THE BIBLE AND MIRACLES
Why Huxley Came to Write about the Bible—A Magna Charta of the Poor—The Theological Use of the Bible—The Doctrine of Biblical Infallibility—The Bible and Science—The Three Hypotheses of the Earth's History—Changes in the Past Proved—The Creation Hypothesis—Gladstone on Genesis—Genesis not a Record of Fact—The Hypothesis of Evolution—The New Testament—Theory of Inspiration—Reliance on the Miraculous—The Continuity of Nature no a priori Argument against Miracles—Possibilities and Impossibilities—Miracles a Question of Evidence—Praise of the Bible.
Huxley was by training and habit of mind a naturalist, busy with dissections and drawings, pursuing his branch of science for itself and with no concern as to its possible relation to philosophical speculation or religious dogma. It is possible that, had his life been passed under different conditions, his intellectual activities might have been spent entirely on his scientific work. As it was, he became almost more widely known as a hostile critic of accepted religious doctrine than as a man of science. Many causes contributed to this effect, but the chief reason was the contemporary attitude of the churches to Darwinism. He tells us as a matter of fact that in 1850, nine years before the appearance of The Origin of Species, he had "long done with the Pentateuchal cosmogony which had been impressed on his childish understanding as divine truth." In the chapter he contributed to the Life of Darwin he wrote that in his opinion "the doctrine of evolution does not even come into contact with theism, considered as a philosophical doctrine." The reason of his general attitude to the Bible was simply that his application to it of the agnostic method led him to the view that there was not sufficient evidence for the pretensions assigned to it; the reason of his coming forward as a public and active champion of his views in this matter was partly to make a counter attack on the enemies of science, and partly his innate respect for the propagation of truth. He had the inevitable respect of an Englishman for the English Bible as one of the greatest books in our language, and we have seen how he had advocated its adoption in schools. He had the veneration for its ethical contents common to the best thinkers of all ages since it came into existence, and few writers have ever employed loftier or more direct language to express their respect and admiration. As a venerator of freedom and of liberty he regarded the Bible as the greatest text-book of freedom.
"Throughout the history of the Western world," he wrote, "the Scriptures, Jewish and Christian, have been the great instigators of revolt against the worse forms of clerical and political despotism. The Bible has been the Magna Charta of the poor and of the oppressed; down to modern times no State has had a constitution in which the interests of the people are so largely taken into account, in which the duties, so much more than the privileges, of rulers are insisted upon, as that drawn up for Israel in Deuteronomy and in Leviticus; nowhere is the fundamental truth that the welfare of the State, in the long run, depends on the uprightness of the citizen so strongly laid down. Assuredly the Bible talks no trash about the rights of man; but it insists on the equality of duties, on the liberty to bring about that righteousness which is somewhat different from struggling for 'rights'; on the fraternity of taking thought for one's neighbour as for oneself."
It was not against the Bible but against the applications made of it and implications read into it that he strove.
"In this nineteenth century, as at the dawn of modern physical science, the cosmogony of the semi-barbarous Hebrew is the incubus of the philosopher and the opprobrium of the orthodox. Who shall number the patient and earnest seekers after truth, from the days of Galileo until now, whose lives have been embittered and their good name blasted by the mistaken zeal of Bibliolaters? Who shall count the host of weaker men whose sense of truth has been destroyed in the effort to harmonise impossibilities—whose life has been wasted in the attempt to force the generous new wine of science into the old bottles of Judaism, compelled by the outcry of the same strong party? It is true that if philosophers have suffered, their cause has been amply avenged. Extinguished theologians lie about the cradle of every science as the strangled snakes beside that of Hercules; and history records that whenever science and orthodoxy have been fairly opposed, the latter has been forced to retire from the lists, bleeding and crushed, if not annihilated; scotched, if not slain. But orthodoxy is the Bourbon of the world of thought. It learns not, neither can it forget; and though, at present, bewildered and afraid to move, it is as willing as ever to insist that the first chapter of Genesis contains the beginning and the end of sound science; and to visit, with such petty thunderbolts as its half-paralysed hands can hurl, those who refuse to degrade Nature to the level of primitive Judaism."
