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Title: Theism or Atheism
The Great Alternative
Author: Chapman Cohen
Release Date: May 2, 2008 [EBook #25291]
Language: English
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THEISM OR ATHEISM
THE GREAT ALTERNATIVE
By CHAPMAN COHEN
THE PIONEER PRESS,
61, Farringdon Street,
----E.C.4----
1921.
Contents.
Part I.
AN EXAMINATION OF THEISM.
PAGE
Chapter I. What is God? 9
Chapter II. The Origin of the Idea of God 20
Chapter III. Have we a Religious Sense? 37
Chapter IV. The Argument from Existence 49
Chapter V. The Argument from Causation 59
Chapter VI. The Argument from Design 69
Chapter VII. The Disharmonies of Nature 85
Chapter VIII. God and Evolution 94
Chapter IX. The Problem of Pain 110
Part II.
SUBSTITUTES FOR ATHEISM.
Chapter X. A Question of Prejudice 131
Chapter XI. What is Atheism? 138
Chapter XII. Spencer and the Unknowable 151
Chapter XIII. Agnosticism 169
Chapter XIV. Atheism and Morals 181
Chapter XV. Atheism Inevitable 194
PREFACE.
Shrouded in the cloak of philosophy, the question of the existence of
God continues to attract attention, and, I may add, to command more
respect than it deserves. For it is only by a subterfuge that it assumes
the rank of philosophy. "God" enters into philosophy only when it is
beginning to lose caste in its proper home, and then in its new
environment it undergoes such a transformation as to contain very little
likeness to its former, and proper, self. It disowns its parentage and
claims another origin, and, like so many genealogists devising pedigrees
for the parvenu, certain philosophers attempt to map out for the
newcomer an ancestry to which he can establish no valid claim. Nothing
would, indeed, surprise the ancestor more than to be brought face to
face with his descendant. He would not be more astonished than would the
ancient Eohippus on meeting with a modern dray-horse. In anthropology or
history the idea of God may fairly claim a place, but it has no place in
philosophy on any sensible meaning of the word.
The consequence of this transference of the idea of God to the sphere of
philosophy is the curious position that the God in which people believe
is not the God whose existence is made the product of an argument, and
the God of the argument is not the God of belief. The theory and the
fact have no more likeness to each other than a chestnut horse has to a
horse-chestnut. A fallacy is perpetuated by appealing to a fact, but the
fact immediately discredits the fallacy by disowning it in practice. The
grounds upon which the belief in God is supposed to rest, the reasoning
from which it springs, are seen to follow the belief instead of
preceding it. The roots are in the air, and on closer inspection are
seen to be artificial adornments, so many imitations that have been hung
there for the purpose of imposing on near-sighted or careless observers.
The purpose of the following pages is to make clear the nature of this
alliance and to expose the real character of what we are asked to
worship. There are, of course, many on whose ears any amount of
reasoning will fall without effect. To that class this book will not
appeal; it may be questioned whether many will even read it. They will
go on professing the belief they have always professed, and taking pride
in the fact that they have an intellect which is superior to proof, and
which disdains evidence when it runs contrary to "my belief." Others
will, I expect, complain that the treatment of so solemn a subject is
not "reverent" enough. But why _any_ subject should be treated
reverently, as a condition of examination, is more than I have ever been
able to discover. It is asking the inquirer to commence his
investigation with a half-promise to find something good in what he is
about to examine. Whether a thing is worthy of reverence or not is a
conclusion that must follow investigation, not precede it. And one does
not observe any particular reverence shown by the religious person
towards those beliefs in which he does not happen to believe.
But there are some who will read thoughtfully an examination of so old a
subject as Theism, and it is to those that these pages are addressed.
One cannot hope to say anything that is strikingly new on so well worn a
subject as the existence of God, but there are many who will read an old
subject when presented in a new work, and even then there is also the
possibility of presenting an old topic in a slightly new form. And I
think these will find the main lines of the defence set up by the
Goddite dealt with in a manner that should at least make the point at
issue clear.
Finally, it is one aim of this book to press home the point that the
logical issue is between Theism and Atheism. That there is no logical
halting place between the two, and that any attempt to call a halt is
little more than a concession to a desire for mental or social
convenience, seems to me as clear as anything can well be. And there is
really nothing gained, ultimately, by the halt. Disinclination on the
part of the non-Theist to push the issue to its logical conclusion is
treated by the Theist as inability to do so, and is used as an argument
in support of his own belief. In matters of the intellect, compromise is
almost always a dangerous policy. It heartens one's enemies and
disheartens one's friends. And there is really no adequate reason why
those who have given up belief in deity should continue to treat this
master superstition of the ages as though it were one of our most
valuable inheritances, to be surrendered with lowered heads and sinking
hearts. We who know both sides know that in giving up the belief in
deity we have lost nothing of value, nothing that need cause us a single
regret. And on that point we certainly can speak with authority; for we
have been where the Theist is, he has not been where we are. Many of us
know quite well all that is meant by the fear and trembling with which
the believer looks upon a world without God. And we know how idle the
fear is--as idle as a child's fear of the dark. What the world is like
_with_ God, there is all the experience of history to inform us; and it
would indeed be strange if love and brotherhood, armed with the weapons
that science has given us, could not produce a better human society than
has ever existed under the dominion of the Gods.
Part I.
AN EXAMINATION OF THEISM.
CHAPTER I.
WHAT IS GOD?
Soon after that famous Atheist, Charles Bradlaugh, entered the House of
Commons, it is said that a fellow member approached him with the remark,
"Good God, Bradlaugh, what does it matter whether there is a God or
not?" Bradlaugh's answer is not recorded, but one is impelled to open
the present examination of the belief in God, by putting the same
question in another form. Is the belief in God, as we are so often
assured, one of the most important questions that can engage the
attention of man? Under certain conditions one can conceive a rational
answer in the affirmative. Where the mental and social conditions are
such that men seriously believe the incidence of natural forces on
mankind to be determined by the direct action of "God," one can
appreciate right belief concerning him being treated as of first rate
importance. In such circumstances wrong ideas are the equivalent of
disaster. But we are not in that condition to-day. It is, indeed, common
ground with all educated men and women that natural happenings are
independent of divine control to at least the extent that natural forces
affect all alike, and without the least reference to religious beliefs.
Fire burns and water drowns, foods sustain and poisons kill, no matter
what our opinions on theology may be. In an earthquake or a war there is
no observable relation between casualties and religious opinions. We
are, in fact, told by theologians that it is folly to expect that there
should be. A particular providence is no longer in fashion; God, we are
told, works only through general laws, and that is only another way of
saying that our opinions about God have no direct or observable
influence on our well-being. It is a tacit admission that human welfare
depends upon our knowledge and manipulation of the forces by which we
are surrounded. There _may_ be a God behind these forces, but that
neither determines the extent of our knowledge of them or our power to
manipulate them. The belief in God becomes a matter of, at best,
secondary importance, and quite probably of no importance whatever.
