IX. The Heavens.
Reader. The laws of nature are [pg 830] universal. Such is the subject of the seventh chapter of your Force and Matter. I need hardly say that, while admitting with you the universality of the natural laws, I cannot but condemn the materialistic spirit which disgraces your explanation of that obvious truth. But in the chapter which follows you speak of the heavens in a most objectionable style.
Büchner. “Every school-boy knows that the sky is not a glass shade covering the earth, but that, in contemplating it, we behold an immense space interrupted by infinitely distant and scattered groups of worlds” (p. 51).
Reader. This I grant; but I am at a loss to understand how the contemplation of the heavens can furnish you an argument against the existence of God. Is it not strange that what has hitherto been considered to proclaim most loudly the existence, and magnify the power, of God, has become, in your hands, an evidence in support of atheism?
Büchner. The heavenly masses “are in constant motion—a motion singularly combined and complicated, yet in all its modifications merely the result of a single universal law of nature—the law of attraction.... All these motions may be determined and predicted with mathematical exactness. As far as the telescope of man reaches, the same law, the same mechanical arrangement, according to the same calculated mechanical formula, is found. Nowhere is there a trace of an arbitrary finger which has ordered the heavens or pointed out the path of comets. ‘I have searched the heavens,’ says Lalande, ‘but have nowhere found the traces of God.’ And when the Emperor Napoleon asked the celebrated astronomer Laplace why there was no mention of God in his Mécanique Céleste, he replied, ‘Sire, je n'avais pas besoin de cette hypothèse.’ The more astronomy progressed in its knowledge of the laws and motions in the heavens, the more it repudiated the idea of a supernatural influence, and the easier it became to deduce the origin, grouping, and motions of the heavenly bodies from the properties inherent in matter itself. The attraction of atoms rendered the bodies compact, whilst the law of attraction, in combination with their primary motion, produced the mode of their reciprocal rotation which we now observe” (pp. 51, 52).
Reader. Waiving the more than problematic plausibility of your premises, and setting aside the blasphemies which you have diligently copied from the books of the French unbelievers, and which are too stolid to need an answer, I reply, doctor, that you are always too hasty in drawing your conclusions. Why did you not reflect that the matter of which the celestial bodies are formed must have had an origin, that the revolutions of those bodies cannot be ruled by an abstract law, and that their enormous distances, as well as the expanse of their orbits through the immensity of space, compel the admission of an infinite being ranging infinitely above matter and necessarily prior to it? You should not have overlooked the fact that the heavens proclaim God's existence by their immensity far more eloquently than by the revolutions of the celestial bodies. You speak of movements ruled by a law. I admit the movements and the law which rules our calculation of the movements. But without space there is no movement, and without [pg 831] God there is no space; therefore without God there is no movement. Extricate yourself, if you can. Do you concede that without space there is no movement?
Büchner. It is evident.
Reader. Do you admit that without God there is no space?
Büchner. This I deny.
Reader. Then what do you mean by “space”?