God and the World: A Survey of Thought

by Arthur William Robinson

CHAPTER VI.

THE COUNTER-ARGUMENTS (continued)

We have still to see how the last of the difficulties of which we have spoken was treated. It was a difficulty which could not be regarded with indifference. For what would it avail to shew that men had a right to cherish the belief in Power, and Purpose, and Personality, unless they could also be assured that the Orderer of the world is good? Nay, might they not feel, if there were no such assurance, that it would be better to be altogether without His presence and influence? On a matter so vital to happiness and well-being the mere possibility of a doubt was torment enough. What was there to be said to bring relief to the mind and heart when charges were made against the benevolence and beneficence of Nature's ways? What satisfactory account could be given of the waste and cruelty which were seen to abound on every hand? The more clear the certainty that there is design in the Universe, the more urgent became the question as to the character of that design, and of the motives that prompt it.

So long as the difficulty remained unrelieved, the thoughts of many of the most sensitive minds in regard to Theism were held in suspense. The shadow of misgiving was felt to be creeping over the mind of the age, like the gloom of an approaching eclipse, even before the arrival of the Darwinian hypothesis. In words too well known to need repeating, Tennyson had given utterance to the half-realised anxiety of his contemporaries in the stanzas of his In Memoriam, published in 1850.

What the finer spirits were already beginning to feel was soon to be proclaimed, in terms which could not fail to be understood by the multitude, as an inevitable truth brought to light by scientific enquiry. We have seen how it was stated with the passion of eloquence by Huxley and Romanes. And Darwin, with all his detachment and philosophic calm, was at times deeply affected by the seriousness of the problem which he had done so much to bring into prominence. It is plain that he did his very utmost to retain the hopeful view, and to put the most consoling interpretation he could upon the disquieting facts.

He had no difficulty in shewing that the wholesale destruction of living organisms was imperatively necessary. "There is no exception to the rule," he said, "that every organic being naturally increases at so high a rate that, if not destroyed, the earth would soon be covered by the progeny of a single pair."[[1]]

The truth of this has been demonstrated again and again. A pair of rabbits, for example, would in the most favourable circumstances increase in four or five years to a million. The roe of a cod may contain eight or nine millions of eggs. More appalling still, the female of the common flesh fly will at one time deposit 20,000 eggs. At this rate of increase it has been calculated that, in less than a year, a single pair would produce enough flies, if these were not devoured by their natural foes, to cover the whole surface of the globe to the depth of a mile and a quarter! But all this does not, of course, make it clear why in a beneficently ordered world such a necessity of slaughter should ever have been allowed to arise.

Darwin, as we have said, tried hard to take the most favourable view of the whole process. He thus concluded his chapter on the struggle for existence; "When we reflect on the struggle, we may console ourselves with the full belief that the war of nature is not incessant, that no fear is felt, that death is generally prompt, and that the vigorous, the healthy, and the happy survive and multiply." And these are the words with which he concluded the Origin of Species: "Thus from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object we are capable of conceiving, namely the production of the higher animals, directly follows."

But a year or two later he shewed that his mind was by no means at rest on the matter, by writing in this strain to his friend Asa Gray:

"I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice.... I am inclined to look at everything as resulting from designed laws, with the details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we may call chance. Not that this notion at all satisfies me.... Let each man hope and believe what he can. Certainly I agree with you that my views are not at all necessarily atheistical."[[2]]

Happily there were others who were able to see their way somewhat further than this. Romanes, in a paper which he read before the Aristotelian Society in 1889, shewed that he was reconsidering his position. He questioned whether the assertion, made by a speaker in a previous discussion, that "the fair order of Nature is only acquired by a wholesale waste and sacrifice," could be accepted as strictly true, for "how can it be said that, in point of fact, there has been a waste, or has been a sacrifice? Clearly such things can only be said when our point of view is restricted to the means (i.e., the wholesale destruction of the less fit); not when we extend our view to what, even within the limits of human observation, is unquestionably the end (i.e., the causal result in an ever improving world of types)."[[3]]

He had intended to write more fully on the subject, but did not live to do so. We only know that on the Sunday before his death he did express to Bishop Gore his entire agreement with a statement that had been made a short time before by Professor Knight, in his Aspects of Theism, to the effect that "A larger good is evolved through the winnowing process by which physical nature casts its weaker products aside, etc."[[4]] We cannot suppose that, if he had lived, he would have been content to have left the argument thus. That the end justifies the means, is scarcely a doctrine which can be accepted as the last word of an ethical defence of the constitution of the world.