But if that be so why bother about the belief? Is that not a reason for
leaving it alone and turning our attention to other matters? The answer
to that is that the belief in God is not of so detached a character as
this advice assumes. In the course of ages the belief in God has
acquired associations that give it the character of a highly obstructive
force. It has become so entangled with inculcated notions of right and
wrong that it is everywhere used as a buttress for institutions which
have either outgrown their utility, or are in need of serious
modification in the interests of the race. The opposition encountered in
any attempt to deal with marriage, divorce, or education, are examples
of the way in which religious ideas are permitted to interfere with
subjects that should be treated solely from the standpoint of social
utility. The course of human development has been such that religion has
hitherto occupied a commanding position in relation to social laws and
customs, with the result that it is often found difficult to improve
either until the obstructive influence of religious beliefs has been
dealt with.
It is not, then, because I believe the question of the existence of God
to be of intrinsic importance that an examination of its validity is
here undertaken. Its importance to-day is of a purely contingent
character. The valid ground for now discussing its truth is that it is
at present allowed to obstruct the practical conduct of life. And under
similar circumstances it would be important to investigate the
historical accuracy of Old Mother Hubbard or Jack and the Beanstalk. Any
belief, no matter what its nature, must be dealt with as a fact of some
social importance, so long as it is believed by large numbers to be
essential to the right ordering of life. Whether true or false, beliefs
are facts--mental and social facts, and the scheme of things which
leaves them out of account is making a blunder of the most serious kind.
Certainly, conditions were never before so favourable for the delivery
of a considered judgment on the question of the belief in God. On the
one side we have from natural science an account of the universe which
rules the operations of deity out of court. And on the other side we
have a knowledge of the mode of origin of the belief which should leave
us in no doubt as to its real value. We hope to show later that the
question of origin is really decisive; that in reaching conclusions
concerning the origin of the god-idea we are passing judgment as to its
value. That the masters of this form of investigation have not usually,
and in so many words, pushed their researches to their logical
conclusions is no reason why we should refrain from doing so. Facts are
in themselves of no great value. It is the conclusions to which they
point that are the important things.
If the conclusions to which we refer are sound, then the whole basis of
theism crumbles away. If we are to regard the god-idea as an evolution
which began in misunderstandings of nature that were rooted in the
ignorance of primitive man, it would seem clear that no matter how
refined or developed the idea may become, it can rest on no other or
sounder basis than that which is presented to us in the psychology of
primitive man. Each stage of theistic belief grows out of the preceding
stage, and if it can be shown that the beginning of this evolution arose
in a huge blunder I quite fail to see how any subsequent development can
convert this unmistakable blunder into a demonstrable truth. To take a
case in point. When it was shown that so far as witchcraft rested on
observed facts these could be explained on grounds other than those of
the malevolent activities of certain old women, the belief in witchcraft
was not "purified," neither did it advance to any so-called higher
stage; it was simply abandoned as a useless and mischievous explanation
of facts that could be otherwise accounted for. Are we logically
justified in dealing with the belief in God on any other principle? We
cannot logically discard the world of the savage and still retain his
interpretation of it. If the grounds upon which the savage constructed
his theory of the world, and from which grew all the ghosts and gods
with which he believed himself to be surrounded, if these grounds are
false, how can we still keep in substance to conclusions that are
admittedly based on false premises? We can say with tolerable certainty
that had primitive man known what we know about nature the gods would
never have been born. Civilised man does not discover gods, he discards
them. It was a profound remark of Feurbach's, that religion is
ultimately anthropology, and it is anthropology that gives to all forms
of theism the death blow.
In our own time, at least, it is not difficult to see that the word God
retains its influence with many because of the indefinite manner in
which it is used. It is never easy to say what a person has in his mind
when he uses the word. In most cases one would be safe in saying that
nothing at all is meant. It is just one of those "blessed" words where
the comfort felt in their use is proportionate to the lack of definite
meaning that accompanies them. A frank confession of ignorance is
something that most people heartily dislike, and where problems are
persistent and difficult of solution what most people are in search of
is a narcotic. That "God" is one of the most popular of narcotics will
be denied by none who study the psychology of the average man or woman.
When not used as a narcotic, "God" is brought into an argument as though
it stood for a term which carried a well defined and well understood
meaning. In work after work dealing with theism one looks in vain for
some definition of "God." All that one can do is to gather the author's
meaning from the course of his argument, and that is not always an easy
task. The truth is, of course, that instead of the word carrying with it
a generally understood meaning there is no word that is more loosely
used or which carries a greater variety of meanings. Its connotations
are endless, and range from the aggressively man-like deity of the
primitive savage up--or down--to the abstract force of the mathematical
physicist and the shadowy "Absolute" of the theologising metaphysician.
The consequence of this is to find commonly that while it is one kind of
a god that is being set up in argument, it is really another god that is
being defended and even believed in. When we find people talking of
entering into communion with God, or praying to God, it is quite certain
they do not conceive him as a mere mathematical abstraction, or as a
mere symbol of an unknown force. It is impossible to conceive any sane
man or woman extracting comfort from praying or talking to a god who
could not think, or feel, or hear. And if he possesses qualities that
the religious attitude implies, we endow him with all the attributes of
personality, and, be it noted, of human personality. Either one God is
believed in in fact while another is established in theory, or an
elaborate argument is presented which serves no other purpose than a
disguise for the fact that there is no genuine belief left.
An example of the misleading way in which words are used is supplied by
Sir Oliver Lodge, who for a man of science shows an amazing capacity for
making use of unscientific language. In his "Man and the Universe,"
discussing the attributes of deity, he says, "Let no worthy attribute be
denied to the deity. In anthropomorphism there are many errors, but
there is one truth. Whatever worthy attributes belong to man, be it
personality or any other, its existence in the universe is thereby
admitted; it belongs to the all." Putting on one side the fallacy
involved in speaking of attributes as though they were good or bad in
themselves, one wonders why Sir Oliver limits this inference to the
"worthy" attributes? Unworthy attributes are as real as worthy ones. If
honesty exists so does dishonesty. Kindness is as real as cruelty. And
if we must credit the deity with possessing all the good attributes, to
whom must we credit the bad ones? A little later Sir Oliver does admit
that we must credit the deity with the bad attributes also, but adds
that they are dying out. But as they are _part_ of the deity, their
decay must mean that the deity is also undergoing a process of change,
of education, and is as much subject to the law of growth as we are.
Surely that is not what people mean when they speak about God. A god who
is only a part of the cosmic process ceases to be a god in any
reasonable sense of the term.
