“Another stumbling-block which theologians have laid in the way of the devotee of physical sciences is the creation out of nothing. This dogma, which, as every scholar knows, is not necessarily contained in any place, whether of the Old or New Testament, arose in the Jewish Church, and has been stamped with orthodox authority in Christendom, partly from a pious desire to magnify the divine Omnipotence; partly from the timid stupidity of clinging to the letter instead of breaching the spirit of Scripture; and partly also from the evil trick which we have just mentioned of importing metaphysics and scholastic definitions into the Bible, from which all the Scriptures are the furthest possible removed. Now, the objection to this doctrine on the part of modern thinkers I conceive to be this: that, though not perhaps absolutely impossible, it is contrary to all known experience, and highly improbable if we are to judge of the constitution of things from what we see, not from what we choose to imagine. It is the vulgar imagination which delights to represent the Supreme Being as a sort of omnipotent harlequin, launching the fiat of his volition, as the nimble gentleman in the pantomime strikes the table with his wand, and out comes a man, or a monkey, or something else, out of nothing. This is man’s crude conception; but God’s ways are not as man’s ways, and his way is evolution. Nothing is created out of nothing; and mere volition, even of an omnipotent Being, cannot be conceived as bringing into existence a thing of an absolutely opposite nature, called matter.”
To answer these reckless assertions in detail would take a volume. Fortunately, however, we may be dispensed from such a task, as there are hundreds of excellent books, both philosophical and theological, where the dogma of creation is fully established and victoriously vindicated. On the other hand, our professor does not give any proof of his infidel view; he merely asserts what has no possibility of proof. “Nothing is created out of nothing,” says he; but philosophy demonstrates that nothing is, or can be, created but out of nothing. “God’s way is evolution.” No; God’s way is creation. Evolution is man’s way, as Mr. Darwin and all his admirers know; and, since (as the author reminds us) God’s ways are not as man’s ways, it follows on his own showing that God’s way is not evolution. Evolution is impossible without antecedent creation. The subject of evolution is matter, and matter is a created being. To deny the creation of matter is to assume that matter is eternal and self-existent, or, in other terms, to make it an independent being or an appurtenance of Divinity; and this colossal absurdity even the author must reject, as he confesses that the nature of matter is “absolutely opposite” to the nature of Divinity.
The author imagines that the absolute opposition between God and matter makes it impossible for God to create matter, because “mere volition, even of an omnipotent Being, cannot be conceived as bringing into existence a thing of an absolutely opposite nature.” These words show the author’s philosophical ignorance of the law of causation. The law is that efficient causes must always be of a nature entirely different from that of their effects. The efficient cause of gravitation at the earth’s surface is the substance or matter of the earth itself; but gravitation is neither matter nor substance, but something entirely different. The soul is the efficient cause of the voluntary movements produced in our organism; and yet those movements have nothing common with the substance of the soul. And the same is to be said of all other effects as compared with their efficient causes.[[105]] Hence it is idle to argue that an omnipotent Being, owing to his spirituality, cannot create matter. The author will say that every effect must be contained in its cause, and that matter is not contained in God. To which it must be answered that effects are eminently and virtually, not formally, contained in their efficient causes. If the effect existed formally in its cause its production by the cause would become a contradiction; for the effect would exist before its effection. Effects are said to be pre-contained in their causes only in this sense: that causes possess a power competent to produce their effects. Causation is action, and action is the production of an act. Every act produced is the formal principle of a new existence, or of a new mode of existence. To say that God cannot create matter is to say that God cannot produce an act giving formal existence to matter; which amounts to the denial of omnipotence. Still, the existence of matter must be accounted for. Matter undergoes modifications and is subject to natural agents; it is therefore essentially potential and contingent. How, then, did it come into existence? And how is it potential, if it is not created out of nothing, since nothingness is the only source of potentiality?
But we are told that creation out of nothing “is contrary to all known experience.” This shows what new kind of philosophers nowadays we have to deal with. They want to see God making a few acts of creation before they consent to believe, just as they want a lecturer to prove his theories by a series of visible experiments. God, of course, will not satisfy their curiosity; he has given them the light of reason and the light of revelation, which are quite enough. But were God to condescend to their yearning, would they believe even then? Would not these men, who have the impudence to speak of an “omnipotent Harlequin,” declare with equal profanity any visible fact of creation to be jugglery?
The author tells us also that “if we are to judge of the constitution of things from what we see, not from what we choose to imagine,” we shall find out that creation is improbable. At this we need not wonder; for the author is a great enemy of scholastic definitions and of metaphysics—that is, of intellectual light. He sees with the eyes of his body, but he shuts the eyes of his reason. Had he less horror of metaphysics, he might learn that “the constitution of things” proclaims in the loudest and most unmistakable language the fact of creation; and that every change or movement in the universe furnishes a peremptory demonstration of it. But what can a man see who discards definitions and disregards the principles of real philosophy?
And now let us see to what conclusions the author is led by his style of reasoning. He says:
“To us dependent ephemeral creatures all existence is a divine miracle; and the continuity of that divine miracle in the shape of what we call growth is, so far as we can see, the eternal form of divine creativeness. The absolute dualism of mind and matter which is implied in the received orthodoxy of the church is not warranted by any fact that exact science can recognize; nowhere do we find mind acting without a material instrument, nowhere matter absolutely divorced from the action of inherent forces, inasmuch as even the most motionless statical condition of things most solid is always produced by a balance of forces in some way or other—forces which, if they are not blind, but acting according to a calculated law, as they manifestly do, are only another name for Mind. This view of the constitution of the universe ... is generally disowned with a certain pious horror as pantheism, a word to which a great chorus of thoughtless and ill-informed people are straightway ready to echo back atheism, with the feeling that the two terms, though etymologically as opposed as white and black, are practically the same.... Pantheism, scientifically understood, has nothing to do either with materialism or with atheism. It ... simply denies the existence of two opposite entities in the world of divine reality, while it asserts the existence of only one. The world is essentially one; and the All, though externally many, is, when traced to its deepest roots, not different from the One; as the human body, for instance, is both one and many.... The term pantheism, therefore, is not opposed to unity, or to the principle of unity in the world, which is God; and a pantheist, as Hegel well said of Spinoza, may more properly be said to deny the world than to deny God.”
This is the quagmire into which the professor, as we said at the beginning of this article, has fallen. The view he takes of “the constitution of the universe,” the assertions he makes, and the arguments he employs are a mass of confusion to which no more appropriate name can be given than nonsense. We are “dependent ephemeral creatures.” Yes. But how could he call us “creatures,” he who denies creation? or “dependent,” he who makes us one with God? or “ephemeral,” he who includes us in the eternal All? Is not this a flagrant contradiction?
To us “all existence is a divine miracle.” If so, the author cannot consistently be a pantheist. Miracles are facts transcending the power and exigencies of nature. Pantheism divinizes nature, and admits of nothing transcending the power and exigencies of nature; and therefore pantheism can admit of no miracle.
“Growth is, so far as we can see, the eternal form of divine creativeness.” Growth implies change, whereas the eternal form of divine creativeness is altogether unchangeable. Hence, so far as we can see (and we see it most evidently), growth is not what the professor imagines.