These words were written in 1860 and events have moved rapidly since Huxley wrote them. There is now practically no religious body containing a proportion of educated persons which does not allow within it a very wide range of opinion as to the inspiration of the Scriptures, the Biblical account of the Creation, the miraculous events of the Old Testament and the recorded miracles of the New. Within the last few months, Dr. St. George Mivart, a distinguished Catholic zoölogist and long an opponent of Huxley, has declared that within the Catholic Church itself a number of educated persons are prepared to accept most of Huxley's positions, as well as views more extremely iconoclastic than any advanced by Huxley. Although Dr. Mivart's outspoken words have called down on him the official thunders of Rome, it is an open secret that many good Catholics think this attempted exclusion of modern knowledge to be fraught with grave danger to the Church. In these matters the Protestant churches have advanced much farther.
It was very different when Huxley wrote. The first and gravest difficulty placed in the way of science was the asserted infallibility of the Scriptures. In Catholic theology, at least until late in this century, the general tendency has been to regard the Bible rather as a quarry for doctrine than as a direct means of grace. The theory of religion rested on two pillars: the inspired Scriptures containing the necessary information and the inspired Church to interpret the Scriptures. Protestant theology had rejected the infallible inspiration of the Church, and, in consequence, had thrown a greater burden on the Scriptures. The Scriptures became the Word of God, verbally and literally true; in its extreme form this doctrine reverted almost to the ancient Rabbinical maxim that even the vowel points and accents were of divine origin. In practice, if not in theory, the halo was extended to cover even the marginal chronology, then a familiar feature in the editions of the English Bible. The present writer, even so lately as in 1888 was reproved with violence by a clergyman of considerable education and position for expressing a doubt as to the accuracy of these dates. Obviously there was no common measure between a church holding such views and advancing science. War was inevitable, until one side or the other should give way.
Huxley conducted the attack in a series of controversies extending over many years, and in which his opponents were well-known laymen such as Mr. Gladstone, Dr. St. George Mivart, the Duke of Argyll, and many clerical dignitaries of different denominations. The most important of his contributions to these controversies, as well as several isolated essays and addresses, have been collected in two volumes, Science and the Hebrew Tradition, and Science and the Christian Tradition.
The first stage in the controversy, and the stage most immediately pressing, was to shew that the Bible was misleading and inaccurate as a record of scientific fact, and that therefore it could not be brought forward as evidence against scientific doctrines supported by scientific evidence. The vital matter in this was the account given in Genesis of the origin of the world. If that disappeared then the whole ground was gained; science would be left free in its own sphere.
In a lecture on Evolution, delivered in 1876, Huxley began by discussing the possibilities as to the past history of nature. He believed that there were only three hypotheses which had been entertained or which well could be entertained respecting this history. The first was to assume that phenomena of nature similar to those exhibited by the world at present had always existed; in fact that the universe had existed from all eternity in what might be termed, broadly, its present condition. The second hypothesis was that the present condition of things had had only a limited duration, and that, at some period of the past, what we now know came into existence without any relation of natural causation to an antecedent state. The third hypothesis also assumed that the present condition of things had had a limited duration, but it supposed that that condition had been derived by natural processes from an antecedent condition, the hypothesis attempting to set no limits to the series of changes.
In a certain sense, the first hypothesis recalls the doctrine of uniformitarianism, which Hutton and Lyell had shaped from a rational interpretation of the present conditions of nature. But, although it is no longer necessary to imagine the past history of the earth as a series of gigantic catastrophes, yet the whole record of science is against the supposition that anything like the existing state of nature has had an eternal duration. The record of fossils shews that the living population of the earth has been entirely different at different epochs. Geological history shews that, whether these changes have come about by swift catastrophes, or by slow, enduring movements, the surface of the globe, its distribution into land and water, the character of these areas and the conditions of climate to which they have been subjected have passed through changes on a colossal scale. Moreover, if we look from this earth to the universe of stars and suns and planets, we see everywhere evidence of unceasing change. If we use scientific observation and reason, if we employ on the problem the only means we possess for attempting its solution, we cannot accept the hypothesis that the present condition of nature has been eternal.
"So far as that limited revelation of the nature of things, which we call scientific knowledge, has yet gone, it tends, with constantly increasing emphasis, to the belief that, not merely the world of plants, but that of animals; not merely living things but the whole fabric of the earth; not merely our planet but the whole solar system, not merely our star and its satellites, but the millions of similar bodies which bear witness to the order which pervades boundless space and has endured through boundless time, are all working out their predestined courses of evolution."
