Through Nature to God

by John Fiske

Very different in spirit was the acute reply of Laplace when reminded by Napoleon that his great treatise on the dynamics of the solar system contained no allusion to God. "Sire," said Laplace, "I had no need of that hypothesis." This remark was profound in its truth, for it meant that in order to give a specific explanation of any single group of phenomena, it will not do to appeal to divine action, which is equally the source of all phenomena. Science can deal only with secondary causes. In the eighteenth century men of science were learning that such is the case; men like Diderot and D'Alembert had come to realize it, and they believed that the logical result was atheism. This was because the only idea of God which they had ever been taught to entertain was the Latin idea of a God remote from the world and manifested only through occasional interferences with the order of nature. When they dismissed this idea they declared themselves atheists. If they had been familiar with the Greek idea of God as immanent in the world and manifested at every moment through the orderly sequence of its phenomena, their conclusions would doubtless have been very different.

To these philosophers Voltaire's unshaken theism seemed a mere bit of eccentric conservatism. But along with that queer and intensely independent personality there went a stronger intellectual grasp and a more calm intellectual vision than belonged to any other Frenchman of the eighteenth century. In the facts of Nature, despite the lifeless piecemeal fashion in which they were then studied, Voltaire saw a rational principle at work which atheism could in nowise account for. To him the universe seemed full of evidences of beneficent purpose, and more than once he set forth with eloquence and power the famous argument from design, which is as old as Xenophon's Memorabilia, and which received its fullest development at the hands of Paley and the authors of the Bridgewater Treatises. There is thus yet another significance added to the little church at Ferney. Not only was it the sole church in France dedicated simply to God, and not only was its builder a layman hostile to ecclesiastical doctrines and methods, but he was almost alone among the eminent freethinkers of his age and country in believing in God and asserting the everlasting reality of religion.

It is therefore that I have cited Voltaire as a kind of text for the present discourse; for it is my purpose to show that, apart from all questions of revelation, the light of nature affords us sufficient ground for maintaining that religion is fundamentally true and must endure forever. It appears to me, moreover, that the materialism of the present day is merely a tradition handed down from the French writers whom Voltaire combated. When Moleschott made his silly remark about phosphorus, it was simply an inheritance of silliness from Lalande. When Haeckel tells us that the doctrine of evolution forbids us to believe in a future life, it is not because he has rationally deduced such a conclusion from the doctrine, but because he takes his opinions on such matters ready-made from Ludwig Büchner, who is simply an echo of the eighteenth century atheist La Mettrie. We shall see that the doctrine of evolution has implications very different from what Haeckel supposes.

But first let me observe in passing that in the English-speaking world there has never been any such divorce between rationalism and religion as in France, and among the glories of English literature are such deeply reverent and profoundly philosophical writings as those of Hooker and Chillingworth, of Bishop Butler and Jonathan Edwards, and in our own time of Dr. Martineau. Nowhere in history, perhaps, have faith and reason been more harmoniously wedded together than in the history of English Protestantism. But the disturbance that affected France in the age of Voltaire now affects the whole Christian world, and every question connected with religion has been probed to depths of which the existence was scarcely suspected a century ago. One seldom, indeed, hears the frivolous mockery in which the old French writers dealt so freely; that was an ebullition of temper called forth by a tyranny that had come to be a social nuisance. The scepticism of our day is rather sad than frivolous; it drags people from long cherished notions in spite of themselves; it spares but few that are active-minded; it invades the church, and does not stop in the pews to listen but ascends the pulpit and preaches. There is no refuge anywhere from this doubting and testing spirit Of the age. In the attitude of civilized men towards the world in which we live, the change of front has been stupendous; the old cosmology has been overthrown in headlong ruin, attacks upon doctrines have multiplied, and rituals, creeds, and Scriptures are overhauled and criticised, until a young generation grows up knowing nothing of the sturdy faith of its grandfathers save by hearsay; for it sees everything in heaven and earth called upon to show its credentials.

II
The Reign of Law, and the Greek Idea of God

The general effect of this intellectual movement has been to discredit more than ever before the Latin idea of God as a power outside of the course of nature and occasionally interfering with it. In all directions the process of evolution has been discovered, working after similar methods, and this has forced upon us the belief in the Unity of Nature. We are thus driven to the Greek conception of God as the power working in and through nature, without interference or infraction of law. The element of chance, which some atheists formerly admitted into their scheme of things, is expelled. Nobody would now waste his time in theorizing about a fortuitous concourse of atoms. We have so far spelled out the history of creation as to see that all has been done in strict accordance with law. The method has been the method of evolution, and the more we study it the more do we discern in it intelligible coherence. One part of the story never gives the lie to another part.

So beautiful is all this orderly coherence, so satisfying to some of our intellectual needs, that many minds are inclined to doubt if anything more can be said of the universe than that it is a Reign of Law, an endless aggregate of coexistences and sequences. When we say that one star attracts another star, we do not really know that there is any pulling in the case; all we know is that a piece of cosmical matter in the presence of another piece of matter alters its space-relations in a certain specified way. Among the coexistences and sequences there is an order which we can detect, and a few thinkers are inclined to maintain that this is the whole story. Such a state of mind, which rests satisfied with the mere content of observed facts, without seeking to trace their ultimate implications, is the characteristic of what Auguste Comte called Positivism. It is a more refined phase of atheism than that of the guests at Baron d'Holbach's, but its adherents are few; for the impetus of modern scientific thought tends with overwhelming force towards the conception of a single First Cause, or Prime Mover, perpetually manifested from moment to moment in all the Protean changes that make up the universe. As I have elsewhere sought to show, this is practically identical with the Athanasian conception of the immanent Deity.[3] Modern men of science often call this view of things Monism, but if questioned narrowly concerning the immanent First Cause, they reply with a general disclaimer of knowledge, and thus entitle themselves to be called by Huxley's term "Agnostics." Thirty-five years ago Spencer, taking a hint from Sir William Hamilton, used the phrase "The Unknowable" as an equivalent for the immanent Deity considered per se; but I always avoid that phrase, for in practice it invariably leads to wrong conceptions, and naturally, since it only expresses one side of the truth. If on the one hand it is impossible for the finite Mind to fathom the Infinite, on the other hand it is practically misleading to apply the term Unknowable to the Deity that is revealed in every pulsation of the wondrously rich and beautiful life of the Universe. For most persons no amount of explanation will prevent the use of the word Unknowable from seeming to remove Deity to an unapproachable distance, whereas the Deity revealed in the process of evolution is the ever-present God without whom not a sparrow falls to the ground, and whose voice is heard in each whisper of conscience, even while his splendour dwells in the white ray from yonder star that began its earthward flight while Abraham's shepherds watched their flocks. It is clear that many persons have derived from Spencer's use of the word Unknowable an impression that he intends by means of metaphysics to refine God away into nothing; whereas he no more cherishes any such intention than did St. Paul, when he asked, "Who hath known the mind of the Lord, or who hath been his counsellor?"—no more than Isaiah did when he declared that even as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are Jehovah's ways higher than our ways and his thoughts than our thoughts.