(b) The teleological argument.—Man, as an intellectual, moral, and religious being, does not attain the end of his existence on earth. His development is imperfect here. Divine wisdom will not leave its work incomplete. There must be a hereafter for the full growth of man's powers, and for the satisfaction of his aspirations. Created, unlike the brute, with infinite capacities for moral progress, there must be an immortal existence in which those capacities shall be brought into exercise. Though the wicked forfeit all claim to this future, we have here an argument from God's love and wisdom to the immortality of the righteous.
In reply to this argument, it has been said that many right wishes are vain. Mill, Essays on Religion, 294—“Desire for food implies enough to eat, now and forever? hence an eternal supply of cabbage?” But our argument proceeds upon three presuppositions: (1) that a holy and benevolent God exists; (2) that he has made man in his image; (3) that man's true end is holiness and likeness to God. Therefore, what will answer the true end of man will be furnished; but that is not cabbage—it is holiness and love, i. e., God himself. See Martineau, Study, 2:370-381.
The argument, however, is valuable only in its application to the righteous. God will not treat the righteous as the tyrant of Florence treated Michael Angelo, when he bade him carve out of ice a statue, which would melt under the first rays of the sun. In the case of the wicked, the other law of retribution comes in—the taking away of “even that which he hath” (Mat. 25:29). Since we are all wicked, the argument is not satisfactory, unless we take into account the further facts of atonement and justification—facts of which we learn from revelation alone.
But while, taken by itself, this rational argument might be called defective, and could never prove that man may not attain his end in the continued existence of the race, rather than in that of the individual, the argument appears more valuable as a rational supplement to the facts already mentioned, and seems to render certain at least the immortality of those upon whom God has set his love, and in whom he has wrought the beginnings of righteousness.
Lord Erskine: “Inferior animals have no instincts or faculties which are not subservient to the ends and purposes of their being. Man's reason, and faculties endowed with power to reach the most distant worlds, would be useless if his existence were to terminate in the grave.” There would be wastefulness in the extinction of great minds; see Jackson, James Martineau, 439. As water is implied by the organization of [pg 987]the fish, and air by that of the bird, so “the existence of spiritual power within us is likewise presumption that some fitting environment awaits the spirit when it shall be set free and perfected, and sex and death can be dispensed with” (Newman Smyth, Place of Death in Evolution, 106). Nägeli, the German botanist, says that Nature tends to perfection. Yet the mind hardly begins to awake, ere the bodily powers decline (George, Progress and Poverty, 505). “Character grows firmer and solider as the body ages and grows weaker. Can character be vitally implicated in the act of physical dissolution?” (Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 353). If a rational and moral Deity has caused the gradual evolution in humanity of the ideas of right and wrong, and has added to it the faculty of creating ethical ideals, must he not have provided some satisfaction for the ethical needs which this development has thus called into existence? (Balfour, Foundations of Belief, 351).
Royce, Conception of God, 50, quotes Le Conte as follows: “Nature is the womb inwhich, and evolution the process by which, are generated sons of God. Without immortality this whole process is balked—the whole process of cosmic evolution is futile. Shall God be so long and at so great pains to achieve a spirit, capable of communing with himself, and then allow it to lapse again into nothingness?” John Fiske, Destiny of Man, 116, accepts the immortality of the soul by “a supreme act of faith in the reasonableness of God's work.” If man is the end of the creative process and the object of God's care, then the soul's career cannot be completed with its present life upon the earth (Newman Smyth, Place of Death in Evolution, 92, 93). Bowne, Philosophy of Theism, 254—“Neither God nor the future life is needed to pay us for present virtue, but rather as the condition without which our nature falls into irreconcilable discord with itself, and passes on to pessimism and despair. High and continual effort is impossible without correspondingly high and abiding hopes.... It is no more selfish to desire to live hereafter than it is to desire to live to-morrow.” Dr. M. B. Anderson used to say that there must be a heaven for canal horses, washerwomen, and college presidents, because they do not get their deserts in this life.
