God and the World: A Survey of Thought

by Arthur William Robinson

CHAPTER III

THEOLOGICAL DIFFICULTIES

We shall not exaggerate if we say that the chief interest aroused by these discoveries was a theological interest. Of course the men of science were keenly concerned to understand the new facts and the new interpretations, and among them there were divided camps and serious contentions. Sir Richard Owen, for instance, was a vigorous opponent of Darwin's views. But we cannot think it surprising that the men of religion should feel that their positions were not only being attacked, but undermined; and that issues were being raised which were more vital for them than for any other students of the problems of existence.

When we thus speak of men of science and men of religion we do not mean to imply that there were two distinct classes which could be sharply divided. By no means. It was not so much that there were two camps as that there were two positions, with much passing to and fro between them, and the keenest interest and anxiety felt on both sides as to what the future might have to bring of widening divergence or ultimate reconciliation.

There could be no doubt at all that most formidable questions had to be faced and answered. These were the chief of them:—

Is it any longer necessary, or even possible, to insist upon a First Cause for all that exists? Can the argument from Design be said to retain its validity as a proof of the working of a controlling Mind? If we admit the evidence for the existence of a Creator, can we know anything about Him? Can we, in particular, still assert with any confidence that He is good?

Let us take the questions in order and give the replies that were made to them from the different sides. And, first of all, from the side of negation.

The number of those who directly denied that there must have been a First Cause were very few. But there were many who did their utmost to discredit the idea as due to what they held to be an illegitimate deduction from our limited human experiences. Others were disposed to quarrel with the word "Cause" altogether, and to dispute the propriety of its employment.

They wished to banish it altogether from the scientific vocabulary, and to substitute for the terms cause and effect, antecedent and consequent, reducing causation to conjunction. But it was generally admitted that, where we have to deal with an invariable antecedent followed by an invariable consequent, nothing was to be gained by a change in the common phraseology. John Stuart Mill refused to abandon the word. Speaking of one who had done so, he said, "I consider him to be entirely wrong." "The beginning of a phenomenon is what implies a Cause."[[1]] There were, he allowed, "permanent causes," but, he added, "we can give no account of the origin of the permanent causes"—which was virtually to abandon the subject as being beyond the domain of science.

In regard to the second question, it very soon became evident that the old views of Design would be subjected to the most incisive criticism. To many it appeared as if the new doctrine of evolution had supplied an explanation which left no room for the recognition of the particular contrivances upon which Paley had constructed his argument. No one asserted this more strongly than Haeckel, the German biologist. To quote his words, "The development of the universe is a monistic mechanical process, in which we discover no aim or purpose whatever; what we call design in the organic world is a special result of biological agencies; neither in the evolution of the heavenly bodies, nor in that of the crust of our earth, do we find any trace of controlling purpose." "Nowhere in the evolution of animals and plants do we find any trace of design, but merely the inevitable outcome of the struggle for existence, the blind controller." "All is the result of chance." We ought to add that he somewhat qualified this last statement by explaining that "chance" itself must be considered as coming under "the universal sovereignty of nature's supreme law."[[2]]

It is not to be supposed that anyone was to be found who denied the general intelligibility of Nature. To have done this would have been to reduce science to an absurdity. Science is bound to proceed upon the assumption that there are "reasons" for things. Moreover, there is mind in man, who is part of the order of Nature. It follows that what is in the part cannot be denied to the whole. All this could be freely admitted. But then the question arose, Is mind the originating source of the movements of matter, or is it not rather itself the product of them?

There were those who did not shrink from affirming that matter produces thought, even as the liver secretes bile. Others preferred to take what seemed to be an intermediate course. They were not prepared to give priority to either mind or matter. Thus Haeckel maintained that matter and thought are only two different aspects, or two fundamental attributes of an underlying something which he defined as "substance." It was to the action of this universal substance that he imagined the "monistic mechanical process" to be due. He went so far as to state his conviction that not even the atom is without "a rudimentary form of sensation and will."[[3]]

In like manner Tyndall had claimed a two-sidedness for matter, and traced all higher developments back to the side which held in it the element of spirit and thought; while admitting that "the production of consciousness by molecular action is quite as inconceivable on mechanical principles as the production of molecular action by consciousness."[[4]]

The bearing of all this upon the question of Design was plain, for, if thought and intention are the outcome and result of the mechanical operations of Nature, it might well seem to follow that mind had been removed from its high place as the dominant and directing power.

