Creation or Evolution? A Philosophical Inquiry

by George Ticknor Curtis

There is a passage in one of the writings of Lord Macaulay in which that brilliant essayist maintained that natural theology is not a progressive science. Macaulay's tendency to paradox was often aggravated by the superficial way in which he used his multifarious knowledge. As in the course of this work I am about to do that which he regarded as idle, namely, to inquire whether natural religion, aside from revelation, is of any value as a means of reaching a belief in the existence and attributes of God and the immortality of man, I cite the passage in which Macaulay makes the assertion that natural theology has made no progress from the time of the Greek philosophers to the present day: "As respects natural religion, revelation being for the present altogether left out of the question, it is not easy to see that a philosopher of the present day is more favorably situated than Thales or Simonides. He has before him just the same evidences of design in the structure of the universe that the early Greeks had. We say just the same, for the discoveries of modern astronomers and anatomists have really added nothing to the force of that argument which a reflecting mind finds in every beast, bird, insect, fish, leaf, flower, and shell. The reasoning by which Socrates in Xenophon's hearing confuted the little atheist Aristophanes, is exactly the reasoning of Paley's 'Natural Theology.' Socrates makes precisely the same use of the statues of Polycletus and the pictures of Zeuxis which Paley makes of the watch. As to the other great question, the question what becomes of man after death, we do not see that a highly educated European, left to his unassisted reason, is more likely to be in the right than a Blackfoot Indian. Not a single one of the many sciences in which we surpass the Blackfoot Indians throws the smallest light on the state of the soul after the animal life is extinct. In truth, all the philosophers, ancient and modern, who have attempted without the aid of revelation to prove the immortality of man, from Plato down to Franklin, appear to us to have failed deplorably.

"Then, again, all the great enigmas which perplex the natural theologian are the same in all ages. The ingenuity of a people just emerging from barbarism is quite sufficient to propound those enigmas. The genius of Locke or Clarke is quite unable to solve them. It is a mistake to imagine that subtile speculations touching the Divine attributes, the origin of evil, the necessity of human actions, the foundation of moral obligation, imply any high degree of intellectual culture. Such speculations, on the contrary, are in a peculiar manner the delight of intelligent children and of half-civilized men. The number of boys is not small who, at fourteen, have thought enough on these questions to be fully entitled to the praise which Voltaire gives to Zadig: 'Il en savait ce qu'on a su dans tous les ages; c'est à dire, fort peu de chose.'

"The book of Job shows that, long before letters and arts were known to Ionia, these vexing questions were debated with no common skill and eloquence under the tents of the Idumean emirs; nor has human reason, in the course of three thousand years, discovered any satisfactory solution of the riddles which perplexed Eliphaz and Zophar. Natural theology, then, is not a progressive science."[3]

Here, in the space of two not very long paragraphs, is a multitude of allusions which evince the range of Lord Macaulay's reading, but which are employed, without very close thinking, in a quite inaccurate way, to sustain assertions that are not true. If he had said that a modern philosopher has before him in the structure of the universe not only all the same evidence of design which the early Greeks had, but a great deal more, he would have hit the exact truth. It is simple extravagance to say that modern astronomy has added nothing to the strength of the argument which shows the existence of a supreme lawgiver and artificer of infinite power and skill. What did the early Greeks know about the structure of the solar system, the law of universal gravitation, and the laws of motion? Compare the ideas entertained by the Greek philosophers of the phenomena of the universe with those which modern astronomy has enabled a modern philosopher to assume as scientific facts established by rigorous demonstration; compare what was known before the invention of the telescope with what the telescope has revealed; compare the progress that was made in Greek speculative philosophy from the time of Thales to the time of Plato, and then say whether natural religion had not made advances of the greatest importance even before modern science had multiplied the means for still greater progress. A brief summary of the Greek philosophy concerning the producing causes of phenomena will determine whether Lord Macaulay was right or wrong in the assertion that the "early Greeks" had as good means of making true deductions in natural theology as the means which exist to-day.