Life is a series of commencements rather than of accomplished ends. Longfellow, on Charles Sumner: “Death takes us by surprise, And stays our hurrying feet; The great design unfinished lies, Our lives are incomplete. But in the dark unknown Perfect their circles seem, Even as a bridge's arch of stone Is rounded in the stream.” Robert Browning, Abt Vogler: “There never shall be one lost good”; Prospice: “No work begun shall ever pause for death”; “Pleasure must succeed to pleasure, else past pleasure turns to pain; And this first life claims a second, else I count its good no gain”; Old Pictures in Florence: “We are faulty—why not? We have time in store”; Grammarian's Funeral: “What's time? Leave Now for dogs and apes,—Man has Forever.”Robert Browning wrote in his wife's Testament the following testimony of Dante: “Thus I believe, thus I affirm, thus I am certain it is, that from this life I shall pass to another better, there where that lady lives, of whom my soul was enamored.”And Browning says in a letter: “It is a great thing—the greatest—that a human being should have passed the probation of life, and sum up its experience in a witness to the power and love of God.... I see even more reason to hold by the same hope.”
(c) The ethical argument.—Man is not, in this world, adequately punished for his evil deeds. Our sense of justice leads us to believe that God's moral administration will be vindicated in a life to come. Mere extinction of being would not be a sufficient penalty, nor would it permit degrees of punishment corresponding to degrees of guilt. This is therefore an argument from God's justice to the immortality of the wicked. The guilty conscience demands a state after death for punishment.
This is an argument from God's justice to the immortality of the wicked, as the preceding was an argument from God's love to the immortality of the righteous. “History defies our moral sense by giving a peaceful end to Sulla.” Louis XV and Madame Pompadour died in their beds, after a life of extreme luxury. Louis XVI and his queen, though far more just and pure, perished by an appalling tragedy. The fates of these four cannot be explained by the wickedness of the latter pair and the virtue of the former. Alexander the Sixth, the worst of the popes, was apparently prosperous and happy in his iniquities. Though guilty of the most shameful crimes, he was serenely impenitent, and to the last of his days he defied both God and man. Since [pg 988]there is not an execution of justice here, we feel that there must be a “judgment to come,”such as that which terrified Felix (Acts 24:25). Martineau, Study, 2:383-388. Stopford A. Brooke, Justice: “Three men went out one summer night, No care had they or aim, And dined and drank. ‘Ere we go home We'll have,’ they said, ‘a game.’ Three girls began that summer night A life of endless shame, And went through drink, disease, and death As swift as racing flame. Lawless and homeless, foul, they died; Rich, loved and praised, the men: But when they all shall meet with God, And Justice speaks,—what then?” See John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 2:255-297. G. F. Wilkin, Control in Evolution: “Belief in immortality is a practical necessity of evolution. If the decisions of to-day are to determine our eternal destiny, then it is vastly more important to choose and act aright, than it is to preserve our earthly life. The martyrs were right. Conscience is vindicated. We can live for the ideal of manhood. Immortality is a powerful reformatory instrument.” Martineau, Study of Religion, 2:388—“If Death gives a final discharge to the sinner and the saint alike, Conscience has told us more lies than it has ever called to their account.” Shakespeare, Henry V, 4:2—“If [transgressors] have defeated the law and outrun native punishment, though they can outstrip men, they have no wings to fly from God”; Henry VI, 2d part, 5:2—“Can we outrun the heavens?” Addison, Cato: “It must be so,—Plato, thou reasonest well.—Else whence this pleasing hope, this fond desire, This longing after immortality? Or whence this secret dread and inward horror Of falling into naught? Why shrinks the soul Back on herself and startles at destruction? 'Tis the divinity that stirs within us, 'Tis Heaven itself that points out a hereafter, And intimates eternity to man.”
Gildersleeve, in The Independent, March 30, 1899—“Plato in the Phædo argues for immortality from the alternation of opposites: life must follow death as death follows life. But alternation of opposites is not generation of opposites. He argues from reminiscence. But this involves pre-existence and a cycle of incarnations, not the immortality which we crave. The soul abides, as the idea abides, but there is no guarantee that it abides forever. He argues from the uncompounded nature of the soul. But we do not know the soul's nature, and at most this is an analogy: as soul is like God, invisible, it must like God abide. But this is analogy, and nothing more.”William James, Will to Believe, 87—“That our whole physical life may lie soaking in a spiritual atmosphere, a dimension of being which we at present have no organ for apprehending, is vividly suggested to us by the analogy of the life of our domestic animals. Our dogs, for example, are in our human life, but are not of it. They bite, but do not know what it means; they submit to vivisection, and do not know the meaning of that.”