Creation or Evolution? A Philosophical Inquiry

by George Ticknor Curtis

I have thus discriminated between what we do and what we do not think of, when we think of an existence beyond phenomena, but which we deduce from phenomena. This is a most necessary discrimination; for, in thinking of the existence, we do not try to think how it came to be an existence. We think only of the existence; and we deduce it from our observation and study of phenomena, which teach us that they must have had an actor, an author, a producer, and that they did not produce or create themselves.

It remains for me to advert to Mr. Spencer's theory of the origin of the religious consciousness, or the origin of the idea of supernatural beings, and hence of one highest supernatural being. This is his ghost-theory. He has recently told us that in his "Descriptive Sociology"—a work commenced in 1867, and which preceded his "Principles of Sociology" (written in 1874)—he caused to be gathered adequate materials for generalization, consisting of a great number of excerpts from the writings of travelers and historians who have given accounts of the religious beliefs of the uncivilized races. He numbers 697 of these extracts which refer to the ghost-theory, and only 87 which refer to fetichism. This great ratio of eight to one he considers overwhelming proof that the ghost-theory, as opposed to fetichism, is sustained by the beliefs of a vast majority of the uncivilized races. What if it is? What is the ghost-theory, and what is fetichism, as the chief source and origin of religion? Mr. Spencer, in his recent article, explains fetichism as most persons understand it, namely, the worship of inanimate objects, or belief in their supernatural powers. The ghost-theory, which his 697 extracts illustrate, is "the belief in a wandering double, which goes away during sleep, or fainting, and deserts the body for a longer period at death; a double which can enter and possess other persons, causing disease, epilepsy, insanity, etc., which gives rise to ideas of spirits, demons, etc., and which, originates propitiation and worship of ghosts."[100] Further on, he reiterates his ghost-theory as the origin of religious beliefs, and explains it thus:

Setting out with the statement that "unlike the ordinary consciousness, the religious consciousness is concerned with that which lies beyond the sphere of sense," I went on to show that the rise of this consciousness begins among primitive men with the belief in a double belonging to each individual, which, capable of wandering away from him during life, becomes his ghost or spirit after death; and that from this idea of a being eventually distinguished as supernatural, there develop, in course of time, the ideas of supernatural beings of all orders up to the highest. Mr. Harrison has alleged that the primitive religion is not belief in and propitiation of the ghost, but is worship of "physical objects treated frankly as physical objects" (p. 498). That he has disproved the one view and proved the other, no one will, I think, assert. Contrariwise, he has given occasion for me to cite weighty authorities against him.

Next it was contended that in the assemblage of supernatural beings thus originating in each tribe, some, derived from chiefs, were superior to others; and that, as the compounding and recompounding of tribes gave origin to societies having social grades and rulers of different orders, there resulted that conception of a hierarchy of ghosts or gods which polytheism shows us. Further it was argued that while, with the growth of civilization and knowledge, the minor supernatural agents became merged in the major supernatural agent, this single great supernatural agent, gradually losing the anthropomorphic attributes at first ascribed, has come in our days to retain but few of them; and, eventually losing these, will then merge into a consciousness of an Omnipresent Power to which no attributes can be ascribed. This proposition has not been contested.

Without entering into any consideration of what Mr. Harrison has disproved or proved, as between fetichism and the ghost-theory, I will now ask why the beliefs of the uncivilized races, or of the primitive men, should be regarded as important evidence of the origin of beliefs among civilized and cultivated men? Is modern philosophy, in accounting for or justifying the belief in a Supreme Being which is held to-day by most of the cultivated and educated part of mankind, to assign its origin to the primitive and uncivilized men? Is the whole idea of a supernatural being to be regarded as traditionally handed down from our barbarian ancestors? Is there no other source from which we can derive that idea? Are we none of us capable of finding for ourselves rational grounds of belief in a supernatural agent, deducing his existence from a study of nature? Or must we trace this belief back through the ages until we arrive at an origin which we shall of course despise? What has philosophy to do now with "the primitive religion"? Is there nothing that science and reason and disciplined methods of thought and sound deduction can teach us? Are we to throw away all the proofs which nature spreads before us, and for the investigation of which we have accumulated so many facilities, and turn to the beliefs of uncivilized men? Are the conceptions of supernatural beings, to which a barbarian attained, to be taken as the origin of the conception of a personal God to which an educated philosopher can now attain? And because of the inadequate and childish superstitions of the past, and of their growth into a belief of one supreme supernatural agent—whatever that idea of him may have been—is the consciousness which we have of a personal God to be hereafter merged into a consciousness of an Omnipresent Power to which no attributes can be ascribed?