No doubt there were further pleas to be put in, and we shall do well to give them their full value. There is the contention that the pleasures of life as a whole outweigh the sum of its evils. This was maintained, and we need not hesitate to say successfully maintained, by Lord Avebury, and not by him alone. Indeed Darwin had emphatically said, "According to my judgment happiness decidedly prevails."[[5]] Then there has always been urged the undoubted fact that pain, if an evil, is yet the minister of good. Browning's optimism may have carried him too far when he laid it down that "when pain ends gain ends," but it is not to be questioned that men have profited by sufferings, and that they have had to thank their pains, if only because these have served to protect them from yet greater misfortunes. There is a true wisdom in the moral of the old fable of the blacksmith, who prayed to heaven that the fire might not burn his fingers, to discover that as a result it had charred his hand to the bone. Medical science has had much to say with regard to the salutary office of pain. It has gone so far as to assert that, "the symptoms of disease are marked by purpose, and the purpose is beneficent." Nay more, "the processes of disease aim not at the destruction of life, but at the saving of it."[[6]] None the less, with what might seem a splendid inconsistency, the medical profession devotes itself untiringly to the alleviation of the symptoms and to the eradication of disease.

Again, we may be thankful to be assured that, whatever be the case with man, the lower organisms feel pain less than he does, and much less than he is often wont to imagine that they feel it. This has been argued again and again by the veteran naturalist Wallace, whose right to speak on the subject no one is likely to dispute. In his recently published book, The World of Life, he has devoted a whole chapter to answering the question, "Is Nature cruel?" and it is due to him, as well as to the importance of the problem, that we should carefully note what he has said. The following quotations may be taken as sufficiently indicating his position.

"The widespread idea of the cruelty of Nature is almost wholly imaginary."[[7]] "Our whole tendency to transfer our sensations of pain to the other animals is grossly misleading."[[8]]

"No other animal needs the pain-sensations that we need; it is therefore absolutely certain—on principles of evolution—that no other possesses such sensations in more than a fractional degree of ours."[[9]]

"In the category of painless or almost painless animals, I think we may place almost all aquatic animals up to fishes, all the vast hordes of insects, probably all mollusca and worms; thus reducing the sphere of pain to a minimum throughout all the earlier geological ages, and very largely even now."[[10]]

"The purpose and use of all parasitic diseases is to seize upon the less adapted and less healthy individuals—those which are slowly dying and no longer of value in the preservation of the species, and therefore to a certain extent injurious to the race by requiring food and occupying space needed by the more fit."[[11]]

Speaking of "the vicious-looking teeth and claws of the cat tribe, the hooked beak and prehensile talons of birds of prey, the poison fangs of serpents, the stings of wasps and many others," Dr. Wallace writes; "The idea that all these weapons exist for the purpose of shedding blood or giving pain is wholly illusory. As a matter of fact, their effect is wholly beneficent even to the sufferers, inasmuch as they tend to the diminution of pain. Their actual purpose is always to prevent the escape of captured food—of a wounded animal, which would then, indeed, suffer useless pain, since it would certainly very soon be captured again and be devoured." "All conclusions derived from the house-fed cat and mouse are fallacious."[[12]] Finally he concludes by inveighing against "the ludicrously exaggerated view adopted by men of such eminence and usually of such calm judgment as Huxley—a view almost as far removed from fact or science as the purely imaginary and humanitarian dogma of the poet:

'The poor beetle, that we tread upon,
In corporal sufferance finds a pang as great
As when a giant dies.'

Whatever the giant may feel, if the theory of Evolution is true, the 'poor beetle' certainly feels an almost irreducible minimum of pain, probably none at all."[[13]]

We may add to all these considerations the further fact that we are constantly finding out that things have their use which had been too hastily assumed to be mere blots upon Nature. The desert and the volcano, for instance, have often been regarded in that light. But we have lately been assured that both are needed for the supply of atmospheric dust, which is a necessary condition of the rain-fall; so that they are really essential to life upon the planet. Beyond question, then, there is very much to be said in mitigation of the terrible difficulty occasioned by what appear to be the havoc and the prodigality of Nature.

And yet—when all has been said—a residuum does remain of inexplicable misery and distress, and there are times when we are all of us constrained to cry out with Darwin that it is "too much," and to ask whether there is not some further clue to the mystery. And then it may well be that there comes to our mind an answer that has been given from the very first moment at which human beings have thought at all. It is an answer which has seemed inevitable alike to the simplest and the wisest.

Carlyle once told of two Scottish peasants who found themselves for the first time at Ailsa Crag. They stared in astonishment at the great sea-precipices. At last one said to the other: "Eh, Jock, Nature's deevilish!"[[14]] That was the view taken by the primitive races of the world, as their worships and incantations bore witness. It is a view which cannot be lightly dismissed as having nothing at all in its support. We may minimise the evil that is at work around and within us as we will, but, when we have done our utmost, we shall be unlike the vast majority of our race if we are not compelled to admit that there is that in the world which it is quite impossible to ascribe to the immediate action of an entirely good and beneficent God.

