may not be true, and therefore to deny it as the law for all intelligences. Supposing God has appointed an authority, infallible through his gracious assistance, to teach all men and nations his religion, or the truth he has revealed, and the law he commands all to obey, this authority must be competent to decide whether any alleged scientific discoveries are or are not favorable to religion, and must necessarily have the right to decide prior to all scientific investigation. If this authority decides that this or that theory is unfavorable to religion, we as religious men must pronounce it false, and refuse to entertain it. Dr. McCosh, as a Presbyterian or Protestant, would have no right to say so, but the Catholic would have the right, and it is his duty to say so; because religion is absolutely true, and the supreme law for reason as well as for conscience, and what is or is not religion, the authority unerringly decides for him. Nothing that is not in accordance with the teachings of religion can be true in science any more than in religion itself, though many things may be true that are not in accordance with the opinions and theories held by religious men.
The moment the Christian allows that the authority is not catholic; that it is limited and covers only one part of truth; and that there is by its side another and an independent authority, another and independent order of truth, he ceases to be able to meet successfully the Positivists; for truth is one, and can never be in opposition to truth—that is, in opposition to itself. Religion, we concede, does not teach the sciences, or the various facts with which they are constructed, but it does judge and pronounce authoritatively on the inferences or conclusions scientific men draw from these facts, or the explanations
they give of them, and to decide whether they are or are not consistent with her own teachings. If they are inconsistent with the revealed word, or with what that word implies, she pronounces them false; and, if warranted by the alleged facts, she pronounces the alleged facts themselves to be misinterpreted, misapprehended, misstated, or to be no facts. Her authority is higher than any reasonings of men, than the authority even of the senses, if it comes to that, for nothing is or can be more certain than that religion is true. We cannot as Catholics, as Christians, make the concession to the Positivists the Presbyterian doctor does, that their science is an authority independent of religion, and not amenable to it.
Dr. McCosh, we think, is unwise, in a controversy with Positivists, in separating natural theology, as he calls it, from revealed theology. The two are only parts of one whole, and, in point of fact, although distinguishable, have never existed separately at any epoch of history. The existence of God, the immateriality of the soul, and the liberty of man or free-will, are provable with certainty by reason, and are therefore truths of philosophy, but they were not discovered by unassisted reason or the unassisted exercise of our natural powers before they were taught to our first parents by the Creator himself, and have never been held as simple natural truths, unconnected with supernatural instruction or some reminiscences of such instruction. Natural theology, or philosophy, and revealed theology form one indissoluble whole, and Christianity includes both in their unity and catholicity. In defending Christianity against positivism, which denies both, we should defend both as a whole; because the natural is incomplete and
unable of itself alone to satisfy the demands of reason, which is never sufficient for itself; and the truths necessary to complete it and to solve the objections to the being and providence of God are not obtainable by reason alone or without the light of revelation. We may assert and prove miracles as a fact, but the objections of Positivists to them cannot be scientifically answered till we have proved that they have their law in the supernatural order. The inferences we draw from miracles will not be appreciated or allowed by men who deny the supernatural and reduce God to nature.
The author in reality has no method, but he begins by attempting to prove the being of God, then the existence of mind in man, and the reality of knowledge, and finally, in the second part, that the life of Christ was the life of a real personage, and proves the reality of his religion. He offers only one argument to prove that God is, and that is the well-known argument from design, which he bases on the principle that every effect has its cause. He does not develop this argument, which has been so fully done by Paley and the Bridgewater Treatises, but simply asserts its sufficiency. There are marks of design in adapting one thing to another throughout the universe, which can be only the effect of the action of an intelligent designer. Giving this argument all possible force, it does not carry the author in his conclusion beyond Plato or Aristotle, neither of whom was properly a theist. Plato and Aristotle both believed in an intelligent mind in the universe, operating on an eternal uncreated matter, forming all things from pre-existing materials, and arranging them in an artistic order. The argument from design can go no farther, and this is all that is proved
by Paley’s illustration of the watch, which would be no illustration at all to a mind that had no intuition or conception of a designer. Neither Plato nor Aristotle had any conception of a creator or supermundane God. Whether the intelligent mind has created all things from nothing, or has only formed and disposed all things from pre-existing matter, as the soul of the world, anima mundi, is what can never be determined by any induction from the alleged marks of design discoverable in the universe.
We therefore hold, and have always held, that this famous argument, the only one the Baconian philosophy admits, however valuable it may be in proving or illustrating the attributes or perfections of God, when God is once known to exist, is inconclusive when relied on alone to prove that God is, or is that by which the mind first obtains the idea. It may serve as a corroborative argument, but of itself alone it cannot originate the idea in the mind, or carry one beyond an intelligent soul of the world, or the pantheism of Plato and Aristotle, and of all Gentile philosophy, except the school of Leucippus and Democritus, followed as to physics by Epicurus—unless we must also except the sceptics, Pyrrho and Sextus Empiricus. We think, therefore, the author has damaged the cause of Christianity, instead of serving it, by risking it on a single argument, by no means conclusive to his purpose. A weak and inadequate defence is worse than no defence at all.
The principle that every effect has a cause, on which the author bases his argument, is no doubt true; but we must know that the fact is an effect before we can infer from it that it has or has had a cause. Cause and effect are correlative terms,
which connote one another; but this is no proof that this or that fact is an effect; and we cannot pronounce it an effect unless we know that it has begun to exist; nor even then, unless we have the intuition of cause; and no intuition even of a particular cause suffices, unless we have intuition of a universal cause. It is not so simple a thing, then, to pronounce a given fact an effect, and to conclude that there is between it and something else, the relation of cause and effect. It is precisely this relation that Hume, Kant, Thomas Browne, Sir William Hamilton, Dr. Mansel, Auguste Comte, John Stuart Mill, Huxley, Herbert Spencer, and all the so-called Positivists deny or relegate to the region of the unknowable. Dr. McCosh does not refute them, by assuming and arguing from the principle; he simply begs the question.