All scholars who have attended to the history of Greek speculation know that the Greeks held to the belief in polytheistic personal agents as the active producers of the phenomena of Nature. This was the system of Homer and Hesiod and the other old poets. This was the popular belief held throughout all the Hellenic world, and it continued to be the faith of the general public, not only after the different schools of philosophy had arisen, but down to and after the time when St. Paul stood on Mars Hill and told the men of Athens how he had found that they were in all things too superstitious. Thales, who flourished in the first half of the sixth century before Christ, was the first Greek who suggested a physical agency in place of a personal. He assumed the material substance, water, to be the primordial matter and universal substratum of everything in Nature. All other substances were, by transmutations, generated from water, and when destroyed they all returned into water. His idea of the earth was that it was a flat, round surface floating on the immense watery expanse or ocean. In this he agreed with the old poets; but he did not, like them, suppose that the earth extended down to the depths of Tartarus. The Thalesian hypothesis, therefore, rejected the Homeric Okeanus, the father of all things, and substituted for that personal agency the agency of one primordial physical substance, by its own energy producing all other substances. This is about all that is known of the philosophy of Thales, and even this is not known from any extant writing of his, but it is derived from what subsequent writers, including Aristotle, have imputed to him.[4] Why Lord Macaulay should have selected Thales as the Greek philosopher who was as favorably situated as a philosopher of the present day for dealing with questions of natural religion, is not very apparent. All that Thales did, assuming that we know what he did, was to strike out a new vein of thought, the direct opposite of the poetical and popular idea of the origin of phenomena.

From Thales to Plato, a century and a half intervened.[5] During this period there arose, according to Mr. Grote, twelve distinct schemes of philosophy, the authors of which that learned Englishman has enumerated, together with an admirable summary of their respective systems. From this summary certain things are apparent. All these philosophers, from Thales to Democritus, while each speculated upon Nature in an original vein of his own, endeavored to find an explanation or hypothesis on which to account for the production and generation of the universe by some physical agency apart from the mythical personifications which were believed in by the populace and assumed in the poetical theologies. Some of them, without blending ethics and theology in their speculations, adopted, as the universal and sufficient agents, the common, familiar, and pervading material substances, such as water, fire, air, etc.; others, as Pythagoras and his sect, united with ethical and theological speculations the idea of geometrical and arithmetical combinations as the primal scientific basis of the phenomena of Nature. But what was common to all these speculations was the attempt to find a scientific basis on which to explain, by physical generation, by transmutation and motion from place to place, the generation of the Kosmos, to take the place of generation by a divine personal agency or agencies. But while these speculations were of course unsuccessful, their abundance and variety, the inventive genius which they exhibit, the effort to find a scientific basis apart from the popular and poetic belief in a multitude of personal and divine agencies, constitute, as Mr. Grote has well said, "one of the most memorable facts in the history of the Hellenic mind"; and "the mental effort required to select some known agency and to connect it by a chain of reasoning with the result, all this is a new phenomenon in the history of the human mind." Such an amount of philosophical speculations could not go on for a century and a half without enlarging the means for dealing with questions of natural theology; for they very nearly exhausted the "causings and beginnings" which could be assigned to regular knowable and predictable agencies; and these they carried through almost every conceivable form of action by which such agencies could be supposed to operate. While the authors of these systems of philosophy were constantly hampered by the popular and poetic conceptions of a diversified and omnipresent polytheistic agency, a belief which, as Mr. Grote has said, was "eminently captivating and impressive," and which pervaded all the literature of their time, their speculations accumulated a vast fund of ideas in the sphere of scientific explanations, which, although unsatisfactory to modern science, became, when we reach Plato, the principal influence which led him to revert to the former idea of a divine agency, intentionally and deliberately constructing out of a chaotic substratum the system of the Kosmos; and which also led him to unite with it the idea of a mode in which it acted on and through the primordial elements of matter.

So that, from the class of philosophers to whom Lord Macaulay presumably referred as "the early Greeks," down to and including Plato, there was a great advance. The earlier Greek philosophers did not divide substance from its powers or properties, nor did they conceive of substance as a thing acted upon by power, or of power as a thing distinct from substance. They regarded substance, some primordial substance, with its powers and properties, as an efficient and material cause, and as the sole cause, as a positive and final agent. They did not seek for a final cause apart from the substances which they supposed to be the sole agents operating to produce important effects. But, inasmuch as they carried their various theories through nearly the whole range of possible speculation, they enabled Plato and Aristotle to see that there was a fundamental defect in their reasoning; that there must be an abstract conception of power as something distinct from substance or its properties. It was by Plato and Aristotle that this abstract conception was reached, of course without any influence of what we regard as revelation; and, although they did not always describe correctly the mode in which this power had acted, their perception of the logical necessity for such a final cause marks a great progress in philosophical speculation. It entirely refutes Lord Macaulay's assertion that natural theology is not a progressive science. It had made great progress from Thales to Plato; and while in a certain sense it is true that "a modern philosopher has before him just the same evidence of design in the structure of the universe which the early Greeks had"—that is, he has the same physical phenomena to observe—it is not true that the early Greeks did not develop conceptions of the origin of the universe valuable to their successors. Lord Macaulay should not have compared Thales with the modern philosopher, in respect of advantage of situation, but he should have compared the modern philosopher with Plato, and Plato with his predecessors; and if he had done this, he could not have asserted with any show of truth that natural theology has made no advance as a science from the time of Thales, the Milesian philosopher, and Simonides, the poet, to the present day. I shall have occasion hereafter to speak of the masterly intellectual power by which Plato wrought out his conception of a formative divine agency in the production of the Kosmos, and the bold and original speculation by which he avoided the charge of infidelity toward the established religion of his countrymen.

