Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 354, April 1845

by Various

The charge of an atheistic tendency, as it is the heaviest which can be made against a work, so it is the last which ought to be hazarded without sufficient cause. In general, owing to the very sacredness of the subject, we feel disposed, in all suspicious cases, to pass over in silence both accusation and defence; and if in the present instance we depart, for a moment, from this line of conduct, it is only to give expression to a conviction—which we share, we believe, with all who have both the interest of science and the interest of theology at heart—that the fair efforts of the scientific enquirer should never be impeded by needless objections of a theological character. What we mean is this: though a suspicion may cross the mind, that a writer does not hold the religious tenets which we should desire to see every where advocated; yet if we are persuaded, at the same time, that this laxity of faith has no real logical connexion with the scientific results with which he is occupied, we ought not to inflict on them any portion of our suspicion or distrust. We shall always protest against confounding the legitimate attempts of science with the erroneous principles of certain schools of metaphysics, which may or may not be connected with them. If there is atheism in the world, we know whence it comes; we know well it is in a very different laboratory than that of the chemist that it has been distilled.

The unknown author before us, repeatedly protests against being numbered amongst atheistic philosophers; on our own part, we are thoroughly convinced that no formula of physical science could possibly interfere with a rational belief in the power and wisdom of God; what remains, then, but to treat his book purely in a scientific point of view?

To reduce to a system the acts of creation, or the development of the several forms of animal life, no more impeaches the authorship of creation, than to trace the laws by which the world is upheld and its phenomena perpetually renewed. The presumption naturally rises in the mind, that the same Great Being would adopt the same mode of action in both cases. If, for instance, the nebular hypothesis, to which we have already alluded, should be received as a scientific account of the proximate origin of our planetary system, this, as Mr Whewell has shown in his "Bridgewater Treatise," would serve only to enlighten and elevate our conception of the power of God. And indeed to a mind accustomed—as is every educated mind—to regard the operations of Deity as essentially differing from the limited, sudden, evanescent impulses of a human agent, it is distressing to be compelled to picture to itself the power of God as put forth in any other manner than in those slow, mysterious, universal laws, which have so plainly an eternity to work in; it pains the imagination to be obliged to assimilate those operations, for a moment, to the brief energy of a human will, or the manipulations of a human hand. Does not the language even of a Christian poet, when he speaks of God as launching from his ample palm the rolling planets into space, in some measure offend us? Do we not avoid as much as possible all such similitudes, as being derogatory to our notions of the Supreme?

There are still, indeed, some men of narrow prejudices who look upon every fresh attempt to reduce the phenomena of nature to general laws, and to limit those occasions on which it is necessary to conceive of a direct and separate interposition of divine power, as a fresh encroachment on the prerogatives of the Deity, or a concealed attack upon his very existence. And yet these very same men are daily appealing to such laws of the creation as have already been established, for their great proofs of the existence and the wisdom of God! Their imagination has remained utterly untutored by the little knowledge which they have rather learned to repeat than to apprehend. Whatever words they may utter, of subtle and high-sounding import, concerning the purely spiritual nature of the Divine Being, it is, in fact, a Jupiter Tonans clad in human lineaments, and invested with human passions, that their heart is yearning after. Such objectors as these can only be beaten back, and chained down, by what some one has called the brute force of public opinion.

Some little time ago men of this class deemed it irreligious to speak of the laws of the human mind; it savoured of necessity, of fatalism; they now applaud a Dr Chalmers when he writes his Bridgewater Treatise, to illustrate the attributes of God in the laws of the mental as well as the physical world.

No, there is nothing atheistic, nothing irreligious, in the attempt to conceive creation, as well as reproduction, carried on by universal laws. For what is the difference between individual isolated acts, and acts capable of being expressed in a general formula? This only, that in the second case the same act is repeated in constant sequence with other acts, and probably repeated in many places at the same time. The divine work is only multiplied. If the creation of a world should be proved to be as orderly and systematic as that of a plant, this may make worlds more common to the imagination, but it cannot make the power that creates them less marvellous.