The second hypothesis is familiar to us in the sacred records of many religious and in the Hebrew Scriptures. Most of these have a fundamental similarity, inasmuch as they offer pictures in which the mode and order of creation are given in the minutest detail and with the simplest kind of anthropomorphism; in which the Creator is represented with familiar human characteristics. But these general considerations, so obvious now that we have learned to read the Bible narrative without passion or prejudice, were not plain to the early opponents of evolution, and it was necessary, step by step, to shew not only that the narrative in Genesis could not be reconciled with known facts if it were accepted in its literal meaning, but that the most strained interpretation of the language failed to bring it into accordance with scientific truth. Mr. Gladstone was the latest and most vigorous of those who attempted to reconcile Genesis with modern knowledge, and in his controversy with Huxley he brought to bear all the resources of an acute intellect trained by long practice in the devices of argument and inspired by a lofty if mistaken enthusiasm. In the course of his argument he wrote:
"But the question is not here of a lofty poem, or a skilfully constructed narrative; it is whether natural science, in the patient exercise of its high calling to examine facts, finds that the works of God cry out against what we have fondly believed to be His word and tell another tale; or whether, in this nineteenth century of Christian progress, it substantially echoes back the majestic sound, which, before it existed as a pursuit, went forth into all lands.
First, looking largely at the latter portion of the narrative, which describes the creation of living organisms, and waiving details, on some of which (as in v. 24) the Septuagint seems to vary from the Hebrew, there is a grand fourfold division, set forth in an orderly succession of times as follows: on the fifth day
1. The water-population.
2. The air-population,
and, on the sixth day,
3. The land-population of animals.
4. The land-population consummated in man.
Now this same fourfold order is understood to have been so affirmed in our time by natural science, that it may be taken as a demonstrated conclusion and established fact."
The defence itself shewed that already a large part of the original position had been abandoned. The literal meaning and belief in detailed accuracy were given up and Mr. Gladstone sought to establish only a general correspondence between the Biblical narrative and the results of science. But even in that form Huxley shewed the defence to be untenable.
"I can meet the statement in the last paragraph of the above citation," he replied, "with nothing but a direct negative. If I know anything at all about the results attained by the natural science of our time, it is a 'demonstrated conclusion and established fact' that the fourfold order given by Mr. Gladstone is not that in which the evidence at our disposal tends to shew that the water, air, and land populations of our globe made their appearance."
With the most voluminous detail, he proceeds to shew that there is no possible relation between the order implied by the narrative and the order as revealed by science. Let us sum up, by two quotations, the result of the whole controversy. First, the literal meaning is untenable.
"The question whether the earth and the immediate progenitors of its present living population were made in six natural days or not is no longer one on which two opinions can be held. The fact that it did not come so into being stands upon as sound a basis as any fact of history whatever. It is not true that existing plants and animals came into being within three days of the creation of the earth out of nothing, for it is certain that innumerable generations of other plants and animals lived upon the earth before its present population. And when, Sunday after Sunday, men who profess to be our instructors in righteousness read out the statement, 'In six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is,' in innumerable churches, they are either propagating what they may easily know, and, therefore, are bound to know, to be falsities; or, if they use the words in some non-natural sense, they fall below the moral standard of the much abused Jesuit."
The attenuated meaning equally must be given up.
"Even if they (the reconcilers) now allow that the words 'the evening and the morning' have not the least reference to a natural day, but mean a period of any number of millions of years that may be necessary; even if they are driven to admit that the word 'creation,' which so many millions of pious Jews and Christians have held, and still hold, to mean a sudden act of the Deity, signifies a process of gradual evolution of one species from another, extending through immeasurable time; even if they are willing to grant that the asserted coincidence of the order of nature with the 'fourfold order' ascribed to Genesis is an obvious error instead of an established truth, they are surely prepared to make a last stand upon the conception which underlies the whole, and which constitutes the essence of Mr. Gladstone's 'fourfold division, set forth in an orderly succession of times.' It is that the animal species which compose the water-population, the air-population, and the land-population, respectively, originated during three distinct and successive periods of time, and only during these periods of time.... But even this sublimated essence of the Pentateuchal doctrine remains as discordant with natural science as ever."