Professor Mellone, in his "God and the World," says that the word God
"becomes a name for the infinite system of law regarded as a whole" (p.
122). If that were really all that was meant by the word the matter
would not be worth discussing. "God" as a symbol of a generalisation is
a mere name, and as such is as good as any other name. But, again, it is
plain that people mean more than that when they speak about God. If God
is a name for universal law, let any really religious man try the plan
of substituting in his prayers and in his thoughts the phrase "Universal
Law" for "God," and then see how long he will retain his religion. As
Mr. Balfour points out ("Theism and Humanism," p. 20), the god of
religion and the god of philosophy represent two distinct beings, and it
is hard to see how the two can be fused into one. The plain truth is
that it is impossible to now make the existence of the god of religion
reasonable, and the plan adopted is that of arguing for the existence of
something about which there is often no dispute, and then introducing as
the product of the argument something that has never been argued for at
all. It is the philosophic analogue of the hat and omelette trick.
In this connection some well considered words of Sir James Frazer are
well worth noting. He says:--
By a god I understand a superhuman and supernatural being, of a
spiritual and personal nature, who controls the world or some part
of it on the whole for good, and who is endowed with intellectual
faculties, moral feelings, and active powers, which we can only
conceive on the analogy of human faculties, feelings, and
activities, though we are bound to suppose that in the divine
nature they exist in an infinitely higher degree, than the
corresponding faculties, feelings, and activities of man. In short,
by a God I mean a beneficent supernatural spirit, the ruler of the
world or of some part of it, who resembles man in nature though he
excels him in knowledge, goodness, and power. This is, I think, the
sense in which the ordinary man speaks of a God, and I believe that
he is right in so doing. I am aware that it has been not unusual,
especially of late years, to apply the name of God to very
different conceptions, to empty it of all implications of
personality, and to reduce it to signifying something very large
and very vague, such as the Infinite or the Absolute (whatever
these hard words may signify) the great First Cause, the Universal
Substance, the stream of tendency by which all things seek to
fulfil the law of their being, and so forth. Now, without
expressing opinion as to the truth or falsehood of the views
implied by such applications of the name of God, I cannot but
regard them as illegitimate extensions of the term, in short, an
abuse of language, and I venture to protest against it in the
interest, not only of verbal accuracy, but of clear thinking,
because it is apt to conceal from ourselves and others a real and
very important change of thought; in particular it may lead many to
imagine that the persons who use the name of God in one or other of
these extended senses retain theological opinions which they may in
fact have long abandoned. Thus the misuse of the name of God may
resemble the stratagem in war of putting up dummies to make an
enemy imagine that a fort is still held long after it has been
abandoned by the garrison. (_The Belief in Immortality_; pp. 9-10.
Vol. I.).
This expression of opinion from an authoritative quarter is very much
needed. The fear of public opinion displayed by many "advanced" thinkers
is in this country one of the greatest obstacles to rapid advance. It is
simply deplorable to observe the trouble taken by some to coin new
names, or the illegitimate use made of old ones, for no other
discoverable reason than that of disguising from the world the fact that
the orthodox beliefs are no longer held. The need of to-day is not so
much liberal thought as strong and courageous thought; and one would
cheerfully hand back to orthodoxy a fairly large parcel of a certain
type of heretical thinker in exchange for a single one who used plain
language to express clear convictions.
What is it that the mass of believers have in their minds when they
speak of God? There can be no doubt but that what the plain man has
always understood by "God" is a person. Every book of religious devotion
implies this; every prayer that is offered takes it for granted that
_someone_ will listen, and probably grant the petition. God is personal,
God is just, God is beneficent, God is intelligent, these are
conceptions that are bound up with all the religions of the world, and
without which they would lack both significance and value. A very acute
theistic writer, Mr. W. H. Mallock, puts this quite plainly when he says
that the God of theism "is represented as revealing himself in the
universe, firstly, as the mind which animates and moves everything,
secondly, as a purposing mind which is infinitely wise and powerful, and
has created a perfect universe with a view to some perfect end; and
lastly, as an ethical mind which out of all the things created by it,
has selected men as the object of a preferential love. A personality
which thinks and wills and loves and hates. That is what mankind in the
mass have always meant by 'God.'"
Indeed, any other kind of God is inconceivable. Whatever may be the
metaphysical subtleties employed, we come ultimately to that. It is
this, the older and the vital conception that is being fought for. The
arguments for any other kind of existence are mere subterfuges. The
pleas for an "Absolute" or an "Unconditioned" are only used to buttress
the older conception, and never till the older one has lost its force.
The unconditioned God is argued for only that it may serve as the basis
for the belief in a personal one. What is proved is not what is asked
for; what is asked for is not what is proved. No wonder that so eminent
a writer as Mr. F. H. Bradley feels constrained to give these
verbalistic thimble riggers a smart rap over the knuckles, as in the
following passage:--
Most of those who insist on the "personality of God" are
intellectually dishonest. They desire one conclusion, and, to reach
it, they argue for another. But the second, if proved, is quite
different, and answers their purpose only because they obscure it
and confound it with the first.... The deity they want, is, of
course, finite, a person much like themselves, with thoughts and
feelings limited and mutable in the process of time.... And for
their purpose, what is not this is really nothing. (_Appearance and
Reality_; p. 532).
And it is really what people mean by God that is decisive. It is not at
all a question of what they might be made to mean, or what they ought to
mean. It is wholly a matter of what they _do_ mean. And to say that what
people intend to affirm in an expression of belief is not true, is to
say that the belief itself is false. If the God I believe in is a
delusion, then my God ceases to exist. True, I may if I think it worth
while acquire another one, but that will not revive the first. It is
what people believe that is the important question, not what some
ingenious speculator may succeed in making the belief stand for.
Honestly to be of service to theism the God established must be a
person. To be intelligible, having regard to the historical developments
of religion, the God proved must be a person. The relation demanded by
religion between man and God must be of a personal character. No man can
love a pure abstraction; he might as reasonably fall in love with a
triangle or profess devotion to the equator. The God of religion must be
a person, and it is precisely that, as a controlling force of the
universe, in which modern thought finds it more and more difficult to
believe, and which modern science decisively rejects. And in rejecting
this the death blow is given to those religious ideas, which however
disguised find their origin in the fear-stricken ignorance of the
primitive savage.
CHAPTER II.
THE ORIGIN OF THE IDEA OF GOD.
The alleged universality of the belief in God is only inferentially an
argument for its truth. The inference is that if men have everywhere
developed a particular belief, this general agreement could only have
been reached as a consequence of a general experience. A universal
effect implies a universal cause. So put the argument seems impressive.
As a matter of fact the statement is one long tissue of fallacies and
unwarranted assumptions.
