Creation or Evolution? A Philosophical Inquiry

by George Ticknor Curtis

However wild and fantastic may be the idea which the savage conceives of a being stronger and wiser than himself; however groveling and sensual may be his conception of the form, or attributes, or action of that being, he is, when he strives after the comprehension of his deity, engaged in the same intellectual effort that is made by the most civilized and cultivated of mankind, when, speculating upon the origin of the human soul, or its relation to the universe, or the genesis of the material world, they reach the sublime conception of an infinite God, the creator of all other spiritual existences and of all the forms of animal life, or when they end in the theory that there is no God, or in that other theory which supposes that what we call the creation, man included, is an evolution out of primordial matter, which has been operated upon by certain fixed laws, without any special interposition of a creating power, exerted in the production of the forms of animal life that now inhabit this earth, or ever have inhabited it. In the investigation of these contrasted theories, it is necessary to remember that the faculties of the human mind are essentially the same in all conditions of civilization or barbarism; that they differ only in the degree of their growth, activity, and power of reasoning, and therefore that there must be a common standard to which to refer all beliefs. The sole standard to which we can refer a belief in anything is its rationality, or a comparison between that which is believed and that which is most probable, according to the power of human reason to weigh probabilities. In the untutored and uncultivated savage, this power, although it exists, is still very feeble; partly because it is exercised upon only a few objects, and partly because the individual has comparatively but little opportunity to know all the elements which should be taken into account in determining a question of moral probabilities.

In the educated and cultivated man this power of judging probabilities, of testing beliefs by their rationality, is carried, or is capable of being carried, to the highest point of development, so as to comprehend in the calculation the full elements of the question, or at least to reduce the danger of some fatal omission to the minimum. It is, of course, true that the limited range of our faculties may prevent a full view of all the elements of any question of probability, even when our faculties have attained the highest point of development experienced by the age in which we happen to live. This renders the rationality of any hypothesis less than an absolutely certain test of truth. But this rationality is all that we have to apply to any question of belief; and if we attend carefully to the fact that moral probabilities constitute the groundwork of all our beliefs, and note the mental processes by which we reach conclusions upon any question depending upon evidence, we shall find reason to regard this power of testing beliefs by a conformity between the hypotheses and that which is most probable to be the most glorious attribute of the human understanding, as it is unquestionably the safest guide to which we can trust ourselves.

It may be that, while philosophers will not object to my definition of rationality, churchmen will ask what place I propose to assign to authority in the formation of beliefs. I answer, in the first place, that I am seeking to make myself understood by plain but reflecting and reasoning people. Such persons will perceive that what I mean by the rationality of a belief in any hypothesis is its fitness to be accepted and acted upon because it has in its favor the strongest probabilities of the case, so far as we can grasp those probabilities. I know of no other foundation for a belief in anything; for belief is the acceptance by the mind of some proposition, statement, or supposed fact, the truth of which depends upon evidence addressed to our senses, or to our intellectual perceptions, or to both. In the next place, in regard to the influence of authority over our beliefs, it is to be observed that the existence of the authority is a question to be determined by evidence, and this question, therefore, of itself involves an application of the test of rationality, or conformity with what is probable. But, assuming that the authority is satisfactorily established, it is not safe to leave all minds to the teaching of that authority, without the aid of the reasoning, which, independent of all authority, would conduct to the same conclusion. There are many minds to whom it is useless to say, You are commanded to believe. The question instantly arises, Commanded by whom, or what? And if the answer is, By the Church, or by the Bible, and the matter is left to rest upon that statement, there is great danger of unbelief. It is apparent that a large amount of what is called infidelity, or unbelief, now prevailing in the world, is due to the fact that men are told that they are commanded to believe, as if they were to be passive recipients of what is asserted, and because so little is addressed to their understandings.

I do not wish to be understood as maintaining that there is no place for authority in matters of what is called religious belief. I am quite sensible that there may be such a thing as authority even in regard to our beliefs; that it is quite within the range of possibilities that there should be such a relation between the human soul and an infinite Creator as to require the creature to accept by faith whatever a proved revelation requires that intelligent creature to believe. But, in view of the fact that what is specially called revealed religion is addressed to an intelligent creature, to whom the revelation itself must be proved by some evidence that will satisfy the mind, there is an evident necessity for treating the rationality of a belief in God as an independent question. In some way, by some process, we must reach a belief in the existence of a being before we can consider the claims of a message which that being is supposed to have sent to us. What we have to work with, before we can approach the teaching of what is called revealed religion, is the mind of man and the material universe. Do these furnish us with the rational basis for a belief in God?

And here I shall be expected to say what I mean by a belief in God. I have neither so little reverence for what I myself believe in, nor so little respect for my readers, as to offer them anything but the common conception of God. All that is necessary for me to do, in order to put my own mind in contact with that of the reader, is to express my conception of God just as it would be expressed by any one who is accustomed to think of the being called God by the Christian, the Jew, the Mohammedan, or by some other branches of the human race. These different divisions of mankind may differ in regard to some of the attributes of the Deity, or his dealings with men, or the history or course of his government of the world. But what is common to them all is a belief in God as the Supreme Being, who is self-existing and eternal, by whose will all things and all other beings were created, who is infinite in power and wisdom and in goodness and benevolence. As an intellectual conception, this idea of a Supreme Being, one only God, who never had a beginning and can have no end, and who is the creator of all other beings, excludes, of course, the polytheism of the ancient civilized nations, or that of the present barbarous tribes; and it especially excludes the idea of what the Greeks called Destiny, which was a power that governed the gods as well as the human race, and was anterior and superior to Jove himself. The simple conception of the one God held by the Christian, the Jew, or the Mohammedan, as the First Cause of the universe and all that it embraces, creating all things and all other beings by his will, in contrast with the modern idea that they came into existence without the volition of a conscious and intelligent being making special creations, is what I present to the mind of the reader.