Is it then to be thought incredible that the order of the world should have been interfered with, at an early stage in its development, in such a way that the disarrangement was left to work out its fatal mischief by means of the very constancy of the great system of laws which make for a regular development? How this might conceivably have occurred has been set out by an anonymous writer in a remarkable book which ought to be better known than it is. It was published some years ago,[[15]] and bears the suggestive title of Evil and Evolution. The author maintains that the original motive in all living things was self-preservation for self-realisation; and that this elementary law was in itself necessary and good, the essential condition of progress. But just as we to-day know well how hard it is to draw the line which distinguishes a right self-seeking from the wrong, so it has been from the outset. The distinction is a fine one, and the balance is easily upset. We have but to suppose that this perversion of the right and lawful happened at an early stage, to see that nothing more would have been required to account for the subsequent heritage of woe.[[16]] After speaking of the innocent "kind of comparative strife that we see in the fields and forests around us," in which "there may be nothing that we cannot reconcile with the perfect beneficence of the Great Designer and Creator," this writer goes on to say: "But the moment that evolution has attained that point at which the struggle begins to involve pain and unhappiness, it becomes quite another matter. The moment that rudimentary but happy and congenial life begins to be overshadowed by fear, or debased by conscious cruelty, the moment that process of evolution begins to evolve not only cruel selfishness in its most odious forms, but deceit and artifice and treacherous cunning in the warfare which one animal wages with another, then I think you may be certain of one of two things—either the Creator is not all-benevolent, or that that scheme is somehow working out as He never intended it should: there must have been some disturbing and hostile influence."[[17]]

This is well put, but the interest of the book chiefly consists in its attempts to show in detailed instances how things that are evil may have been made so. The author boldly argues that, if the normal course had been followed, "birds and beasts of prey and venomous reptiles would never have been evolved." "Evolutionists," he says, "are agreed that it is just the fierce struggle of created things that has produced these birds and beasts of prey, and that there can be little doubt that it is the malignity of the struggle that has produced the venom of so many reptiles."[[18]] Instances are given in which such venom may now be developed as the result of rage or terror in an otherwise harmless animal.

"A few years ago it was reported that the late M. Pasteur 'cultivated' the poison of human saliva to such a point that he was able to produce with it many of the effects of the most virulent snake poisons."[[19]] Had they not been inflamed by the terror of the struggle for existence, "tigers and hyaenas, vultures and sharks, ferrets and polecats, wasps and spiders, puff-adders and skunks" might have turned their undoubted abilities in other more desirable directions.[[20]] Again, "it is the perpetual effort, generation after generation, through long ages, to repair the mischief inflicted by enemies," that accounts for "the fecundity of the codfish and other creatures. The more prolific it becomes, the more enemies it can feed; and the more they multiply, the more prolific it grows." A vicious circle indeed! Even "earthquakes, storms, droughts, deluges," are explained as due to a certain want of balance and failure in adjustment.[[21]]

Certainly, if we had to choose between the idea of a careless or indifferent God, and the belief in a God who has given us ample proofs of a generally beneficent purpose, but who has, for reasons of the meaning of which we as yet can have only the vaguest conceptions, allowed Himself to be hindered and thwarted on the way to His goal, with results of suffering to Himself even greater than those endured by His creatures; if these were the alternatives before us, there can scarcely be one of us who would hesitate to say towards which of them his reason and conscience would confidently point him.

[[1]] Origin of Species, Chap. III.

[[2]] Life and Letters.

[[3]] Thoughts on Religion, pp. 92, f.

[[4]] p. 94.

[[5]] Life and Letters, I., p. 309.

[[6]] Address by Sir Frederick Treves at the Edinburgh Philosophical Institution, October, 1905.

[[7]] p. 380.

[[8]] p. 377.

[[9]] p. 381.

[[10]] p. 375.

[[11]] p. 383.

[[12]] p. 377. Among the illustrations that have been adduced of the insensibility of the lower organisms, none perhaps is more extraordinary than this: "A crab will continue to eat, and apparently relish, a smaller crab while being itself slowly devoured by a larger one!"—(Transactions of Victoria Institute, Vol. XXV., p. 257).

[[13]] p. 384.

[[14]] William Allingham's Diary, p. 226.

[[15]] In 1896, by Messrs. Macmillan.

[[16]] In one instance, at least, Darwin had pictured in his imagination the steps by which a "strange and odious instinct" may have been developed from comparatively innocent beginnings. He was referring to the ejection by the young cuckoo of its companions from the nest. "I can see no special difficulty in its having gradually acquired, during successive generations, the blind desire, the strength and structure necessary for the work of ejection." "The first step towards the acquisition of the proper instinct might have been mere unintentional restlessness on the part of the young bird."—Origin of Species, p. 200.

[[17]] Pp. 135, f.

[[18]] P. 142.

[[19]] P. 143.

[[20]] P. 144.

[[21]] P. 232.