There remains the third, or evolutionary hypothesis regarding the origin of the existing order of nature. As Huxley held it, it was rigidly limited within the possibilities afforded by the agnostic attitude. With regard to the real nature, the origin and destiny of the whole universe, there was not sufficient evidence before the human mind, if indeed the human mind were capable of receiving such evidence, to come to any conclusion. For the rest, for the actual condition of the earth itself, science was gradually accumulating overwhelming evidence in favour of a continuous evolution, under natural agencies, from the beginning of life to the existing forms of animals and plants, and the actual origin of life from inorganic matter under similarly natural agencies was becoming more and more a legitimate inference.
Huxley's relation to the New Testament may be summed up in few words. It was simply that there was not sufficient evidence for ascribing to it the supernatural sanction demanded for it by dogmatic theology.
"From the dawn of scientific Biblical criticism until the present day, the evidence against the long-cherished notion that the three synoptic gospels are the work of three independent authors, each prompted by Divine inspiration, has steadily accumulated, until, at the present time, there is no visible escape from the conclusion that each of the three is a compilation consisting of a groundwork common to all three—the three-fold tradition; and of a superstructure consisting, firstly, of matter common to it with one of the others, and, secondly, of matter common to each."
Again:—"There is no proof, nothing more than a fair presumption, that any one of the gospels existed, in the state in which we find it in the authorised version of the Bible, before the second century, or, in other words, sixty or seventy years after the events recorded." These considerations with slight differences in details are now practically admitted among the abler apologists, with the result that, as Huxley claimed, the New Testament, like the Old, must be treated as literature rather than as Dogma. As Literature everyone has the right to examine the contents critically, and, considering the importance attributed to the contents, the right becomes a duty. No doubt, had Huxley not lived there would have been others equally ready and equally able to gain the battle for freedom of thought in its special application to the claim of the Bible to stand in the way of the advance of scientific knowledge; but as it is, it cannot be denied that the existing prevalence of liberal views, inside and outside the churches, on the nature and interpretation of the Scriptures is largely due to him.
After the question of inspiration, the most striking feature of the Bible is its appeal to miracles and the miraculous element. It is now necessary to examine the position assumed by Huxley towards these. Two great a priori difficulties have been brought against accepting any record of miracles as true. The first of these is very simple, depending on the history of all times and peoples. It is that the human race has shewn itself universally credulous in this matter. It has cried "Wolf!" so readily, so honestly, and on so many occasions that the cry has ceased to carry conviction with it. Every religion has its series of miraculous events; every savage tribe and every uneducated race has its miracle-workers implicitly accepted. In mediæval and modern Europe up to our own times, miracles have been so constantly recorded on testimony of such undoubted integrity that we must either believe that miracles can be performed by numberless persons with no other claim to special regard, or that it is singularly easy to get false but honest evidence regarding them. Huxley supported the latter alternative strongly, and held the view that to believe in any particular miracles would require evidence very much more direct and very much stronger than would be necessary in the case of inherently probable events.
The second a priori objection to the credibility of miracles has been urged more strongly, but was not accepted by Huxley. It is that miracles are inherently incredible inasmuch as they are "violations of the order of nature." Hume, attacking miracles, had made this objection the chief ground of his argument. Huxley paid a logical respect, at least as great, to the continuity of nature.
"When the experience of generation after generation is recorded, and a single book tells us more than Methuselah could have learned, had he spent every waking hour of his thousand years in learning; when apparent disorders are found to be only the recurrent pulses of a slow-working order, and the wonder of a year becomes the commonplace of a century; when repeated and minute examination never reveals a break in the chain of causes and effects; and the whole edifice of practical life is built upon our faith in its continuity; the belief that that chain has never been broken and will never be broken, becomes one of the strongest and most justifiable of human convictions. And it must be admitted to be a reasonable request, if we ask those who would have us put faith in the actual occurrence of interruptions of that order, to produce evidence in favour of their view, not only equal, but superior, in weight, to that which leads us to adopt ours."