But while we would reprove the narrowness of spirit that finds, in any of the discoveries of science, a source of disquietude for the interests of religion, we have here an observation to make of an opposite character, which we think of some importance, and which we shall again, in reviewing the theories of our author, have occasion to insist upon. It is undoubtedly true that there rises in the minds of every person at all tinctured with science, a presumption that every phenomenon we witness might be, if our knowledge enabled us, reduced under the expression of some general law; and that whatever changes are, or have been, produced in the world, might be traced to the interwoven operations of such laws. But however prevalent and justifiable such a presumption may be, we hold it no sound philosophy to give it so complete a preponderance as to debar the mind from contemplating the possibility of quite other and independent acts of divine power, the possibility of the abrupt introduction into our system of new facts, or series of facts, with their appropriate laws. The author before us, in his anxiety to explain, after a scientific manner, the introduction of life, and the various species of animals, into the globe, seems to have thought himself entitled to have recourse to the wildest hypothesis rather than to the immediate intervention of creative power; as if it were something altogether unphilosophical to suppose that there could be such a thing as a quite new development of that plastic energy. It is not even necessary that we should urge, that if a Creator exist, it is a most unwarrantable supposition to imagine that all his creative power has been exhausted. We say, even to an atheistic philosophy, that it is an unauthorized limitation that would forbid the mind to contemplate the possibility of the uprise, in time, of entirely new phenomena. Can any philosopher, of any school whatever, be justified in saying, that there shall be no new fact introduced into the universe?—that its laws cannot be added to? Why should he recoil from the introduction of any thing new? If he is one whose last formula stands thus, whatever is, is—this new fact will also fall, with others, into his formula. Of this, also, he can say, whatever is, is. There is, we repeat, a strong presumption in favour of a scientific sequence, of an unbroken order of events; but this presumption is not to authorize any hypothesis whatever in order to escape from the other alternative, an immediate intervention of creative power. This, also, is a probability which philosophy recognises, and in which a rational mind may choose to rest till science brings to him some definite result.

We are very far from intending to follow the author of the Vestiges of the Natural History of the Creation through all the sciences along which his track has led him. We shall limit ourselves to what forms the most peculiar and startling portion of his work—to his theory of the origin and development of animal life.

But for the discoveries of geology a certain philosophy might have been content to say of the animal creation, that it was the law of nature that life should beget life—that reproduction, like nutrition, to which it has been assimilated, is a part of the definition of life—and that, as to a commencement of the various tribes of animals, we are no more bound to look for this than for the commencement of any other of the phenomena of nature. From the researches, however, of geology, it is evident that there was a time when this earth revolved around the sun a barren and untenanted globe—that there was a time when life did make its first appearance, and that in different epochs of the world's existence there have flourished very different species of animals than those which now inhabit it. Here, at all events, the imagination cannot gain that imperfect repose which it finds in the contemplation of an eternal series. It is a plain historical fact, that life had a beginning on this earth, and that from time to time new forms of life, new species of vegetables and animals, have been introduced upon the scene. Here are two great facts to be accounted for, or to be left standing out, unconnected in their origin with that interlinked series of events which creation elsewhere displays. Life reproduces life, the plant its seed, the animal its young, each after its kind, such is the law; but this law itself, when was it promulgated, or when and how did it come into force and operation?

For ourselves, in the present imperfect condition of our knowledge, we are satisfied with referring life, in all its countless forms, at once to the interposing will of the Creator. We listen, however, with curiosity and attention to any theory which the naturalist or physiologist may have to propose, so he proceed in the fair road of induction. There is nothing in the laws of life which forbids, but much, on the contrary, which invites, to the same pains-taking examination which has been bestowed, with more or less success, on other phenomena of nature.