This idea of God as a matter of belief presents, I repeat, a question of moral probabilities. The existence of the universe has to be accounted for somehow. We can not shut out this inquiry from our thoughts. The human being who never speculates, never thinks, upon the origin of his own soul, or upon the genesis of this wondrous frame of things external to himself, or upon his relations to some superior being, is a very rare animal. If he is much more than an animal, he will have some idea of these things; and the theories by which some of the most cultivated and acute intellects of our race, from the widest range of accumulated physical facts and phenomena yet gathered, have undertaken to account for the existence of species without referring them to the volition of an infinite creator, are at once a proof of the universal pressure of the question of creation upon the human mind, and of the logical necessity for treating it as a question dependent upon evidence and probability.

I lay out of consideration, now, the longing of the human mind to find a personal God and Creator. This sentiment, this yearning for an infinite father, this feeling of loneliness in the universe without the idea of God, is certainly an important moral factor in the question of probability; but I omit it now from the number of proofs, because it is a sentiment, and because I wish to subject the belief in God as the Creator to the cold intellectual process by which we may discover a conformity between that hypothesis and the phenomena of Nature as a test of the probable truth. If such a conformity can be satisfactorily shown, and if the result of the process as conducted can fairly claim to be that the existence of God the Creator has by far the highest degree of probability above and beyond all other hypotheses that have been resorted to to account for our existence, the satisfaction of a moral feeling of the human heart may well become a source of happiness, a consolation in all the evils of this life, and a support in the hour of death.

But in this preliminary chapter I ought to state what I understand to be the scientific hypothesis or hypotheses with which I propose to contrast the idea of God as the creator of species by applying the test of probability. To discuss the superior claims of one hypothesis over another, without showing that there is a real conflict between them, would be to set up a man of straw for the sake of knocking it down as if it were a living and real antagonist. What I desire to do is not to aim at a cheap victory by attacking something that does not call for opposition; but it is to ascertain first whether there is now current any explanation or hypothesis concerning the origin of the creation, or anything that it contains, which rejects the idea of God as the creator of that which we know to exist and as it exists, and then to ascertain which of the two hypotheses ought to be accepted as the truth, because it has in its favor the highest attainable amount of probability. There is an amount of probability which becomes to us a moral demonstration, because our minds are so constituted that conviction depends upon the completeness with which the evidence in favor of one hypothesis excludes the other from the category of rational beliefs.

I pass by the common sort of infidelity which rejects the idea of an intelligent creator acting in any manner whatever, whether by special creations or by laws of development operating on some primordial form of animal life. But among the modern scientists who have propounded explanations of the origin of species, I distinguish those who do not, as I understand, deny that there was an intelligent Creator by whose will some form of animal life was originally called into being, but who maintain that the diversified forms of animal life which we now see were not brought into being by the special will of the Creator as we now know them, but that they were evolved, by a process called natural selection, out of some lower type of animated organism. Of this class, the late Mr. Darwin is a representative. There is, however, at least one philosopher who carries the doctrine of evolution much farther, and who, if I rightly understand him, rejects any act of creation, even of the lowest and simplest type of animal existence. This is Mr. Herbert Spencer—a writer who, while he concurs in Mr. Darwin's general theory of natural selection as the process by which distinct organisms have been evolved out of other organisms, does not admit of any primal organism as the origin of the whole series of animals and as the creation of an intelligent will.

It will be appropriate hereafter to refer to the doctrine of evolution as a means of accounting for the existence of the human mind. At present it is only necessary to say that I understand it to be maintained as the hypothesis which has the highest attainable amount of evidence in its favor, that distinct species of animals are not a creation but a growth; and also that the mind of man is not a special creation of a spiritual existence, but a result of a long process by which organized matter has slowly worked itself from matter into intellect. Wherever, for instance, these scientists may place the non-human primate, out of which man has been evolved by what is called natural selection, and whether they do or do not assume that he was a creation of an intelligent will, they do not, as I understand, claim that the primate was endowed with what we call intellect; so that at some time there was a low form of animal life without intellect, but intellect became evolved in the long course of countless ages, by the process of natural selection, through the improving conditions and better organization of that low animal which had no intellect. In other words, we have what the scientist calls the non-human primate, a low form of animal without intellect, but capable of so improving its own physical organization as to create for itself and within itself that essence which we recognize as the human mind. Here, then, there is certainly a theory, an hypothesis, which may be and must be contrasted with the idea that the mind of man is a spiritual essence created by the volition of some other being having the power to create such existences, and put into a temporary union with a physical organization, by the establishment of a mysterious connection which makes the body the instrument of the soul so long as the connection exists. If I have stated correctly the theory which assigns the origin of the human mind to the process of evolution, I have assuredly not set up a man of straw. I stand confronted with an hypothesis which directly encounters the idea that the human intellect is a creation, in the sense of a direct, intelligent, conscious, and purposed production of a special character, as the human mind and hand, in the production of whatever is permitted to finite capacities, purposely creates some new and independent object of its wishes, its desires, or its wants. The human mind, says the scientist, was not created by a spiritual being as a spiritual existence independent of matter, but it grew out of matter, that was at first so organized that it did not manifest what we call intellect, but that could so improve its own organization as to evolve out of matter what we know as mind.