In the first place, even admitting the universal pressure of certain
facts, it by no means follows that the theistic interpretation of those
facts is the only one admissible. There is no exception to the fact that
men have everywhere come to the conclusion that the earth was flat, and
yet a wider and truer knowledge proved that universal belief to be quite
false. The fact of a certain belief being universal only warrants the
assumption that the belief itself has a cause, but it tells us nothing
whatever concerning its truthfulness. The truth here is that the
argument from universality dates its origin from a stage of human
culture suitable to the god idea itself, a stage when very little was
known concerning the workings of the mind or the laws of mental
development. Otherwise it would have been seen that all the universality
of a belief really proves is the universality of the human mind--and
that means that, given an organism of a certain kind, it will react in
substantially an identical manner to the same stimuli. Thus it is not
surprising to find that as the human organism is everywhere
fundamentally alike, it has everywhere come to the same conclusions in
face of the same set of conditions. A man reacts to the universe in one
way, and a jelly fish in another way. And universality is as true of the
reactions of the latter as it is of those of the former.
And this means that a delusion may be as widespread as truth, a false
inference may gain as general an acceptance as a true one. What belief
has been more general than the belief in witches, fairies, and the like?
But we see in the prevalence of these and similar beliefs, not a
presumption of their truth, but only the grounds for a search after the
conditions, social and psychological, which gave them birth.
The truth is that the conditions which give rise to the belief in gods
are found in all ages, and no one would be more surprised than the
Atheist to find it otherwise. But here, precisely as in the case of good
and bad spirits, the vital question is not that people have everywhere
believed in the existence of supernatural beings,[1] but an
understanding of the conditions from which the beliefs themselves have
grown. That alone can determine whether in studying the god idea we are
studying the acquisition of a truth or the growth of a fallacy.
Next, while it may be granted, at least provisionally, that the belief
in supernatural beings is universal, against that has to be set the fact
that the whole tendency of social development is to narrow the range of
the belief, to restrict the scope of its authority, and to so attenuate
it that it becomes of no value precisely where it is supposed to be of
most use. The belief in God is least questioned where civilisation is
lowest; it is called into the most serious question where civilisation
is most advanced. To-day the belief in God is only universal in the
sense that some representatives of it are to be found in all societies.
The majority may still profess to have it, but it has ceased to be
universal in the strict sense of the term. Nor will it be disputed that
the number of convinced disbelievers is everywhere on the increase. The
fact is everywhere lamented by the official exponents of religion. All
that we can say is that the belief in God is universal--with those who
believe in him. And even here universality of belief is only secured by
their refraining from discussing precisely what it is they mean by
"God," and what it is they believe in. There is agreement in obscurity,
each one dreading to see clearly the features of his assumed friend for
fear he should recognise the face of an enemy.
Finally, the suspicious feature must be pointed out that the belief in
God owes its existence, not to the trained and educated observation of
civilised times, but to the uncritical reflection of the primitive mind.
It has its origin there, and it would indeed be remarkable if, while in
almost every other direction the primitive mind showed itself to be
hopelessly wrong, in its interpretation of the world in this particular
respect it has proved itself to be altogether right. As a matter of
fact, this primitive assumption is going the way of the others, the only
difference being that it is passing through more phases than some. But
the decay is plain to all save those who refuse to see. The process of
refinement cannot go on for ever. In other matters knowledge passes from
a nebulous and indefinite stage to a precise and definite one. In the
case of theism it pursues an opposite course. From the very definite
god, or gods, of primitive mankind we advance to the vague and
indefinite god of the modern theist--a God who, apparently, means
nothing and does nothing, and at most stands as a symbol for our
irremovable ignorance. Clearly this process cannot go on for ever. The
work of attenuation must stop at some point. And one may safely predict
that just as the advance of scientific knowledge has taken over one
department after another that was formerly regarded as within the
province of religion, so one day it will be borne in upon all that an
hypothesis such as that of theism, which does nothing and explains
nothing, may be profitably dispensed with.
What really remains for discussion is a problem of socio-psychology.
That is, we have to determine the conditions of origin of so widespread
a belief, but which we believe to be false. The materials for answering
this question are now at our command, and whatever differences of
opinion there may be concerning the stages of development, there is
very little concerning their essential character. And it is not without
significance that this question of origin is one that the present-day
apologists of theism seem pretty unanimous in leaving severely alone.
Let us commence with the fact that religion is something that is
acquired. Every work on the origin of religion assumes it, and all
investigation warrants the assumption. The question at issue is the mode
of acquisition. And here one word of caution is advisable. The wide
range of religious ideas and their existence at a very low culture
stage, precludes the assumption that religious ideas are generated in
the same conscious way as are scientific theories. Even with the modern
mind our conclusions concerning many of the affairs of life are formed
in a semi-conscious manner. Most frequently they are generated
subconsciously, and are only consciously formulated under pressure of
circumstances. And if we are to understand religion aright we must be on
our guard against attributing to primitive mankind a degree of
scientific curiosity and reflective power to which it can lay no claim.
We have to allow for what one writer well calls "physiological thought,"
thought, that is, which rises subconsciously and has its origin in the
pressure of insistent experience.
A comprehensive survey of religious beliefs show that there are only two
things that can be said to be common to them all. They differ in
teachings, in their conceptions of deity, and in modes of worship. But
all religions agree in believing in some kind of ghostly existence and
in a continued life beyond the grave. I use the expression, "ghostly
existence," because we can really trace the idea of God backward until
we lose the definite figure in a very general conception, much as
astronomers have taught us to lose a definite world in the primitive
fire-mist. So when we get beyond the culture stage at which we meet with
the definite man-like God, we encounter an indefinite thought stage at
which we can dimly mark the existence of a frame of mind that was to
give birth to the more concrete conception.
The most general term for the belief in the various orders of gods thus
becomes the belief in invisible, super-material beings, like, and yet
superior to man. It is for this reason that Professor Tylor's definition
of religion as "the belief in spiritual beings--so long as we do not use
the term "spiritual" in its modern sense"--seems to me the moat
satisfactory definition yet offered. It is the one point on which all
religions agree, and for this reason may be regarded as their essential
feature.
This taken for granted, our next point of enquiry is, What was there in
the conditions of primitive life that would give rise to a belief in
this super-material, or in modern language, spiritual existence? Now
there are at least two sets of experiences that seem adequate to the
required explanation. The one is normal, the other abnormal. The first
is connected directly with the universal experience of dreams. The
savage is, as Tylor says, a severely practical person. He believes what
he sees and, one may add, he sees what he believes. Knowing nothing of
the distinction we draw between a fact and an illusion, ignorant of the
functions, or even the existence of a nervous system, the dreams of a
savage are to him as real as his waking experiences. He does not say "I
dreamed I saw So-So," but like the Biblical characters he says, "I saw
So-So in a dream." The two forms of expression carry all the difference
between fact and fancy. One thing is therefore obvious to the savage
mind--something escapes from the body, travels about, and returns. Such
a conviction does not represent the conclusions of a genius speculating
upon the meaning of unexplained facts. It is a conviction steadily built
up by the pressure of unvarying experience, as steadily as is the
conviction that fire burns or that water is wet. The very universality
of the belief is proof that it had some such sub-conscious origin.
