[3] There are no doubt ways of making Morality the law of the Universe without what most of us understand by Theism, though not without Religion, and a Religion of a highly metaphysical character; but because such non-theistic modes of religious thought exist in Buddhism, for instance, it does not follow that they are reasonable, and, at all events, they are hardly intelligible to most Western minds. Such non-theistic Religions imply a Metaphysic quite as much as Christianity or Buddhism. There have been Religions without the idea of a personal God, but never without Metaphysic, i.e. a theory about the ultimate nature of things.
[4] Tennyson's Wages.
[5] The doctrine of St. Thomas Aquinas is 'Cum possit Deus omnia efficere quae esae possunt, non autem quae contradictionem implicant, omnipotens merito dicitur.' (Summa Theol., Pars I. Q. xxv. art. 8.)
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LECTURE IV
DIFFICULTIES AND OBJECTIONS
In the present lecture I shall try to deal with some of the difficulties which will probably have been arising in your minds in the course of the last three; and in meeting them, to clear up to some extent various points which have been left obscure.
(1) Creation. I have endeavoured to show that the world must be thought of as ultimately an experience in the mind of God, parts of which are progressively communicated to lesser minds such as ours. This experience—both the complete experience which is in His own mind and also the measure of it which is communicated to the lesser minds—must be thought of as willed by God. At the same time I suggested as an alternative view that, even if we think of things as having an existence which is not simply in and for minds, the things must be caused to exist by a rational Will. Now the world, as we know it, consists of a number of changes taking place in time, changes which are undoubtedly represented in thought as changes happening to, or {88} accidents of, a permanent substance, whether (with the Idealist) we suppose that this substance is merely the object of Mind's contemplation, or whether (with the Realist) we think of it as having some sort of being independent of Mind. But what of the first of these events—the beginning of the whole series? Are we to think of the series of events in time as having a beginning and possibly an end, or as being without beginning or end? What in fact are we to make of the theological idea of Creation, often further defined as Creation out of nothing? It is often suggested both by Idealists and by Realists that the idea of a creation or absolute beginning of the world is unthinkable. Such a view seems to me to be a piece of unwarrantable a priori dogmatism—quite as much so as the closely connected idea that the Uniformity of Nature is an a priori necessity of thought. No doubt the notion of an absolute beginning of all things is unthinkable enough: if we think of God as creating the world at a definite point of time, then we must suppose God Himself to have existed before that creation. We cannot think of an event in time without thinking of a time before it; and time cannot be thought of as merely empty time. Events of some kind there must necessarily have been, even though those events are thought of as merely subjective experiences involving no relation to space. A beginning of existence is, {89} indeed, unthinkable. But there is no difficulty in supposing that this particular series of phenomena which constitutes our physical Universe may have had a beginning in time. On the other hand there is no positive evidence, for those who cannot regard the early chapters of Genesis as representing on such a matter anything but a primitive legend edited by a later Jewish thinker, that it had such a beginning. It is no doubt more difficult to represent to ourselves a beginning of space; and the notion of an empty space, eternally thought but not eternally filled up by any series of phenomena of the space-occupying kind, represents a rather difficult, though not (as it seems to me) an absolutely impossible conception. The question, therefore, whether there was a beginning of the series of events which constitute the history of our physical world must (so far as I can see) be left an open one.
Of course if the argument of Lord Kelvin be accepted, if he is justified in arguing on purely physical grounds that the present distribution of energy in the Universe is such that it cannot have resulted from an infinite series of previous physical changes, if Science can prove that the series is a finite one, the conclusions of Science must be accepted.[1] Metaphysic has nothing to say for or against such a view. That is a question of Physics on which {90} of course I do not venture to express any opinion whatever.
(2) The time-series. I am incompetent to pronounce an opinion on the validity of such arguments as Lord Kelvin's. But, however we decide this question, there will still remain the further and harder question, 'Is the series of all events or experiences, physical or psychical (not merely the particular series which constitutes our physical Universe), to be thought of as finite or infinite? On the one hand it involves a contradiction to talk of a time-series which has a beginning: a time which has no time before it is not time at all; any more than space with an end to it would be space. On the other hand, we find equally, or almost equally, unthinkable the hypothesis of an endless series of events in time: a series of events, which no possible enumeration of its members will make any smaller, presents itself to us as unthinkable, directly we regard it as expressing the true nature of a positive reality, and not as a mere result of mathematical abstraction. Here then we are presented with an antinomy—an apparent contradiction in our thought—which we can neither avoid nor overcome. It is one of the classical antinomies recognized by the Kantian Philosophy—the only one, I may add, which neither Kant himself nor any of his successors has done anything to attenuate or to remove. {91} Kant's own attempted solution of it involved the impossible supposition that the past has no existence at all except in so far as it is thought by some finite mind in the present. The way out of this difficulty which is popular with post-Kantian Idealists is to say that God is Himself out of time, and eternally sees the whole series at once. But, in the first place, that does not get over the difficulty: even if God does see the whole series at once, He must see it either as limited or as endless, and the old antinomy breaks out again when we attempt to think either alternative. And secondly, when you treat a temporal series as one which is all really present together—of course it may all be known together as even we know the past and the future—but when you try to think of God as contemplating the whole series as really present altogether, the series is no longer a time-series. You have turned it into some other kind of series—practically (we may say) into a spacial series. You have cut the knot, instead of unravelling it. I have no doubt that the existence of this antinomy does point to the fact that there is some way of thinking about time from which the difficulty disappears: but we are, so far as I can see, incompetent so to resolve it. Philosophers resent the idea of an insoluble problem. By all means let them go on trying to solve it. I can only say that I find no difficulty in showing the futility {92} of any solution of the time-difficulty which I have so far seen. For the present at least—I strongly suspect for ever—we must acquiesce on this matter in a reverent Agnosticism. We can show the absurdity of regarding time as merely subjective; we can show that it belongs to the very essence of the Universe we know; we can show that it is as 'objective' as anything else within our knowledge. But how to reconcile this objectivity with the difficulty of thinking of an endless succession no Philosopher has done much to explain. For religious purposes it seems enough to believe that each member of the time-series—no matter how many such events there may be, no matter whether the series be endless or not—is caused by God. The more reflecting Theologians have generally admitted that the act of divine Conservation is essentially the same as that of Creation. A God who can be represented as 'upholding all things by the power of his word' is a creative Deity whether the act of creation be in time, or eternally continuous, or (if there were any meaning in that phrase) out of time altogether.[2]