Communism and Christianism / Analyzed and Contrasted from the Marxian and Darwinian Points of View

by William Montgomery Brown

Mayer took the fourth step by showing that the force which enters into the constitution of the universe is an eternality.

Darwin took the fifth step by showing that the protoplasm contains all the potentialities of every form of physical and degree of psychical life from the moneron to man; that all representatives of both the vegetable and animal kingdoms, including man, are related and so on a level as to their origin and destiny, and that the different species are the natural results of the necessary struggle with rivals and with adverse environments for existence.

Marx took the sixth step by showing that the essential difference between humans and beasts is primarily a question of the hand and secondarily of the machines by which its efficiency is immeasurably increased; that slavery has been and must continue to be the means of advancement towards the ideal civilization; that the kinds of human slavery were what they have been because machines have been what they were, and that the time is coming when the slaves will no longer be men, women and children, but machines which will be exploited for the good of the many, not the profit of the few—then, and not until then, rapid advance shall be made towards the goal where the whole world shall be one great co-operative family, every member of which shall have the greatest of possible opportunities to make the most of terrestrial life by having it as long and happy as possible.

2. Moral Impossibilities. The moral impossibility of the assumptions of these apologies is seen by all who have eyes for seeing things as they are in the fact that if God is credited with the good He must also be debited with the evil. If for example, He endowed the human body with its useful and necessary parts. He also endowed it with its harmful and unnecessary parts.

Experts in the field of anatomy tell us that there are in our bodies at least 180 useless parts, some among which are the occasion of much suffering and many premature deaths, the vermiform appendix alone causing many thousands of such cases annually.

Do you not see that these useless structures, all of which are inherited from the lower animals, are so many evidences of the truth of Darwinism and the untruthfulness of Mosaism? Eleven of these wholly useless and more or less harmful inheritances have been of no use to any of our ancestors from the fish up and four are inherited from our reptilian and amphibian forefathers, but according to Moses we have no such progenitors.

Admitting the fact of the existence of evil there is no escaping from the logical conclusions of dear, old sensible Epicurus:

Either God is willing to remove evil from this world and cannot, or he can and is not willing, or finally he can and is willing. If he is willing and cannot, it is impotence, which is contrary to the nature of God. If he can and is unwilling, it is wickedness, and that is no less contrary to the nature of God. If he is not willing and cannot, there is both wickedness and impotence. If he is willing and can, which is the only one of these suppositions that can be applied to God, how happens it that there is evil on earth?

Oh, if only the world had been influenced by this logic instead of by the metaphysics of the supernaturalistic interpretations of religion, it would have been so far on the way towards the ideal civilization as to have long since passed the point where it would have been possible to have the world war which has recently deluged the earth with blood and tears, or to make the Versailles treaty which is destined to issue in one war after another, ever filling the world fuller with the tyranny, poverty, slavery and misery which are the inevitable concomitants of all wars.

In my opinion the fascinating essayist, Mallock, has written the best of all apologies for theism. I cannot imagine a better one. He, however, makes no more attempt than Sir Oliver Lodge does to establish Christianity, or any other supernaturalistic interpretations of religion. Like Kant and yourself, Mallock takes his stand on the ground that a belief in a celestial God, and in the immortality which goes with it, is necessary to morality, the basic virtue upon which civilization rests. As Kant admits that the existence of God cannot be inferred from pure reason, so Mallock admits and even strongly contends that it cannot be established on scientific grounds. I quote a striking passage: