Creation or Evolution? A Philosophical Inquiry

by George Ticknor Curtis

Kosmicos. You have gone over a good deal of ground, but now what do you infer from all this, supposing that you have taken a right view of the facts?

Sophereus. I infer that, as in the social phenomena there are products and effects which have owed their existence to human will and direct human action, so, in other departments, for example, in the domain which is called Nature, and which is out of the sphere of human agency and human force, it is reasonable to conclude that there are products and effects which must have owed their existence to a will and a power capable of conceiving and producing them. And this is what leads me, as I was led in the examination of the solar system, to the idea of a Supreme Being, capable of producing those objects in nature which are so varied, so complex, so marvelously constructed, so nicely adapted to the conditions of each separate organism, that if we attribute their existence to any intelligent power, it must be to a power of infinite capacities, since nothing short of such capacities could have conceived and executed them.

Kosmicos. You have now come to the very point at which I have been expecting to see you arrive, and at which I will put to you this question: Why do you personify the power to which you trace these products in the natural world? Substitute for the term God, or the Creator, the power of Nature. You then have a force that is not only immense, but is in truth without any limit—a force that embraces everything, gives life to everything, is at once cause and effect, is incessantly active and inexhaustible. It commands all methods, accomplishes all objects, and uses time, space, and matter as its means. Why do you personify this all-pervading and sufficient power of Nature? Why make it a being, a deity, when all you know is that it is a power? "Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the world?" is a question that God is supposed to have asked of Job; and it simply shows that Job had been traditionally taught to believe that there is such a being as God, and that that being laid the foundations of the world. Substitute Nature in the question, let Nature ask the question, and it is just as pertinent, and involves the same problem of human existence. Where was man when Nature began to exhibit that power which has evolved all things that we see out of the primeval nothingness?

Sophereus. Well, here I must say that you have left out certain ideas that are essential to all true reasoning on this subject. Power without a guide, power without control, power without a determining will, power that acts without a volition which determines the how and the when, is a thing that I can not conceive. I thought that in our former conversation, when we were considering the solar system, you conceded that power, as something abstracted from substance or its properties, was a logically necessary conception.

Kosmicos. I did. But I did not concede that power must be converted into a person. You must not misunderstand me. It certainly is my idea that power is a thing to be contemplated by itself; and we are surrounded everywhere by its manifestations. But it is not my idea that it is held and exercised by the being called God, or by any being. We only know of it by its effects; and these show that Nature is, after all, both cause and effect, manner and execution, design and product. You can go no farther. You can not go behind Nature and find a being who sat in the heavens and laid the foundations of the world, unless you mean to accept a story which wise men have at last abandoned along with many kindred beliefs which came from the ages of the greatest ignorance.

Sophereus. Pardon me: the question that was put to Job has more than one aspect. But I have considered the narrative that is found in the first chapter of Genesis only as a hypothesis to be weighed with other hypotheses of the origin of the world and its inhabitants. I have studied the phenomena to which you give the name of Nature, and I will tell you what seems to me to be a postulate necessary to be carried into that study. I have observed that in the works of man two things are apparent: One is, that power is exercised; the other is, that the exercise of the power is always accompanied by a determining will, which decides that the power shall be exerted, or that it shall be deferred, or that it shall be applied variously as respects the mode and the time. In human hands, power is not illimitable, but within certain limitations it may be exercised, and it is always under the guidance of a will. A man determines to build a house; he decides on its dimensions, and when he will begin to erect it. A general determines to attack the enemy on a certain day, and he marshals his forces accordingly. A people determine to change their government, and they decide what their new government shall be. An artist determines to paint a certain picture, and he paints it. Whenever we see human power exercised, so that we can connect product and power, the power itself is put in motion by an intelligent will. I say, therefore, that the idea of power without a controlling will, without a determining design, is inconceivable: for I am obliged to draw my conclusions from what I observe, and certainly the phenomena of society do not present any instances of a product resulting from an exercise of power without a determination to exercise it. Power diffused, power without guidance, power moving by its own volition and without the volition of any intelligent being, is not exhibited in the works of man.