When I come to speak of what modern astronomy has done in furnishing us with new means of sound philosophical speculation on the being, attributes, and methods of God, it will be seen whether Lord Macaulay is correct in the assertion that it has added nothing to the argument. At present I will briefly advert to what the "early Greeks," or any of the Greeks, knew of the structure of the solar system. We learn, from a work which dates from nearly the middle of the second century of the Christian era, what was the general conception of the solar system among the ancients, including the Greeks. This work is known as the "Almagest" of Ptolemy, and the name of the "Ptolemaic System" has been given to the theory which he describes. This theory was common to all the ancient astronomers, Ptolemy's statement of it being a compendium of what they believed. Its principal features are these: 1. The heavens are a vast sphere, in which the heavenly bodies are set, and around the pole of this sphere they revolve in a circle every day. 2. The earth is likewise a sphere, and is situated in the center of the celestial plane as a fixed point. The earth having no motion, and being in the center of all the motions of the other bodies, the diurnal revolutions of those bodies are in a uniform motion around it. 3. The sun, being one of the heavenly bodies making a revolution around the earth, was supposed to be placed outside of the position of Venus in the heavenly sphere. The order of the Ptolemaic system was thus: The moon was first, being nearest to the earth; then came Mercury and Venus, the sun being between Venus and Mars. Beyond Mars came Jupiter and Saturn. Plato's arrangement was in one respect different, his order being the moon, the sun, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. But this ideal heavenly sphere, with the earth in the center of all the revolutions of the other bodies, and remaining quiescent—a theory which was common to all the ancient astronomers—was the result of observing the motions of the heavenly bodies as they appear to a spectator on the earth. Such a spectator would have this appearance of a celestial sphere presented to him wherever he might be; and, judging from the apparent motions of the heavenly bodies relative to his own position at the center, he would conclude that the earth is at that center, and that it remains at rest, supported on nothing. It required certain discoveries to explode this system of a celestial sphere. First came Copernicus, who, about the middle of the sixteenth century of our era, published his demonstrations, which convinced the world of two great propositions: 1. That the diurnal revolution of the heavens is nothing but an apparent motion, caused by the revolution of the earth on its own axis. 2. That the earth is but one of a group of planets, all of which revolve around the sun as a center. Next came Kepler, who, in the early part of the seventeenth century, recognizing the truth of the Copernican system, determined the three laws of planetary motion: 1. That the orbit of each planet is an ellipse, the sun being in one focus. 2. That as each planet moves around the sun, the line which joins it to the sun passes over equal areas in equal times. 3. That the square of the time of a planet's revolution around the sun is in proportion to the cube of its mean distance from the sun. These laws were discovered by Kepler as deductions made upon mathematical principles from observations which had to be carried on without the aid of the telescope, and without that knowledge of the general laws of motion which came later. Kepler's laws, although in the main correct, were subsequently found to be subject to certain deviations in the planetary motions. It was when Galileo, the contemporary of Kepler, who, if he was not the first inventor of the telescope, was the first to use it in astronomical observations, was able by means of it to discover the general laws of motion, that the substantial accuracy of Kepler's three laws could be proved, while at the same time the deviations from them were accounted for. Still, there was wanting the grand discovery, which would disclose the cause of these motions of the planets in elliptical orbits, and the relations between their distances and their times of revolution, and thus reduce the whole of the phenomena to a general law. Descartes, who flourished 1596-1650, first attempted to do this by his theory of Vortices. He supposed the sun to be immersed in a vast fluid, which, by the sun's rotation, was made to rotate in a whirlpool, that carried the planets around with it, the outer ones revolving more slowly because the parts of the ethereal fluid in which they were immersed moved more slowly. This was a reversion back to some of the ancient speculations. It was reserved for Newton to discover the law of universal gravitation, by which, in the place of any physical connection between the bodies of the solar system by any intervening medium, the force of attraction exerted by a larger body upon a smaller would draw the smaller body out of the straight line that it would pursue when under a projectile force, and would thus convert its motion into a circular revolution around the attracting body, and make the orbit of this revolution elliptical by the degree in which the attracting force varied in intensity according to the varying distance between the two bodies. When Newton's laws of motion were discovered and found to be true, the phenomena of the solar system were explained.

