Creation or Evolution? A Philosophical Inquiry

by George Ticknor Curtis

This idea of a Supreme Being, possessed of the attributes of infinite power and wisdom, is one that our inquirer would have reached as a rational deduction from the operation of a law (gravitation) which must have had an author; from the structure of a mechanism so designed as to be governed successfully by that law, and from the execution of the law through such enormous spaces that nothing short of infinite power and wisdom could have produced the result.

At this stage of his investigations, our inquirer encounters a modern scientist. I shall take the liberty of coining convenient names for these two interlocutors: calling the one Sophereus, as representing the spirit of unprejudiced research in the formation of beliefs without the influence of previous teaching; and the other Kosmicos, as a representative of the dogmatic school of evolution and agnosticism.

Sophereus has imparted to his scientific friend the conclusions which he has thus far reached, concerning the existence and attributes of a supreme lawgiver and artificer, as deduced from the phenomena of the solar system. The discussion between them then proceeds as follows:

Kosmicos. I do not wish to convince you at present of my own views on this subject, but I put before you a difficulty which you ought to solve, if you can, to your own satisfaction, before you proceed farther. You have learned of the law of gravitation; and you have imagined a being who has established this and other laws by which matter is to be governed. To this being you have imputed certain personal attributes, which you call infinite power and boundless wisdom. Observe now that the laws to which you assign this origin are of perpetual duration; they have operated without change from the remotest period of their existence just as they operate now, and we have no reason to doubt that they will continue to operate in the same way through the indefinite future. They constitute the order of Nature. Now, you suppose a Supreme Being, who has established these invariable laws, but has not left them anything to do; has not left to them the production of the solar system, but has specially interposed, and in a supernatural mode of action has constructed the machine which has the sun for its center and the surrounding bodies which revolve about it. How can you suppose that the same being has acted in different ways? How can you suppose that the being who you imagine established the general laws of Nature and gave to them a fixed operation throughout the universe, so that they never would be suspended or interrupted, has gone aside from them, and made occasional constructions by special interpositions of his power? Is it not a contradiction to suppose that an Almighty Being, who must have acted by uniform methods without reference to occasions, has acted on certain occasions by special methods that were not uniform with his fixed laws? Does not this hypothesis imply that his fixed laws were insufficient for the purposes for which he designed them, and that he had to resort to other means? How do you get over this difficulty?