Kosmicos. But we are now dealing with the works of Nature; and the question is, whether the power that is manifest in Nature is, to adopt your language, under the control or guidance of a being who is something other than the power itself. You must remember that this is a domain in which you can see nothing but products and effects. You must also remember that if the immensity and variety of those products and effects lead to the conclusion that the power transcends all human faculty, is superhuman, and, so far as we can tell, boundless, all that we can know is that the power itself is illimitable. The quality of an infinite and illimitable capacity may be imputed to the power of Nature, because a power without limit seems necessary to the production of such effects as we see. But here we must stop. We have no warrant for believing that the power which we trace in the phenomena of Nature is held and controlled by a person, as man holds and controls the power which he exercises with his hands. What we see in Nature is the exercise of an immense and apparently boundless power. But the imputation of that power to a being distinct from the power itself, is a mere exercise of the human imagination, without any proof whatever. See how this imagination has worked at different periods. Monotheism and polytheism are alike in their origin. The one has imputed to different beings all the phenomena in the different departments of Nature, one being having the charge and superintendence of one department and another being having another department. Good and evil have thus been parceled out to different deities or demons. On the other hand, monotheism attributes all to some one being, and his existence is no more rational than the existence of the whole catalogue of the mythologies of all antiquity, or the stupid beliefs of the present barbarous tribes. But Nature is a great fact, or rather a vast store-house of facts, which we can study; and what we learn from it is that there is a power which Nature is constantly exerting, which is without any assignable limit, which is itself both cause and effect, and beyond this we can not go.

Sophereus. Let us see if you are correct. In the first place, do you not observe that the tendency of mankind to personify the powers of Nature is one of the strongest proofs of the logical necessity for an interpretation which seeks for an intelligent being of some kind as the actor in the production of the phenomena? It is the fashion, I find, among a certain class of philosophers, to impute this propensity to the proneness of the human mind toward superstitious beliefs; to the mere effect of poetical or imaginary temperament in certain races of men, or to fear in other races; or to a vague longing for some superior being who can sympathize with human sorrows or assist human efforts. Something of all these influences has, no doubt, in different degrees and in various ways, worked itself into the religious beliefs of mankind. But neither any one of them, nor the whole of them, will satisfactorily account for either polytheism or monotheism. We must go deeper. There has been an unconscious reasoning at work, more or less unconscious, which has led to the conclusion that power, the manifestation of power, necessarily implies that the power is held and wielded by some intelligent being. The beliefs of mankind, whether embracing one such being or many, have not been the mere results of superstition, or fear, or longing for divine sympathy, or for superhuman companionship or protection. Those beliefs owe as much to the reasoning powers of mankind as they do to the influence of imagination. In many ages there have been powerful intellects, which have been free from the influence of superstition or fancy, and which have recognized the logical necessity for a conception of power as a force that must be under the guidance and control of intellect. While the popular belief has not attained this conviction by the same conscious and logically conducted process of reasoning, it has been unconsciously led through the same process, by what is open to the observation of human faculties, even in the less civilized portions of the human race. The savage who is sufficiently raised above the brute creation to exercise his own will and intelligence in the pursuit of his game, or in building his wigwam, or in fighting his enemy, knows that he exercises a power that is under his own control; and, as soon as he begins to observe the phenomena of Nature, he conceives of some being who holds a like power over the material universe, and whom he begins to personify, to propitiate, and to worship. This is the result of reasoning: feeble in some cases, but in all cases the intellectual process is the same. Now let us see whether this process is a sound one. Are you sure that you are correct in saying that the power of Nature is without limit? Is there a single force in Nature, a single property of matter, or any sequence of natural events, that is not circumscribed? Do not the very regularity and uniformity of the phenomena of Nature imply that some authority has said, from the beginning, Thus far shalt thou go and no farther? You surely do not imagine that the law of universal gravitation made itself, or that it settled itself into an exact and invariable method of action by the mere force of habit, beginning without prescribed and superimposed limits, and finally resulting in a fixed rule which never changes. You do not imagine that the mysterious, impalpable motion to which is now given the name of electricity, created for itself, as a matter of habit, the perpetual tendency to seek an equilibration of the quantity accumulated in one body with the quantity that is contained in another, by transmission through intermediate bodies; or that it established for itself the conditions which make one substance a better conducting medium than another. You do not suppose, I take it, that certain particles of matter adopted for themselves a capacity to arrange themselves in crystals of certain fixed combinations and shapes, and that other particles of matter did not choose to take on this habit. All these forces, powers, and tendencies are of very great extent, much beyond any that man can exercise; but they all have their limitations, their prescribed and invariable methods of action; they all act as if they have been commanded to act in a certain way and to a certain extent, and not as if they have chosen for themselves both method and scope. Now, is it not a rational deduction that what is really illimitable is not the power of Nature, but the power which made Nature what it is? Is it not a necessary conclusion that, inasmuch as all Nature acts within certain limits, stupendous and minute and varied as the products or effects may be, there must have been behind Nature a power that could and did prescribe the methods, the limitations, the lines within which Nature was to move and act? You can not put into the mouth of Nature the question, Where wast thou (Man) when I laid the foundations of the world? without suggesting the retort, "Where wast thou (Nature) when the foundations of the world were laid?" And this question Nature can no more answer, for itself, than man can answer for himself when the question is put to him. Each must answer, I was nowhere—I did not exist. Each must answer, There was a power which called me into being, which prescribed the conditions of my existence, which gave me the capacities that I possess, which ordained the limitations within which I was to act.