It should seem that the mode in which philosophy, after it came to be cultivated by civilized thinkers and observers, freed itself first from fetichism and the ghost-theory and all the beliefs of polytheism, next from physical agents as the causes of all phenomena, and finally attained an independent conception of a First Cause as a supreme personal intelligence and power, is worthy of some consideration.

In the first chapter of this work, borrowing from the English scholar and critic, Mr. Grote, I have given a condensed account of some of the systems of Greek philosophy which began in the first half of the sixth century before Christ, and extended down to Plato, whose life was embraced in 427-347 of the ante-Christian era. About 150 B. C., the Greek philosophy, and especially the speculations of Plato, encountered at Alexandria the monotheism of the Hellenizing Jews.[101] This history of Greek philosophy, as developed by Mr. Grote, shows that the struggle against polytheistic agencies, as the causes of natural phenomena, began with efforts to find purely physical agencies; that this struggle, in spite of the surrounding beliefs in a multitude of supernatural beings of different orders, was long continued, and gave rise to a most remarkable variety of scientific explanations: that it passed through an extraordinary number of physical theories, until at length in Plato there was developed the idea of a distinct personal constructive actor, the Demiurgus, a being to whom, whether intended by Plato as a philosophical myth, or as an entity in which he had something of faith or conviction, he assigned the formation of his Kosmos. With characteristic acumen, the English commentator points out Plato's skill in eluding the possible charge of infidelity to the established religion of Athens, while he at the same time propounded the existence of a personal First Cause that was in a striking degree inconsistent with the popular faith. The whole course of this history of Greek speculation evinces that from an early period the Greek philosophers were utter skeptics in regard to the popular religion and the poetic traditions; that they not only did not derive anything from the primitive religion, from fetichism, from the ghost-beliefs of their barbarian ancestors—if their ancestors had such beliefs—or from their heroic ages, or from the multitudinous gods of the popular theology and the popular worship, or from the old poetical imagery, but that they strove to get away from all these sources, and to construct theories of the universe that would explain the ultimate cause or causes in a very different manner. The earliest Greek speculators got no further in their theories than the construction of systems of physical agencies, or agencies that stood to them in the quality of physical actors. Plato, on the other hand, resorted to the conception of a supreme personal actor.

Mr. Grote has further mentioned a very striking fact, which is, that before the Christian era, the Demiurgus of Plato was received by the Hellenizing Jews at Alexandria as a conception kindred to the God of Moses. His statement, in substance the same as that previously made by a Continental critic, Gfrörer, is so interesting and important that I quote his words: "But though the idea of a pre-kosmic Demiurgus found little favor among the Grecian schools of philosophy before the Christian era, it was greatly welcomed among the Hellenizing Jews at Alexandria, from Aristobulus (about B. C. 150) down to Philo. It formed the suitable point of conjunction between Hellenic and Judaic speculation. The marked distinction drawn by Plato between the Demiurgus, and the constructed or generated Kosmos, with its in-dwelling gods, provided a suitable place for the Supreme God of the Jews, degrading the pagan gods by comparison. The 'Timæus' was compared with the book of Genesis, from which it was even affirmed that Plato had copied. He received the denomination of the Atticising Moses—Moses writing in Attic Greek. It was thus that the Platonic 'Timæus' became the medium of transition from the polytheistic theology, which served as philosophy among the early ages of Greece, to the omnipotent monotheism to which philosophy became subordinated after the Christian era."[102]