Sophereus. What you propound as a difficulty does not disturb me. I understand the distinction which you make between the natural and the supernatural. I can see in the solar system how the law of gravitation and all the other laws of motion operate; but I do not see, nor can you explain, how these laws, or the laws of chemical combination or any other laws, can have evolved the plan of the solar system out of a mass of fiery vapor. I can understand the enactment and establishment of laws of motion, of chemical combination, and of the mechanical action of different states of matter upon each other, to operate in fixed and invariable ways, in certain conditions. But I do not see that there is any interruption or displacement of these laws, after they are established, when an end that is to be accomplished calls for a complex system of new objects among which they are to operate. It is manifest that the question is whether the different bodies of the solar system have been formed and placed in their respective positions, according to a special design of their relative distances, magnitudes, and orbits, or whether these are the results of the operation of fixed laws, without any special interposition of a creating power. Astronomers have not explained how the latter hypothesis is anything more than a probable conjecture. It remains for me to consider whether the hypothesis of a special interposition, whereby the plan of the solar system has been made, is attended with the difficulty which you suggest. We are reasoning about a period of the remote past when this system of bodies did not exist, but when the general laws that were to govern all matter may be supposed to have been previously ordained. If we think of the solar system, conceived and projected by the Supreme Being, as a complex mechanism that was to exist in Nature, the occasion would be one calling for the exercise of infinite wisdom and power. The production of such a mechanism, to answer any ends for which it was intended that it should exist, implies attributes that transcend all our human experience of the qualities of power and wisdom. That it was an occasional exercise of power, in no way implies any irregularity or inconsistency of method, if the power was so exercised as to leave all the general laws of Nature in full operation, so that there would be no clashing between what you call the natural and the supernatural. I have first to ascertain what was the probably intended scope of the general laws which are supposed to have been ordained before the solar system came into existence. If it appears to have been the purpose of the constructor to have these laws work out this system of bodies without any special interposition and formative skill directly exercised, I need go no further. But I see no evidence of that purpose. No one has suggested anything but a theory on this subject, which is not supported by any satisfactory proofs. I am left, therefore, to the consideration of the question whether an act of special interposition, in the formation of a plan obviously calling for the exercise of infinite wisdom and power, is in any way inconsistent with the establishment of a system of laws which were to operate on these bodies and among them after they had come to exist. My conclusion, from what I have learned of the solar system, is, that in the exercise by the same being of the method which you call the natural, and the exercise of the method which you call the supernatural, there is no inconsistency; that each of the fixed laws of matter and motion was designed to have its own scope; and that each of them may well consist, within its limitations, with occasional exercises of power, for the production of objects that were to be operated upon by the laws, but of which they were not designed to be the producing cause. Thus it seems to me to be a rational conclusion that the law of gravitation, the general laws of motion, and all the other laws of matter, which preceded the existence of the solar system, were not designed to be the agents by which the plan of that system would be worked out, but that the plan was so formed and executed that the bodies composing it would be subject to the operation of laws enacted by the Infinite Will for the government of all the forms of matter. The question is, whether the plan of the solar system is due to the operation of the fixed laws, or to a special interposition; or, to state it in another way, whether the whole of the phenomena, the plan and arrangement of the solar system included, are to be referred to the operation of certain fixed laws as the producing agents, or whether some part of the phenomena, namely, the mechanism of the system, should be referred to the special interposition. I am taught, by the physics on which astronomers are now agreed, that gravitation is a force by which the particles of matter act on each other; that every particle of matter in the universe attracts every other particle with a force varying directly as their masses, and inversely as the square of the distance which separates them. This I understand to be the formula in which the law of universal gravitation is expressed. But, for the purpose of illustrating what I understand to be the operation of this force, I have constructed a diagram, in which two bodies are represented as A and B. From each of these bodies there radiates in all directions an attracting force, which acts directly upon every other body in the universe, and which is represented in the diagram by dotted lines. In the diagram, the bodies A and B are first supposed to be one thousand miles apart. A certain portion of the attracting rays proceeding from A would strike directly upon B. All the other rays proceeding in the same direction from A would pass on either side of B without striking it. If B is removed to the distance of two thousand miles from A, the sum total of the attractive force which A would exert upon B would be diminished by the square of the distance, because B would intercept just one fourth of the number of rays proceeding from A compared with the number which it intercepts when the two bodies are only one thousand miles apart; and the rays which B does not intercept would pass along through the realms of space, until they encountered some other body, on which they would exert a force that would follow the same law of diminution. In the diagram, the two bodies A and B may be single particles of matter or collections of particles; they are represented as cubes; but the law of direct action of the attracting force and the law of its diminution would be the same if the bodies were spheres or oblongs. The power of attraction which bodies exert upon each other resides in every individual particle of matter composing the body, and the attraction which that body exerts upon another body is the sum total of the attractions which proceed from all the particles composing the mass and which impinge upon that other body.