It may be interesting, before leaving for the present this branch of the subject, to advert more particularly to one of the philosophical systems of the Greeks, which, when compared with the discoveries of modern astronomy, illustrates the great addition that has been made to our means of sound speculation upon the origin of the material universe. I refer to the system of the Pythagoreans—one of the most remarkable instances of the invention of facts to fit and carry out a theory that can be found in the history of philosophy, although we are not without striking examples of this practice in modern speculations. It has already been seen that, during the whole period of Greek philosophy before the time of Plato, the problem was to find a primordial and universal agent by which the sensible universe was built up and produced; supplying, that is to say, the matter and force required for the generation of successive products.[6] It has been seen that the Thalesian philosophers undertook to solve this problem by the employment of some primordial physical substance, such as water, fire, air, etc. Pythagoras and his school held that the essence of things consisted in number; by which they did not mean simply that all things could be numbered, but they meant that numbers were substance, endowed with an active force, by which things were constituted as we know them. In the Pythagorean doctrine number was the self-existing reality; not, as in Plato's system of ideas, separate from things, but as the essence or determining principles of things, and having, moreover, magnitude and active force.[7] This remarkably subtle conception of an agent in the production of material things evinces the effort that was making, in a direction opposite to that of Thales and his immediate successors, to find a First Cause. It was carried out by the Pythagoreans in the movements of the heavenly bodies, in the works of human art, and in musical harmony; in all of which departments, according to Mr. Grote, they considered measure and number as the producing and directing agencies. We are here concerned only with their application of this theory to the celestial bodies. One of their writers is quoted by Mr. Grote as a representative of the school which was founded by Pythagoras (about 530 B. C.), and which extended into the Græco-Italian cities, where, as a brotherhood, they had political ascendency until they were put down and dispersed about 509 B. C.; but they continued for several generations as a social, religious, and philosophical sect. According to this writer (Philolaus), "the Dekad, the full and perfect number, was of supreme and universal efficacy as the guide and principle of life, both to the Kosmos and to man. The nature of number was imperative and law-giving, affording the only solution of all that was perplexing or unknown; without number all would be indeterminate and unknowable."

Accordingly, the Pythagoreans constructed their system of the universe by the all-pervading and producing energy of this primordial agent, Number, in the manner thus described by Mr. Grote (i, 12-15): "The Pythagoreans conceived the Kosmos, or the universe, as one single system, generated out of numbers. Of this system the central point—the determining or limiting One—was first in order of time and in order of philosophical conception. By the determining influence of this central constituted One, portions of the surrounding Infinite were successively attracted and brought into system: numbers, geometrical figures, solid substances were generated. But, as the Kosmos thus constituted was composed of numbers, there could be no continuum; each numeral unit was distinct and separate from the rest by a portion of vacant space, which was imbibed, by a sort of inhalation, from the infinite space or spirit without. The central point was fire, called by the Pythagoreans the Hearth of the Universe (like the public hearth or perpetual fire maintained in the prytaneum of a Grecian city), or the watch-tower of Zeus. Around it revolved, from west to east, ten divine bodies, with unequal velocities, but in symmetrical movement or regular dance. Outermost was the circle of the fixed stars, called by the Pythagoreans Olympus, and composed of fire like the center. Within this came successively, with orbits more and more approximating to the center, the five planets, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Venus, Mercury; next, the sun, the moon, and the earth. Lastly, between the earth and the central fire, an hypothetical body, called the Antichthon, or counter-earth, was imagined for the purpose of making up a total represented by the sacred number ten, the symbol of perfection and totality. The Antichthon was analogous to a separated half of the earth, simultaneous with the earth in its revolutions, and corresponding with it on the opposite side of the central fire. The inhabited portion of the earth was supposed to be that which was turned away from the central fire and toward the sun, from which it received light. But the sun itself was not self-luminous: it was conceived as a glassy disk, receiving and concentrating light from the central fire, and reflecting it upon the earth, so long as the two were on the same side of the central fire. The earth revolved in an orbit obliquely intersecting that of the sun, and in twenty-four hours, round the central fire, always turning the same side toward that fire. The alternation of day and night was occasioned by the earth being, during a part of such revolution, on the same side of the central fire with the sun, and thus receiving light reflected from him; and during the remaining part of her revolution on the side opposite to him, so that she received no light at all from him. The earth, with the Antichthon, made this revolution in one day; the moon, in one month; the sun, with the planets Mercury and Venus, in one year; the planets Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn in longer periods respectively, according to their distances from the center; lastly, the outermost circle of the fixed stars (the Olympus, or the Asslanes), in some unknown period of very long duration.