Kosmicos. And all this you derive from the fact that a being whom we call Man has some power over matter; that he has an intelligent faculty by which he can do certain things with matter, and that he actually does produce certain concrete forms of new things that he did not find made to his hand. Is this the basis of your reasoning about the origin of Nature?

Sophereus. It is, and I will tell you why. Man is the one being on this earth in whom we find an intelligent will and constructive faculty united, to a degree which shows a power of variation and execution superior to that of all other beings of whose actions we have the direct evidence of our senses. We might select one or more of the inferior animals, and find in them a strong constructive faculty; but we do not find it accompanied by a power of variation and adaptation that is equal to that of man in degree, or that is probably the same in kind. I will not insist on the distinction between reason and instinct, but I presume you will admit that, when we compare the constructive faculty of man and that of the most ingenious and wonderfully endowed animal or insect, the latter acts always under an implanted impulse, which we have no good ground for regarding as of the same nature as man's reasoning power, however striking may be the products. When, therefore, we select the human power of construction or creation as the basis of reasoning upon the works of Nature, we resort to a being in whom that power is the highest of which we have direct evidence. In the works of man we have direct and palpable proof that the phenomena—the products of human skill and human force—are brought about by the faculties of an intelligent and reasoning being. If we dig into the earth and find there a statue, an implement, or a weapon, we do not hesitate to conclude that the spot was once inhabited by men, just as surely as we should conclude the same thing if we found there human bones. The world, above-ground and below-ground, is full of concrete objects that we know must have been fashioned by human skill, guided by human intelligence. This intelligence, this intellect, is not matter; it is a being; it is a person. It is not a force, acting without consciousness; it is a being wielding a force which is under the control of volition. The force and the volition are both limited, but within the limitations they constitute the power of man. Pass, then, to the works of Nature, or to what you call the power of Nature. As, in the case of man, you can not conclude that he created for himself his own faculties, that he prescribed for himself the limitations of his power over matter, or that he formed those limitations as mere matters of habit, or that it was from habit alone that he derived his great constructive powers, so, in studying the works of Nature, you must conclude that some intelligent being made the laws of matter and motion, prescribed the unvarying order and method of action, laid down the limitations, originated the properties, and, in so doing, acted by volition, choice, and design. The distinction, as I conceive, between man and Nature is, that there has been bestowed on man, in a very inferior degree, a part of the original power of creation. On Nature there has been bestowed none of this power. As we find that the existence of man as an intelligent being, endowed with certain high faculties, among which is a certain degree of the power of creating new objects, can not be accounted for without the hypothesis of a creator, still less can we account for the existence and phenomena of Nature, which has in itself no degree of the creating power, without the same hypothesis.