But these difficulties with which the theologian was thus confronted in respect of a First Cause and the recognition of Design, were even less formidable than those which were arrayed under the other heads that we have enumerated. It was Huxley who invented the term Agnosticism to describe the position of such of his contemporaries as were not inclined to deny that there was a great Power at work behind the phenomena of the Universe, but were not prepared to admit that this Power could be any degree comprehensible by us. The most systematic exponent of this view was Herbert Spencer. He allowed that we are obliged to refer the phenomenal world and its law and order to a First Cause. "And the First Cause," he said, "must be in every sense perfect, complete, total—including within itself all power, and transcending all law." But he insisted that, "it cannot in any manner or degree be known, in the strict sense of knowing."[[5]] Elsewhere he suggested that it may belong to "a mode of being as much transcending intelligence and will as these transcend mechanical motion." "Our only conception of what we know as Mind in ourselves is the conception of a series of states of consciousness." "How," he asked, "is the 'originating Mind' to be thought of as having states produced by things objective to it, as discriminating among these states, and classing them as like and unlike; and as preferring one objective result to another."[[6]] It was by a similar line of reasoning that Romanes reached the like conclusions.[[7]] "In my opinion," he said, "no explanation of natural order can either be conceived or named other than that of intelligence as the supreme directing cause." But "this cause must be widely different from anything that we know of Mind in ourselves." "If such a Mind exists, it is not conceivable as existing, and we are precluded from assigning to it any attributes."

It was obvious that, if no satisfactory reply were forthcoming to such a contention, the very word Theology must be discarded, since there would be no longer any need for it, or justification of its use.

But there was yet a further criticism that was supposed by not a few to complete the discomfiture of those who still clung to the traditional beliefs. We can find it forcibly expressed in one of the earlier writings of Romanes, who in this case was endorsing the verdict of Mill. "Supposing the Deity to be omnipotent, there can be no inference more transparent than that such wholesale suffering, for whatever ends designed, exhibits an incalculably greater deficiency of beneficence in the divine character than that which we know in any, the very worst, of human characters. For let us pause for one moment to think of what suffering in Nature means. Some hundreds of millions of years ago, some millions of millions of animals must be supposed to have become sentient. Since that time till the present there must have been millions and millions of generations of millions and millions of individuals. And throughout all this period of incalculable duration, this inconceivable host of sentient organisms have been in a state of unceasing battle, dread, ravin, pain. Looking to the outcome, we find that more than one-half of the species which have survived the ceaseless struggle are parasitic in their habits, lower and insentient forms of life feasting on higher and sentient forms; we find teeth and talons whetted for slaughter, hooks and suckers moulded for torment—everywhere a reign of terror, hunger, sickness, with oozing blood and quivering limbs, with gasping breath and eyes of innocence that dimly close in deaths of cruel torture!"[[8]]

Huxley, arguing to the same effect, concluded that "since thousands of times a minute, were our ears sharp enough, we should hear sighs and groans of pain like those heard by Dante at the gate of hell, the world cannot be governed by what we call benevolence."[[9]]

Haeckel went so far as to propose to describe by the term "dysteleology" that part of the science of Biology which collected the facts that gave direct contradiction to the idea of beneficial "purposive arrangement."

Such were the difficulties which loomed largest before the minds of vast numbers of thinking men and women, and did much to shake the general confidence in religion, in the years that followed the discoveries which culminated in the Darwinian theory of evolution. It must not be supposed that these thoughts were lightly entertained, nor may we imagine that they gave no distress to those who sincerely believed that they were bound to accept what seemed to be their inevitable consequences. To quote again from the Candid Examination of Romanes, we may take it that he was speaking for many others when he said, "Forasmuch as I am far from being able to agree with those who affirm that the twilight doctrine of the new faith is a desirable substitute for the waning splendour of 'the old,' I am not ashamed to confess that, with this virtual negation of God, the universe to me has lost its soul of loveliness; and although, from henceforth the precept 'to work while it is day' will doubtless but gain an intensified force from the terribly intensified meaning of the words 'that the night cometh when no man can work,' yet when at times I think, as think at times I must, of the appalling contrast between the hallowed glory of that creed which once was mine, and the lonely mystery of existence as now I find it—at such times I shall ever feel it impossible to avoid the sharpest pang of which my nature is susceptible."

[[1]] Logic, Chap. V.

[[2]] The Riddle of the Universe, Chaps. XIV, XV.

[[3]] Chap. XII.

[[4]] Fragments of Science, p. 222.

[[5]] First Principles, i., pp. 33-39.

[[6]] Essays, Vol. III., pp. 246, f.

[[7]] In an essay written before 1889.

[[8]] A Candid Examination of Theism (1876), pp. 171, f.

[[9]] Nineteenth Century, February, 1888.