Perhaps there is no more remarkable fact than this in the whole history of philosophical speculation. Possibly Mr. Spencer would say that it adds another proof to his ghost-theory. But the important fact is that Plato's Demiurgus partakes in no degree of the ghost idea, and, instead of being a modification of that idea, is an original and perfectly independent conception. The Demiurgus of Plato is not a chief spirit evolved in imagination out of a hierarchy of spirits. He is himself the originator and fashioner of the gods, of whom he makes use as ministers in the formation of the bodies of the primitive men, after he has himself formed the souls which are to inhabit them for a season.

It appears, by Mr. Grote's citations from Gfrörer, that the latter had previously noted what Aristobulus maintained one hundred and fifty years earlier than Philo, namely, that "not only the oldest Grecian poets, Homer, Hesiod, Orpheus, etc., but also the most celebrated thinkers, especially Plato, had acquired all their wisdom from a very old translation of the Pentateuch." Neither of these modern critics appears to have accepted the assertion of Aristobulus, and its intrinsic improbability is very great. Certainly the internal evidence of the "Timæus" negatives the assumption that Plato had seen the Pentateuch, for his Demiurgus is not the God of Moses, although it was very natural for the Alexandrian Jews to think they recognized a resemblance. Mr. Grote, moreover, seems to put this matter beyond doubt, for he says that the Platonic "Timæus" became the medium of transition from the polytheism of early Greece to the monotheism of the Christian era. This implies very clearly that Mr. Grote did not consider the Demiurgus of Plato to be either derived from the polytheism of the early Grecian ages, on the one hand, or from the Mosaic Jehovah, on the other hand, but that he considered it a conception which stood between them. The point of resemblance is in the idea of a divine and supreme personal actor in the production of phenomena.

It does not seem, therefore, that a philosopher at the present day is confined to the source of the primitive religion, be that source what it may. The primitive religion, whether its origin was fetichism or a belief in ghosts, has imposed no shackles upon our minds. The beliefs of the primitive men may have originated as Mr. Spencer supposes, but the question for us—revelation being laid aside—is just what it was for Plato, the difference being that our means of investigation are superior to his. The grounds of our belief in a personal God are not the same as those on which the uncivilized races formed first the idea of a wandering double emanating from the human body, then conceived of spirits or ghosts, next of different orders of spirits or ghosts, and finally of a chief and supreme spirit. Our materials for sound deduction are not the same as those of the primitive races of mankind, or of the uncivilized tribes of the present day. I have before remarked that the intellectual effort of a savage in striving for the idea of a deity is the same kind of effort as that of the civilized and educated man; but that the difference between them is in the growth and activity of the reasoning power, and in the materials on which it is exercised. While our barbarian predecessors lived in an age of ignorance, we live in an age of knowledge. We are surrounded by extraordinary discoveries, and are possessed of the means of still further research. They had almost no means for investigating physical phenomena. We are, or ought to be, disciplined reasoners. They, on the contrary, while able to reason correctly on a very few subjects, could not reason correctly on all subjects. We are, or ought to be, capable of subjecting the materials which the phenomena of nature spread before us, to sound processes of thought and to logical deductions. We are, or ought to be, capable of discriminating between that which is really inscrutable and that which is not so. We are, or ought to be, able to know when we are within the bounds of possible thought, and when we transcend them. We are, or ought to be, able to see that the existence of phenomena necessarily implies a causing power; that when the phenomena are such as we know that man produces, the idea of an intelligent personal actor is both a legitimate deduction and a perfectly appreciable subject of thought. Are we not entitled to apply the same reasoning to the phenomena of nature which we know that man did not produce? And when we so reason, do we borrow anything whatever from the primitive idea of ghosts or spirits, whether they are supposed to have first emanated from human bodies, or to reside in inanimate objects?