A second class of experiences lead to the same conclusion. In temporary
loss of consciousness the savage again sees proof of the existence of a
double. With epilepsy or insanity there is offered decisive proof that
some spirit has taken possession of the individual's body. Even in
civilised countries this belief was widely held hardly more than a
century ago. And both these classes of experience are enforced by the
belief that the shadow of a man, an echo, a reflection seen in water,
etc., are all real things. The proofs that the belief in a "soul" does
originate in this way are now so plentiful that exact references are
needless. Examination of primitive religious beliefs all over the world
yield the one result, without there being any evidence to the contrary.
Primitive philosophy does not stop here. Man dreams of things as well as
of persons, and a general extension of the belief in a ghost or double
is made until it covers almost everything. As Tylor says, "the doctrine
of souls is worked out with remarkable breadth and consistency. The
souls of animals are recognised by a natural extension from the theory
of human souls; the souls of trees and plants follow in some vague
partial way; and the souls of inanimate objects expand the category to
the extremest boundary." The reasoning of the primitive mind is thus,
given its limitations and unsound premises, uncompromisingly logical.
One can trace the processes of reasoning more easily than is the case
with modern man because it is less disturbed by cross-currents of
acquired knowledge and conflicting interests.
I am giving but the barest outline of a vast subject because I am
desirous of keeping the attention of the reader on what I believe to be
the main issue. For that reason I am not discussing whether animism--the
vitalising of inanimate objects--has an independent origin, or whether
it is a mere extension of the ghost theory. Either theory does not
affect my main position, which is that the idea of God is derived from
the ignorance of primitive humanity, and has no other authority than a
misunderstanding of natural facts. On that point the agreement among all
schools of anthropologists is now very general. Personally, however, I
do not believe that men would ever have given a soul to trees or other
natural objects unless they had first given them to living beings, and
had thus familiarised themselves with the conception of a double.
At present, though, we are on the track of the gods. The belief that
every human being, and nearly every object, possesses a soul, ends in
surrounding man with a cloud of spirits against which he has to be
always on his guard. The general situation is well put by Miss Kingsley,
who gives a picture of the West African that may well stand for the
savage world in general.
Everything happens by the action of spirits. The thing he does
himself is done by the spirit within acting on his body, the matter
with which that spirit is associated. Everything that is done by
other things is done by their spirit associated with their
particular mass of matter.... The native will point out to you a
lightning stricken tree and tell you its spirit has been killed. He
will tell you, when the earthen cooking pot is broken, it has lost
its spirit. If his weapon failed him, it is because he has stolen
or made its spirit sick by means of his influence on other spirits
of the same class.... In every action of his life he shows you how
he lives with a great, powerful spirit world around him. You see
him before running out to hunt or fight rubbing stuff in his weapon
to strengthen the spirit that is in it; telling it the while what
care he has taken of it; running through a list of what he had
given it before, though these things had been hard to give; and
begging it, in the hour of his dire necessity, not to fail him....
You see him bending over the face of the river, talking to its
spirit with proper incantations, asking it when it meets an enemy
to upset his canoe and destroy him ... or, as I have myself seen in
Congo Française, to take down with it, away from his village, the
pestilence of the spotted death. (_West African Studies_; pp.
394-5).
When Feurbach said that the "realm of memory was the world of souls," he
expressed a profound truth in a striking manner. It is dreams, swoons,
catalepsy, with their allied states which suggest the existence of a
double or ghost. Even in the absence of the mass of evidence from all
quarters in support of this, the fact of the ghost always being pictured
as identical in clothing and figure with the dead man would be almost
enough to demonstrate its dream origin. Into that aspect of the matter,
however, we do not now intend to enter. We are now only concerned with
the bearing of the ghost theory on the origin of God. Another step or
two and we shall have reached that point. Believing himself surrounded
on all sides by a world of ghosts the great concern of the savage is to
escape their ill-will or to secure their favour. Affection and
fear--fear that the ghost, if his wants are neglected, will wreak
vengeance through the agency of disease, famine, or accident--leads
insensibly to the ghosts of one's relations becoming objects of
veneration, propitiation, and petition. All ghosts receive some
attention for a certain time after death, but naturally special and
sustained honours are reserved for the heads of families,[2] and for
such as have been distinguished for various qualities during life. In
this way ancestor worship becomes one of the most general forms of
religious observances, and the gradual development of the great man or
the deceased ancestor into a deity follows by easy stages. The
principles of ancestor worship, to again cite the indispensible Tylor,
are not difficult to understand:--
They plainly keep up the social relations of the living world. The
dead ancestor, now passed into a deity, simply goes on protecting:
his own family and receiving suit and service from them as of old;
the dead chief still watches over his own tribe, still holds his
authority by helping friends and harming enemies, still rewards the
right and sharply punishes the wrong.
That this deification of ancestors and of dead men actually takes place
is indisputable. The Mythologies of Greece and Rome offer numerous
examples, and the deification of the Roman Emperors became the regular
rule. Numerous examples to the same end are supplied from India by Mr.
W. Crookes and Sir A. C. Lyall. That this way of honouring the dead is
not limited to natives is shown by the famous case of General Nicholson,
who actually received the honour of deification during his lifetime.
Anyone who cares to consult those storehouses of information, Spencer's
"Principles of Sociology" (Vol. I.), Tylor's "Primitive Culture," and
Frazer's "Golden Bough" will find the whole god-making process set forth
with a wealth of illustration that can hardly fail to carry conviction.
Finally, in the case of Japan and China we have living examples of an
organised system of religion based upon the deification of ancestors.[3]
It will make it easier to understand the evolution of the god from the
ghost if we bear in mind that with primitive man the gods are conceived
neither as independent existences nor as creators. Even immortality is
not asserted of them. The modern notions of deity, largely due to the
attempt to accommodate the idea of god to certain metaphysical and
philosophical conceptions, are so intermingled with the primitive idea,
that there is always the danger of reading into the primitive
intelligence more than was ever there. The consequence is that by
confusing the two senses of the word many find it difficult to realise
how one has grown out of the other. Such ideas as those of creation and
independence are quite foreign to the primitive mind. Savages are like
children in this respect; their interest in things is primarily of a
practical character. A child does not begin by asking how a thing came
to be; it asks what it is for or what it does. So the prime concern of
the savage is, what are certain things for? what will they do? are they
injurious or beneficial? It is because of this practical turn of mind
that so much attention is paid to the ghost, having once accepted its
existence as a fact. The superiority of the gods do not consist in their
substantial difference from himself, but in the greater power for good
or evil conferred upon them by their invisible existence. Creation is a
conception that does not arise until the capacity for philosophical
speculation has developed. Then reflection sets to work; the nature of
the god undergoes modification, and the long process of accommodating
primitive religious beliefs to later knowledge commences, the end of
which we have not yet seen.
