Through Nature to God

by John Fiske

With the further progress of organic life, the high development of the senses was attended or followed by increase of brain development and the correlative intelligence, immeasurably enlarging the scope of the correspondences between the living creature and the outer world. In the case of Man, the adjustments by which we meet the exigencies of life from day to day are largely psychical, achieved by the aid of ideal representations of environing circumstances. Our actions are guided by our theory of the situation, and it needs no illustration to show us that a true theory is an adjustment of one's ideas to the external facts, and that such adjustments are helps to successful living. The whole worth of education is directed toward cultivating the capacity of framing associations of ideas that conform to objective facts. It is thus that life is guided.

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Nature's Eternal Lesson is the Everlasting Reality of Religion

So as we look back over the marvellous life-history of our planet, even from the dull time when there was no life more exalted than that of conferva scum on the surface of a pool, through ages innumerable until the present time when Man is learning how to decipher Nature's secrets, we look back over an infinitely slow series of minute adjustments, gradually and laboriously increasing the points of contact between the inner Life and the World environing. Step by step in the upward advance toward Humanity the environment has enlarged. The world of the fresh-water alga was its tiny pool during its brief term of existence; the world of civilized man comprehends the stellar universe during countless æons of time. Every stage of enlargement has had reference to actual existences outside. The eye was developed in response to the outward existence of radiant light, the ear in response to the outward existence of acoustic vibrations, the mother's love came in response to the infant's needs, fidelity and honour were slowly developed as the nascent social life required them; everywhere the internal adjustment has been brought about so as to harmonize with some actually existing external fact. Such has been Nature's method, such is the deepest law of life that science has been able to detect.

Now there was a critical moment in the history of our planet, when love was beginning to play a part hitherto unknown, when notions of right and wrong were germinating in the nascent Human Soul, when the family was coming into existence, when social ties were beginning to be knit, when winged words first took their flight through the air. It was the moment when the process of evolution was being shifted to a higher plane, when civilization was to be superadded to organic evolution, when the last and highest of creatures was coming upon the scene, when the dramatic purpose of creation was approaching fulfilment. At that critical moment we see the nascent Human Soul vaguely reaching forth toward something akin to itself not in the realm of fleeting phenomena but in the Eternal Presence beyond. An internal adjustment of ideas was achieved in correspondence with an Unseen World. That the ideas were very crude and childlike, that they were put together with all manner of grotesqueness, is what might be expected. The cardinal fact is that the crude childlike mind was groping to put itself into relation with an ethical world not visible to the senses. And one aspect of this fact, not to be lightly passed over, is the fact that Religion, thus ushered upon the scene coeval with the birth of Humanity, has played such a dominant part in the subsequent evolution of human society that what history would be without it is quite beyond imagination. As to the dimensions of this cardinal fact there can thus be no question. None can deny that it is the largest and most ubiquitous fact connected with the existence of mankind upon the earth.

Now if the relation thus established in the morning twilight of Man's existence between the Human Soul and a world invisible and immaterial is a relation of which only the subjective term is real and the objective term is non-existent, then, I say, it is something utterly without precedent in the whole history of creation. All the analogies of Evolution, so far as we have yet been able to decipher it, are overwhelming against any such supposition. To suppose that during countless ages, from the seaweed up to Man, the progress of life was achieved through adjustments to external realities, but that then the method was all at once changed and throughout a vast province of evolution the end was secured through adjustments to external non-realities, is to do sheer violence to logic and to common sense. Or, to vary the form of statement, since every adjustment whereby any creature sustains life may be called a true step, and every maladjustment whereby life is wrecked may be called a false step; if we are asked to believe that Nature, after having throughout the whole round of her inferior products achieved results through the accumulation of all true steps and pitiless rejection of all false steps, suddenly changed her method and in the case of her highest product began achieving results through the accumulation of false steps; I say we are entitled to resent such a suggestion as an insult to our understandings. All the analogies of Nature fairly shout against the assumption of such a breach of continuity between the evolution of Man and all previous evolution. So far as our knowledge of Nature goes the whole momentum of it carries us onward to the conclusion that the Unseen World, as the objective term in a relation of fundamental importance that has coexisted with the whole career of Mankind, has a real existence; and it is but following out the analogy to regard that Unseen World as the theatre where the ethical process is destined to reach its full consummation. The lesson of evolution is that through all these weary ages the Human Soul has not been cherishing in Religion a delusive phantom, but in spite of seemingly endless groping and stumbling it has been rising to the recognition of its essential kinship with the ever-living God. Of all the implications of the doctrine of evolution with regard to Man, I believe the very deepest and strongest to be that which asserts the Everlasting Reality of Religion.

So far as I am aware, the foregoing argument is here advanced for the first time. It does not pretend to meet the requirements of scientific demonstration. One must not look for scientific demonstration in problems that contain so many factors transcending our direct experience. But as an appeal to our common sense, the argument here brought forward surely has tremendous weight. It seems to me far more convincing than any chain of subtle metaphysical reasoning can ever be; for such chains, however, invincible in appearance, are no stronger than the weakest of their links, and in metaphysics one is always uneasily suspecting some undetected flaw. My argument represents the impression that is irresistibly forced upon one by a broad general familiarity with Nature's processes and methods; it therefore belongs to the class of arguments that survive.

Observe, too, that it is far from being a modified repetition of the old argument that beliefs universally accepted must be true. Upon the view here presented, every specific opinion ever entertained by man respecting religious things may be wrong, and in all probability is exceedingly crude, and yet the Everlasting Reality of Religion, in its three indispensable elements as here set forth, remains unassailable. Our common-sense argument puts the scientific presumption entirely and decisively on the side of religion and against all atheistic and materialistic explanations of the universe. It establishes harmony between our highest knowledge and our highest aspirations by showing that the latter no less than the former are a normal result of the universal cosmic process. It has nothing to fear from the advance of scientific discovery, for as these things come to be better understood, it is going to be realized that the days of the antagonism between Science and Religion must by and by come to an end. That antagonism has been chiefly due to the fact that religious ideas were until lately allied with the doctrine of special creations. They have therefore needed to be remodelled and considered from new points of view. But we have at length reached a stage where it is becoming daily more and more apparent that with the deeper study of Nature the old strife between faith and knowledge is drawing to a close; and disentangled at last from that ancient slough of despond the Human Mind will breathe a freer air and enjoy a vastly extended horizon.