In the diagram the two bodies A and B are supposed to be of the same mass. If, as in the case of the sun and the earth, one of the bodies is of far greater mass than the other, then the attraction of the sun for the earth is the same as the attraction of the earth for the sun, because the action is mutual; but the sun, being the greater mass, tends, by reason of its correspondingly greater inertia, to remain comparatively stationary, or, in other words, it has a greater resistance to being pulled out of its normal position, while the earth, having less inertia, is more easily deflected from its straight course in which its momentum tends to carry it, and so travels in an orbit around the sun, the resisting or centrifugal pull of the earth, due to its inertia, exactly balancing the inward pull due to the mutual attraction. I understand that, besides the law of universal gravitation, there are two fundamental laws of motion. By one of these laws, if a body be set in motion and be acted on by no other than the projectile force, it will move forward in a straight line and with a uniform velocity forever. But by another law, if the moving body is acted on by another force than that which originally projected it in a straight line, it will deviate from that line in the direction of that other force and in proportion to it. If A, the earth, liable to be drawn toward B, the sun, by their mutual attraction, was originally projected into space, at a certain distance from the sun, by a force which would carry it on in a straight line, it would be acted on by two forces: the projectile force would cause it to move in a straight line; the force of the mutual attraction would cause it to deviate from that line in the direction of the sun. The result would be that the earth would be carried around the sun in a circular or an elliptical orbit. Every other planet in the solar system would be under the operation of the same compound forces governed by the same laws; and while the sun would exert upon each of them its force of attraction, and they would each exert upon the others an attractive force that would be diminished by the squares of their distances from one another, each of them would be deflected from the straight line that would have otherwise been the path of its motion, and the result would be a perpetual revolution around the body that could exert upon each just the amount of attraction requisite to overcome the projectile force by which it was first put in motion.

Kosmicos. You have made an ingenious explanation of the law of gravitation, which may or may not be correct. But now let me understand what you infer from this hypothesis, supposing it to be true. What should have prevented the law of gravitation and the laws of motion from working out this very system of bodies, by operating upon a mass of crude matter lying in the universe, supposing it to have been fiery vapor or anything else?

Sophereus. I have thus far arrived, by the aid of what astronomy teaches, at a complex system of physical laws, the law of universal gravitation, and the laws of motion. I must suppose that these laws had an intelligent author. I must suppose that they were enacted, in the same sense in which we speak of any rule of action ordained by a power competent to conceive of it and to put it into execution. To me, as I view the facts of the solar system, the idea that the law of gravitation and the laws of motion are to be regarded as mere phenomena of matter, or as qualities of matter according to which, from some inherent condition, it must act, does not explain the solar system. I can not explain to myself what I see, without asking myself how these qualities of matter came to exist. How came it to be a condition of all matter that its particles should attract each other by a certain force according to a certain rule? How came it to be a law of motion that bodies projected into space should continue to move on forever in a straight line, unless deviated from that line by some other force? To say that things happen, but that no power ever commanded them to happen; that things occur because they do occur, and not because some power has ordained that they shall occur, is to me an inconceivable kind of reasoning, if it be reasoning at all. Because men act or profess to act upon certain principles of moral conduct, I can not suppose that justice, and truth, and mercy are mere phenomena of human conduct, that they never had any origin as moral laws in the will of a lawgiver. For the same reason I can not suppose that the physical laws of matter, stupendous in their scope, and of unerring certainty in their operation, did not proceed from an enacting authority. In short, it seems to me that the conception of power, as something independent of the qualities of substance, is a logical necessity.

Kosmicos. I am not now trying to persuade you that the law of gravitation and the laws of motion did not have an intelligent author. For the purposes of the argument, I will concede that they were enacted, as you term it. You have explained your understanding of the operation of these; laws as they are expressed in the formula given by astronomers, and for the present I will assume that they operate in some such way. I will also concede that the idea of power in the abstract, as something independent of the qualities of substance, is necessary to the explanation of all physical phenomena. But I now recall your attention to the point which I originally suggested. Explain to me how it has happened that the being who you suppose established certain laws for the government of all matter has not allowed those laws to evolve out of diffused matter certain bodies which we find grouped together in the universe, but has specially interposed by another act, and constructed this system of bodies without the agency of his own laws. All that we know about the law of gravitation and the laws of motion we derive from observing the actions of these bodies which compose the solar system. We infer the existence of these laws from the actions of these bodies. Now tell me how you suppose that the same being who ordained these laws as fixed conditions to which matter was to be subjected, and made them to operate upon all matter, whether in a crude and unformed state or after it had become organized into bodies of definite shapes and dimensions, did not rely upon these inherent conditions of matter to produce those shapes and dimensions, but went to work by special interposition, and produced the mechanism of the solar system as a human artificer would make a machine of a corresponding character.