The process of reading modern speculations into the religion of the
savage leads to some curious results, one of which we cannot forbear
mentioning. In his little work on "Animism" Mr. Edward Clodd, after
tracing the fundamental ideas of religion to primitive delusion, says:--
Herein (_i.e._, in dream and visions) are to be found the sufficing
materials for a belief in an entity in the body, but not of it,
which can depart and return at will, and which man everywhere has
more or less vaguely envisaged as his "double" or "other self."...
The distinction between soul and body, which explained to man his
own actions, was the key to the actions of animate and inanimate
things. A personal life and will controlled them. This was
obviously brought home to him more forcibly in the actions of
living things, since these so closely resembled his own that he saw
no difference between themselves and him. _Not in this matter alone
have the intuitions of the savage found their confirmation in the
discoveries of modern science_.... Ignorant of the reflection of
sound, how else could he account for the echoes flung back from the
hillside? Ignorant of the law of the interruption of light, how
else could he explain the advancing and retreating shadows? _In
some sense they must be alive; an inference supported by modern
science._
The italics in the above passages are mine, and they serve to illustrate
how certain writers manage to introduce quite misleading conceptions to
their readers. It almost causes one to cease wondering at the
persistence of religion when one finds a writer accepting the results of
anthropological research, and at the same time claiming that savage
"intuitions" are confirmed by modern science. If that be true, then all
that Mr. Clodd has previously written must be dismissed as untrue. The
statement is, however, quite inaccurate. The inference drawn by the
savage is not supported by modern science. Neither on the existence of a
soul nor on the existence of a god, nor on the nature of disease, nor on
the causes of physical or psychical states has science confirmed the
"intuitions" (whatever that conveniently cloudy word may mean) of the
primitive savage. The acquisition of correct views would indeed be an
easy thing if they could be gained by the "intuitions" of an untaught
savage.
The assertion that "in some sense" natural forces must be alive (as
though there can be any real sense in a term except the right sense),
and that this inference is "supported by modern physics," is an
illustration of that playing with words which is fatal to exact thought.
The only sense in which the expression is used in physics is that of
"active," and both "active" and "alive" owe their vogue to the necessity
for controverting the older view that natural forces are "inert" or
"dead" and need some external force to produce anything. It is a mere
figure of speech; the evil is when it is taken and used as an exact
expression of scientific fact. Let a reader of Mr. Clodd ask himself
whether the life he thinks of when he speaks of forces being alive is
animal life, and he will at once see the absurdity of the statement. And
if he does not mean animal life, what life does he mean?
Putting on one side all such attempts at accommodation, we may safely
say that given the origin of religion in the manner indicated, one may
trace--at least in outline--the development of religion from the
primitive ghost worship up to the rituals and beliefs of current creeds.
I do not mean by this that _all_ religious beliefs and practices spring
directly from ghost worship. Once religion is established, and the
myth-making capacity let loose, additions are made that are due to all
sorts of causes. The Romans and Greeks, for example, seem to have
created a number of deities out of pure abstractions--gods of peace, of
war, of fortune, and so forth. Why particular deities were invented, and
how they became attached to particular groups of phenomena, are
questions that it is often impossible to answer with any great degree of
certainty, but why there should be any gods at all is a question that
can be answered, I think, on the lines above indicated.
The way in which the primitive ghost worship probably paved the way for
some of the doctrines of the "higher" religions may be seen on taking a
story such as the death and resurrection of the Gospel Jesus. In his
treatise on "The Attis" Mr. Grant Allen made the ingenious suggestion
that the greater fertility of the ground on and near the grave, owing to
the food placed there to feed the ghost, would produce in the savage
mind the conviction that this increased fertility was due to the
beneficent activity of the double of the dead man. Reasoning from this
basis, it would be a simple conclusion that the production, or lack, of
crops was everywhere due to the action of good or evil spirits. In the
next place, it must be remembered that it is the act of dying which
raises the human being to the level of a guardian spirit or god; and
from this to the production of a god by ceremonial killing would be a
natural and an easy step. In this last respect, at least, we are upon
the firm ground of fact, and not on that of mere theory. If a reader
will take the trouble to peruse the numerous examples collected by Tylor
in the first chapter of his "Primitive Culture," and those provided by
Frazer in the "Golden Bough," he will find the evidence for this
overwhelming. Examples of the practice of killing a human being and
burying his body under the foundations of a castle or a bridge are very
common, and the modern custom of burying coins under a foundation-stone
is a harmless and interesting survival of this custom. In some parts of
Africa a boy and girl are buried where a village is to be established.
In Polynesia the central pillar of a temple was placed on the body of a
human victim. In Scotland there is the legend that St. Columba buried
the body of St. Oran under his monastery to make the building secure.
Any country will supply stories of a similar kind. Finally, we have the
amusing story of the manner in which Sir Richard Burton narrowly escaped
deification. Exploring in Afghanistan in the disguise of a Mohammedan
fakir, he received a friendly hint that he would do well to get off
without delay. He expressed surprise, as the people seemed very fond of
him. That, it was explained, was the cause of the trouble. They thought
so much of him they intended to kill him, and thus retain so excellent a
man with them for ever.
When Tylor wrote, the prevalent impression was that this killing of
human beings was due to a desire to appease the spirits of the place.
Later investigation showed that instead of a sacrifice it was a
creation. The purpose was to create a local god who would watch over the
building or settlement. God-making was thus shown to be a universal
practice.
Our next step must be taken in the company of Sir James Frazer. On
all-fours with the practice of creating a guardian deity for a building
is that of making a similar guardian for crops and vegetation. The
details of this practice are interesting, but they need not now detain
us. It is enough that the practice existed, and, as Frazer shows, was an
annual practice. Year by year the god was killed in order that the seed
might ripen and the harvest be secured. In some cases the body was cut
up and pieces buried in the fields; in other cases it was burned and the
ashes scattered over the ground. Gradually the ritual becomes more
elaborate, but the central idea remains intact that of a human being
converted into a god by being killed, a man sacrificed for the benefit
of the tribe. In the light of these researches the New Testament story
becomes only a more recent version of a widespread savage superstition.