But out of the mouth of Hume himself he declared against making the recorded experience of man, however lengthy and impressive, a necessary ground for rejecting the possibility of the miraculous. Hume had said, "Whatever is intelligible and can be distinctly conceived implies no contradiction, and can never be proved false by any demonstration, argument, or reasoning, a priori." This or the like applies to most of the recorded miracles. Huxley was extremely careful not to assert that they were incredible merely because they might involve conditions outside our existing experience. It is a vulgar mistake, for which science certainly gives no warrant, to assert that things are impossible because they contradict our experience. In such a sense many of the most common modern conveniences of life would have seemed impossible a century ago. To travel with safety sixty miles an hour, to talk through the telephone with a friend an hundred miles away, to receive intelligible messages across the Atlantic by a cable, and, still more, to communicate by wireless telegraphy would have seemed impossible until recently. At the present time, the conversion of a baser metal into gold would be called impossible by everyone with a little knowledge of elementary chemistry. This last example leads admirably to a right understanding of the scientific view of impossibility. The older alchemists, partly from ignorance and partly from credulity, believed absolutely in the possibility of transmuting the metals. The advance of chemical science led to definite conceptions of the differences between compounds and elementary bodies, and of the independence of these elements. The methods and reasoning of the alchemists became absurd, and no one would attempt seriously to transmute the metals on their lines. These advances, however, do not give us the right to assume that the elements are absolutely independent, and that transmutation is therefore impossible. Some of the most recent progress in chemistry has opened up the suggestion that the elements themselves are different combinations of a common substance. Huxley applied this particular argument to the miracle at the marriage of Cana.
"You are quite mistaken in supposing that anybody who is acquainted with the possibilities of physical science will undertake categorically to deny that water may be turned into wine. Many very competent judges are inclined to think that the bodies which we have hitherto regarded as elementary are really composite arrangements of the particles of a uniform primitive matter. Supposing that view to be correct, there would be no more theoretical difficulty about turning water into alcohol, ethereal and colouring matters, than there is, at this present moment, any practical difficulty in working other such miracles; as when we turn sugar into alcohol, carbonic acid, glycerine, and succinic acid; or transmute gas-refuse into perfumes rarer than musk and dyes richer than Tyrian purple."
Unless we make the unscientific and preposterous assumption that our present knowledge of nature and of natural forces is absolute and complete, it is unscientific and illogical to declare at once that any supposed events could not have happened merely because they seem to have contradicted so-called natural laws.
"Strictly speaking," Huxley wrote, "I am unaware of anything that has a right to the title of an 'impossibility' except a contradiction in terms. There are impossibilities logical, but none natural. A 'round square,' a 'present past,' 'two parallel lines that intersect,' are impossibilities, because the ideas denoted by the predicates, round, present, intersect, are contradictory of the ideas denoted by the subjects, square, past, parallel. But walking on water, or turning water into wine, or procreation without male intervention, or raising the dead, are plainly not impossibilities in this sense."
The whole matter turns on the question of sufficient evidence.
"Hume's arguments resolve themselves into a simple statement of the dictates of common sense which may be expressed in this canon: the more a statement of fact conflicts with previous experience, the more complete must be the evidence which is to justify us in believing it."
Again, expressing the same idea in different words, he wrote:
"Nobody can presume to say what the order of nature must be; all that the widest experience (even if it extended over all past time and through all space) that events had happened in a certain way could justify, would be a proportionately strong expectation that events will go on so happening, and the demand for a proportional strength of evidence in favour of any assertion that they had happened otherwise. It is this weighty consideration, the truth of which everyone who is capable of logical thought must surely admit, which knocks the bottom out of all a priori objections either to ordinary 'miracles' or to the efficacy of prayer, in so far as the latter implies the miraculous intervention of a higher power. No one is entitled to say, a priori, that prayer for some change in the ordinary course of nature cannot possibly avail."
It was a question of evidence, and not only did the evidence not convince Huxley, but the thaumaturgic nature of the Biblical miracles provided him with additional reason for refusing to attach any extrinsic value to the contents of the book.
On the other hand, although he declined to accept the Bible as a miraculous and authentic revelation, again and again he expressed himself in the strongest terms as to its value to mankind, and as to the impossibility of any scientific advance diminishing in any way whatsoever that value.
"The antagonism between religion and science, about which we hear so much, appears to me to be purely factitious—fabricated, on the one hand, by shortsighted religious people who confound a certain branch of science, theology, with religion; and, on the other, by equally shortsighted scientific people who forget that science takes for its province only that which is susceptible of clear intellectual comprehension; and that, outside the boundaries of that province, they must be content with imagination, with hope, and with ignorance."
And again;
"In the eighth century B.C., in the heart of a world of idolatrous polytheists, the Hebrew prophets put forth a conception of religion which appears to me to be as wonderful an inspiration of genius as the art of Pheidias or the science of Aristotle. 'And what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?' If any so-called religion takes away from this great saying of Micah, I think it wantonly mutilates, while if it adds thereto, I think it obscures, the perfect ideal of religion."
