(1) According to the hypothesis "the potency of all things" is in matter with its energy and modes of motion. This is the "all and the one" τὸ πᾶν καὶ ἕν ([Greek: to pan kai hen]) of the universe, at once the only essence and ground of its existence and ongoing. No intelligent first cause is assumed, no creative reason to begin or determine the evolution. There is no ordering mind or purpose in it—for its origin, in the process, or as to its end. It is avowedly a purely mechanical theory of the universe—matter and force acting in self-contained energy without design. All rational, purposive, or teleological idea is wanting. Now it is evident that this pure mechanism of matter and energy must be not only without any moral element whatever, but necessarily incapable of evolving the moral. It is an infinite and endless automatism. Though it should run on æon after æon it is still only a mechanism of atoms in eternally unfree material movement. The unmoral elements can never produce moral law; and, ex hypothesi, there is no intelligent free moral being behind or in the movement to create or establish moral law through it.
(2) Further, this form of evolutionism, returning, as it does, to the ancient notion of the universe as a perpetual flux, even if imagined to be able to evolve the moral out of non-moral elements, could present no permanent and stable ethical law. In such evolution, without beginning and without end, all things are only a continual becoming, "an eternal process moving on." There is and can be nothing fixed, whether of forms or relations, but only a shifting, necessitated, everlasting scene of aimless beginnings and disappearances. Could we even conceive—which we cannot, because the concept is possible only in connection with purpose and ideal order—that the ethical "ought" should momentarily appear, it would soon be broken up and passed by, like the bubble on a stream,
"A moment here, then gone forever."
Manifestly, this perpetual motion, forever changing and superseding its own forms and products, cannot be considered father to even a rational stable conscience, much less a sure abiding moral law for its steady recognition and eternally reverent regard. "The child of contingency remains contingent." And so the advocates of this empirical, materialistic, and atheistic evolutionism consistently maintain that there is no absolute moral law, and that what seems so is only shifting hereditary judgments generated by experience and utility or some instinct formed by biological processes.
(3) But further. In this merely naturalistic evolution all the essential presuppositions of moral law are wanting and excluded. This is easily seen. (a) It has already been pointed out that the action of conscience is theistic, its authority arising from its perception of a law of duty imposed on it and representing a moral law-giver (See Chap. IV, pp. [79]–[80]; Chap. V, pp. [87]–[88]). So moral law, as a rule of ethical righteousness, is necessarily theistic. It is thinkable only as a requirement made by rational intelligence for fitting conduct among personal agents. It rests in a world-system of rational ends and ideal requirements. The standard is established by intelligence. Should it be objected, that we may regard the standard as made by the mind of men only, and altogether a human and subjective thing, it is enough to remind the reader that according to the hypothesis, there is no human mind as a different entity from matter, the only "mentality" left being merely particular effects of molecular or brain activity, and therefore only successive passive products, simply revealing what, if it exists at all, must exist as the molecular matter behind them. The autocratic moral law which the conscience finds, but does not make, is conceivable therefore, only as part of intelligent ordering in a rational world-system. But according to the hypothesis no moral reason has framed or regulates the order of the physical forces that create the relations of life. (b) Moral law, with responsibility, is inconceivable except in connection with personal freedom in the subject of it. But in this kind of evolutionism, everything is reduced to the mechanism of matter; and its supporters agree that our personal freedom is an illusion. There can be no more morality in the thoughts, aims and conduct of men than in the digestion of food or the growth and decay of a tree.
While, therefore, theistic evolution does not present anything inconsistent with the reality and recognition of moral law, every hypothesis which exhibits the world, in its ground and processes, as the mere mechanism of material forces, stands in logical and irreconcilable antagonism. This antagonism, however, is not to be taken as overthrowing or even weakening the truth set forth in this chapter. Rather, the antagonistic hypothesis, which fails in so many other respects to meet the necessities of a rational or scientific account of the phenomena of the universe, discredits itself still further by its incongruity on this great point.
[CHAPTER VIII.]
THE GROUND OF RIGHT.
This topic carries the inquiry concerning moral law one step further than that determined in the last chapter. It being settled that that law is objectively and permanently real, for the recognition of conscience, we must yet seek some explanation of the basis of the reality. Why are some things right and others wrong? What is the reason of the difference? On what is the law of right grounded? We seek the explanation of its existence and the obligation it imposes.