Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors

by James Freeman Clarke

This is the substance of Orthodox supernaturalism; and this seems to me to be its truth, separated from its errors.

The naturalism of the present time we conceive to be partly directed against a false supernaturalism, and partly to be a mistake arising from a too exclusive attention to the order of the universe, as expressed in law.

§ 8. The Error of Orthodox Supernaturalism.

Supernaturalism has generally disregarded God in nature, and only sees him in revelation. It has allowed a sort of natural religion, but only in the way of an argument to prove the existence of God by what he did a long time ago. But it has not gone habitually to nature to see God there, incarnate in sun, moon, and stars; incorporate in spring, [pg 051] summer, autumn, and winter; in day and night; in the human soul, reason, love, will. God has been all around us, never far from us; but theology has only been willing to see him in Jewish history, in sacred books, or on Sundays in church. Let us see him there all we can, but see him also in every rippling brook, in every tender flower, in all beauty, all sublimity, all arrangement and adaptation of this world. No wonder that naturalism should come to do what the Church has left undone—to find its God and Father in this great and wonderful world which he has made for us. The creed says, “God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost;” that is, God the Creator, seen in Nature and Providence; God the Redeemer, seen in Christianity; and God the Sanctifier, seen in every righteous and holy soul. But the Church has neglected its own creed, and omitted God the Creator, often also God the Sanctifier, and has only seen God in Christianity, in its history, its Church, its doctrines, its ceremonies.[8] Against this, naturalism comes as a great and needed protest, and calls us to see God also in nature and life.

Then the Church has been too apt to teach a miraculous revelation, in which the miracles are violations of law. But as God is confessedly the author of law, it has made the Deity violate his own laws; that is, has made him inconsistent, arbitrary, irregular, and wilful. Deep in the human mind God has himself rooted a firm faith in the immutability of law; so that when miracles are thus defined, naturalism justly objects to them.

§ 9. No Conflict between Naturalism and Supernaturalism.

But between true naturalism and true supernaturalism we do not think there need be any war. We know that there are many men so rooted in their faith in nature, that they cannot see anything outside of it, or beyond it. To them [pg 052] God is law, and law only. Even creation is repugnant to them, because they see that creation is really a supernatural thing. Hence come the theories of development; the “Vestiges of Creation;” the nebular hypothesis; the Darwinian theory of formation of species by natural selection; the notion of man coming out of an ape; pantheistic notions of a God so immersed in nature as to be not its intelligent guide, but only its unconscious soul; the whole universe proceeding according to an order which is just as much above God's knowledge as above ours. Now, the best geologists assure us that there is no evidence in support of the transmutation of species. Mr. Darwin's theory of the formation of species by natural selection is this: In the struggle for life, the strongest and best adapted animal lives, the rest die. This animal transmits to its offspring its own superior qualities; so a higher animal is gradually developed. For example, the giraffe was not made by God with a long neck in order that it might browse on the leaves of high trees. But when leaves were scarce, the animal who happened to have a neck a little longer than the rest was able to get leaves. So he lived, and the rest died. His children had longer necks by the law of hereditary transmission. So, in the course of ages, animals were gradually found with very long necks. Thus the walrus has a curved horn growing downwards from his lower jaw, by which he climbs on to the floating ice. We must not suppose, however, that God gave him the tusk for that purpose; but the walrus, or seal, who happened to have a little horny bone under his chin, could climb on the ice and get his food more easily, and so he lived, while the rest died; and his descendants in the course of a few hundreds of thousands of years came, by repeating this process, to have horns, and so this species of phoca arrived.

It is certainly possible to believe this theory. But in believing it we have to suppose two things; first, a happy [pg 053] accident, and then a law of transmission of hereditary qualities. Now, the theory substitutes this law of transmission and these happy accidents for the creative design. Is anything gained thereby? The domain of law is extended a little. But extend it as much as you will, you must at last come to something above law. Suppose these laws by which walrus and giraffe came, were all in the original nebula, so that no Creator has been needed since, and nothing supernatural—nature has done it all since. But who put the laws there to begin with? You have to take the supernatural at last, or else suppose an accident to begin with. Accidentally, all these wonderful laws happened to be in a particular nebula. He who shrinks from this supposition accepts the supernatural, all at once, at the beginning, instead of the supernatural all the way along, “What does he gain by it?” He gains merely this, that he puts the Creator out of sight; or rather, puts himself out of sight of the Creator. He worships the great god Development instead.