The time of the sacrifice, the symbolism, the practices all prove this.
The crucified Saviour, in honour of whom all the Christian cathedrals
and churches of the world are built, is only another late survival of
the god-making practice of primitive savagery.
The gods are, then, ultimately deified ghosts. They are born of
misinterpreted subjective and objective experiences. This is among the
surest and most firmly established results of modern investigation. It
matters not what modifications later knowledge may demand; it will only
mean a change of form, not of substance. On any scientific theory we are
bound to explain the origin of the gods in terms of human error. And no
subsequent development can alter its character. We may trace the various
stages of a universal delusion, but nothing can convert a delusion into
a reality. It is now universally recognised that the primitive notions
of gods represent false conclusions from misunderstood facts. No one now
believes that the visions seen during sleep are proofs of a wandering
double. No one believes that it is necessary to supply the ghost of the
dead with food, or with weapons, or with wives. We do not believe that
the wind, the stars, the waters are alive or are capable of being
influenced by our petitions. All the phenomena upon which the god idea
was originally built are now known to be susceptible to a radically
different explanation. And if this is so, what other foundations have we
on which to build a belief in God? There is none. There is only one
plausible reason for the belief in God, and that is the reason advanced
by the savage. When we get beyond that we are not dealing with reasons
for holding the belief, but only with excuses for retaining it.
Unfortunately, thousands are familiar with the excuses, and only a few
with the reasons. Were it otherwise a great deal of what follows need
never have been written.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Both the words "supernatural" and "God" are here used somewhat
loosely. In fact the conception of the supernatural arises gradually,
and as a consequence of developing knowledge which, so to speak, splits
the universe into two. So also with the belief in God. There is clearly
an earlier form in which there exists a kind of mental plasma from which
the more definite conception of God is subsequently formed. On this
topic the reader may consult "The Threshold of Religion," by R. R.
Marett, 1914.
[2] For the importance of this in the history of religion see Fustel de
Coulanges' "The Ancient City."
[3] The perpetuation of this earlier stage of religion in China and
Japan appears to make the transition to Free-thought easier than in
countries where religion has under-gone a more advanced evolution. In
both the countries named, the better minds find it quite easy to treat
their religion as merely the respect paid to ancestors, and thus divest
it of the supernatural element. In Christian countries there is also the
attempt to restate beliefs in terms of current morality and sociology,
but the transition is more difficult.
CHAPTER III.
HAVE WE A RELIGIOUS SENSE?
In all discussions of theism there is one point that is usually
overlooked. This is that theism is in the nature of a hypothesis. And,
like every hypothesis, its value is proportionate to the extent to which
it offers a satisfactory explanation of the facts with which it
professes to deal. If it can offer no explanation its value is nil. If
its explanation is only partial, its value will be determined by the
degree to which it can claim superiority over any other hypothesis that
is before us. But every hypothesis implies two things. There is a group
of things to be explained, and there is the hypothesis itself that is
offered in explanation. In the harmony of the two, and in the
possibility of verification, lies the only proof of truth that can be
offered.
If this be granted it at once disposes of the plea that a conviction of
the existence of God springs from some special quality of the mind which
enables man to arrive at a conclusion in a manner different from the way
in which conclusions concerning other subjects are reached. Intuition as
a method of discovering truth is pure delusion. All that can be
rationally meant by such a word as intuition is summarised experience.
When we speak of knowing a thing "intuitively," all that we can mean is
that, experience having furnished us with a sufficient guidance, we are
able to reach a conclusion so rapidly that we cannot follow the steps of
the mental process involved. That this is so is seen in the fact that
our intuitions always follow the line of our experience. A stockbroker
may "intuitively" foresee a rise or fall of the market, but his
intuition will fail him when considering the possibilities of a chemical
composition. To say that a man knows a thing by intuition is only one
way of saying that he does not know how he knows it--that is, he is
unable to trace the stages of his own mental operations. And in this
sense intuition is universal. It belongs as much to the cooking of a
dumpling as it does to the belief in deity.
But it is evident that when the theist talks of intuition, what he has
in mind is something very different from this. He is thinking of some
special quality of mind that operates independently of experience,
either racial or individual. And this simply does not exist. In religion
man is never putting into operation qualities of mind different from
those he employs in other directions. Whether we call a state of mind
religious or not is determined, not by the mental processes involved,
but by the object to which it is directed. Hatred and love, anger,
pleasure, awe, curiosity, reverence, even worship, are exactly the same
whether directed towards "God" or towards anything else. Human qualities
are fundamentally identical, and may be expressed in relation to all
sorts of objects.
The attempt to mark religion off from the rest of life, to be approached
by special methods and in a special frame of mind, takes many forms, and
it may be illustrated by the manner in which it is dealt with by
Professor Arthur Thomson. In a little work entitled "An Introduction to
Science," and specially intended for general consumption, he remarks,
as a piece of advice to his readers:--
We would remind ourselves and our readers that the whole subject
should be treated with reverence and sympathy, for it is hardly
possible to exaggerate the august rôle of religion in human life.
Whatever be our views, we must recognise that just as the great
mathematicians and metaphysicians represent the aristocracy of the
human intellect, so the great religious geniuses represent the
aristocracy of human emotion. And in this connection it is probably
useful to bear in mind that in all discussions about religious
ideas or feelings we should ourselves be in an exalted mood, and
yet "with a compelling sense of our own limitations," and of the
vastness and mysteriousness of the world.
If Professor Thomson had been writing on "Frames of Mind Fatal to
Scientific Investigation" he could hardly have chosen a better
illustration of his thesis. One may safely say that anyone who started
an examination of religion in this spirit, and maintained it throughout
his examination, would perform something little short of a miracle did
he reach a sound conclusion. A feeling of sympathy may pass, but why
"reverence"? Reverence is a very complex state, but it certainly
includes respect and a certain measure of affection. And how is one to
rationally have respect or affection for anything _before_ one has
ascertained that they are deserving of either? Is anyone who happens to
believe that religion is _not_ worthy of reverence to be ruled out as
being unfit to express an opinion? Clearly, on this rule, either we
compel a man to sacrifice his sense of self-respect before we will allow
him to be heard, or we pack the jury with persons who confess to have
reached a decision before they have heard the evidence. It would almost
seem from the expression that while examining religion we should be in
an "exalted mood" that Professor Thomson has in view the last
contingency. For by an exalted mood we can only understand a religious
mood--that is, we must believe in religion before we examine it,
otherwise our examination is profanity. Well, that is just the cry of
the priest in all ages. And while it is sound religion, there is no
question of its being shocking science. Even the mere feeling of
exaltation is not to be encouraged during a scientific investigation.
