls have sight of that immortal sea which brought us. .h.i.ther."

Again to the philosopher there is in the individual something indescribable, unique, not to be compressed within the compa.s.s of any general law, something in each individual which his ancestry or antecedents will not explain nor his environment produce.[82]

82: See Royce: "The World and the Individual," II, p. 325.

Says a distinguished professor of biology[83]: "Familiarity with development does not remove the real mystery which lies back of it. The development of a human being, of a personality, from a germ cell seems to me the climax of all wonders, greater even than that involved in the evolution of a species or the making of a world." He remarks that "if personality is determined by heredity alone, all teaching, preaching, government, is useless." The only hope for the race, he says, is in eugenics--always supposing that enough freedom is left to carry out its program.

83: E. G. Conklin: "Heredity and Responsibility," in _Science_, January 10, 1913.

If the birth of the individual and the full story of his origin is thus enveloped in mystery for theologian, poet, philosopher and even scientist, it is not to be expected that the problem of the origin of the human race can be solved by a neat formula. Here the mystery of the birth of the individual from parents of the same species is intensified many fold. Here the problems of mind and body, of their genetic and metaphysical relations to each other, and of the ultimate relation of the spirit world to each, press for solution before there can be any full and final answer to the question of the origin of man. Is it any wonder that the single occurrence upon which was based the birth of all future generations which have peopled the earth should be thought to involve more than can be included in any scientific hypothesis?[84]

84: "No other animal types," says Wallace, "make the slightest approach to any of these high faculties [such as are seen in man] or show any indication of the possibility of their development. In very many directions they have reached a limit of organic perfection beyond which there is no apparent scope for further advancement.

Such perfect types we see in the dog, the horse, the cat-tribe, the deer and the antelopes, the elephants, the beaver and the greater apes; while many others have become extinct because they were so highly specialized as to be incapable of adaptation to new conditions. All these are probably about equal in their mental faculties, and there is no indication that any of them are or have been progressing towards man's elevation, or that such progression, either physically or mentally, is possible."--"Man's Place in the Universe," 3d (popular) ed., pp. 328, 329.

When we seek to interpret these critical points in the history of the world, such as the origin of life and of man, two roads are open before us. We may emphasize, with the advocates of preformation, the principle of continuity alone; and, explaining the higher by the lower, we may go back as Mr. Noyes would carry us, back on the dwindling track, explaining civilization by savagery, the non-moral by the moral, the conscious by the unconscious, the living by the non-living. In this process, it has been often pointed out, there lurks a sort of _generatio aequivoca_; primitive star-dust is endowed with the attributes of life, of consciousness, and even of purpose and morality. Thus J. A. Thomson says that "if we see any good reason for believing in the erstwhile origin of the living from the not-living, we give a greater continuity to the course of events, and we must again read something into the common denominator of science--Matter, Energy, and the Ether. We have already read into this Wonder and Mystery, Harmony and Order, and we must now read into it--Progress and, from a philosophical standpoint, Purpose."[85]

85: "The Bible of Nature," pp. 131, 132.

The objection will be made that to regard the primitive atoms or cells as practically self-preserving, self-repairing and self-improving, the fountain of all life, of all consciousness and morality and civilization, is to endow these ent.i.ties with attributes that are manifestly inappropriate.

Seeing the difficulties of a theory of evolution based upon the principle of continuity alone, we may emphasize, with many popular interpreters, not so much this principle of continuity, as that of progress. Evolution would then mean not a mere shifting of the elements, a redistribution of matter and motion, but a creative synthesis, an epigenesis. It will then mean, not "There is nothing new under the sun,"

but rather, "What next?" The descent of man will no longer suggest the inference that as the progeny of the brute man must share his destiny, but rather the thought that "it doth not yet appear what we shall be."

But how to explain the new element which has arisen, not out of, but alongside of, the others? We would not be content to say, "Now the inorganic elements incapable of producing life; and now, presto! living matter;" for this after all would be a break in continuity not explained, and would lead once more to a sort of creation _ex nihilo_.

The necessities of the case seem to call for some new conception which shall unite the two great principles of continuity and progress.

III. THEISM AND EVOLUTION