One can understand Kepler when he had discovered the true laws of
planetary motion, or Newton when he embraced in one magnificent
generalisation the fall of a stone and the revolution of a planet,
experiencing a feeling of exaltation; but exaltation must follow, not
precede, the conclusion. At any rate, there are few scientific teachers
who would encourage such a feeling during investigation.
Leaving for a moment the question of religious geniuses being the
aristocrats of human emotion, we may take the same writer's view of the
limitations of science, thus providing an opening for the intrusion of
religion. This is given in the form of a criticism of the following
well-known passage from Huxley:--
If the fundamental proposition of evolution is true, namely, that
the entire world, animate and inanimate, is the result of the
mutual interaction, according to definite laws, of forces possessed
by the molecules which made up the primitive nebulosity of the
universe; then it is no less certain that the present actual world
reposed potentially in the cosmic vapour, and that an intelligence,
if great enough, could from his knowledge of the properties of the
molecules of that vapour have predicted the state of the fauna in
Great Britain in 1888 with as much certitude as we say what will
happen to the vapour of our breath on a cold day in winter.
Now, if the principle of evolution be accepted, the truth of Huxley's
statement appears to be self-evident. It may be that no intelligence
capable of making such a calculation will ever exist, but the abstract
possibility remains. Professor Thomson calls it "a very strong and
confident statement," which illustrates the need for philosophical
criticism. His criticism of Huxley's statement is based on two grounds.
These are: (1) "No complete physico-chemical description has ever been
given of any distinctively vital activity; and (2) the physical
description of things cannot cover biological phenomena, nor can the
biological description cover mental and moral phenomena." There is, he
says,
The physical order of nature--the inorganic world--where mechanism
reigns supreme. (2) There is the vital order of nature--the world
of organisms--where mechanism proves insufficient. (3) There is the
physical order of nature--the world of mind--where mechanism is
irrelevant. Thus there are three fundamental sciences--Physics,
Biology, and Psychology--each with characteristic questions,
categories and formulæ.
Now, however earnestly Huxley's statement calls for criticism, it is
clear to us that nothing useful in that direction is offered by Prof.
Thomson. It is quite plain that the abstract possibility of such a
calculation as that named by Huxley can never be ruled out by science,
since such a conception lies at the root of all scientific thinking.
After all, want of knowledge only proves--want of knowledge; and Sir
Oliver Lodge would warn Prof. Thomson of the extreme danger of resting
an argument on the ignorance of science at any particular time.[4]
I note this statement of Professor Thomson's chiefly because it
illustrates a very common method of dealing with the mechanistic or
non-theistic view of the universe. In this matter Professor Thomson may
claim the companionship of Sir Oliver Lodge, who says, "Materialism is
appropriate to the material world, not as a philosophy, but as a working
creed, as a proximate, an immediate formula for guiding research.
Everything beyond that belongs to another region, and must be reached by
other methods. To explain the psychical in terms of physics and
chemistry is simply impossible.... The extreme school of biologists ...
ought to say, if they were consistent, there is nothing but physics and
chemistry at work anywhere." With both these writers there is the common
assumption that the mechanist assumes there is a physical and chemical
explanation of all phenomena. And the assumption is false. There is a
story of a well-known lecturer on physiology who commenced an address on
the stomach by remarking that that organ had been called this, that, and
the other, but the one thing he wished his students to bear in mind was
that it was a stomach. So the mechanist, while firmly believing that
there is an ascending unity in all natural phenomena, is never silly
enough to deny that living things are alive, or that thinking beings
think.
But unless Professor Thomson does impute this to the mechanist, we quite
fail to see the relevance his assertion that there are three
departments, physics, biology, and psychology, each with its
characteristic questions, categories, and formulæ. Of course, there are,
and equally, of course, physical laws will not cover biological facts;
nor will biological laws cover psychological ones. This is not due to
any occult cause, but to the simple fact that as each group of phenomena
has its characteristic features, each set of laws are framed to cover
the phenomena presented by that group. Otherwise there would be no need
of these special laws. It is astonishing how paralysing is the effect of
the theistic obsession on the minds of even scientific men, since it
leads them to ignore what is really a basic consideration in scientific
method.
Perhaps a word or two more on this topic is advisable. If it is
permissible to arrange natural phenomena in a serial order, we may place
them in succession as physical, chemical, biological, and psychological.
But these names represent no more than descriptions of certain features
that are to the group common, otherwise the grouping would be useless
and impossible. And it is part of the business of science to frame
"laws"--descriptions--of phenomena such as will enable us to express
their characteristic features in a brief formula. It is, therefore,
quite true to say that you cannot express vital phenomena in terms of
physics or chemistry. And no materialist who took the trouble to
understand materialism, instead of taking a statement of what it is from
an anti-materialist, ever thought otherwise. _Each specific group of
phenomena can only be covered by laws that belong to that group, and
which were framed for that express purpose._ A psychological fact can no
more be expressed in terms of chemistry than a physical fact can be
expressed in terms of biology. These truths are as plain to the
mechanist as they are to the vitalist. Mental life, the scientific
categories, are real to all; the only question at issue is that of their
origin.
To explain is to make intelligible, and in that sense all scientific
explanation consists in the establishing of equivalents. When we say
that A, B, C are the factors of D, we have asserted D is the equivalent
of A, B, C--plus, of course, all that results from the combination of
the factors. When we say that we have explained the formation of water
by showing it to be the product of H.2.O. we have shown that whether we
say "water" or use the chemical formula we are making identical
statements. If we are working out a problem in dynamics we meet with
exactly the same principle. We must prove that the resultant accounts
for all the forces in operation at the time. Now, all that the mechanist
claims is that it is extremely probable that one day the scientist will
be able to work out the exact physico-chemical conditions that are the
equivalents of biological phenomena, and, in turn, the
physico-chemical-biological conditions that are the equivalents of
psychological phenomena. Very considerable progress has already been
made in this direction, and, as Sir Oliver Lodge says, there are
probably very few scientific men who would deny the likelihood of this
being done.
But this does not deny the existence of differences between these groups
of phenomena; neither does it assert that we can describe the
characteristic features of one group in terms that belong to another
group. Once a group of phenomena, biological, or chemical is there, we
must have special formulæ to describe them, otherwise there would be no
need for these divisions. It is admitted that the earth was at one time
destitute of life; it is also admitted that there are forms of life
destitute of those features which we call mind. And, whatever be their
mode of origin, once introduced they must be dealt with in special
terms. Psychological facts must be expressed in terms of psychology,
biological facts in terms of biology, and chemical facts in terms of
chemistry. You may give the chemical and physical equivalent of a
sunset. That is one aspect. You may also give the psychological
explanation of the emotion of man on beholding it. That is another
aspect. But you cannot express the psychological fact in terms of
chemistry because it belongs to quite another category. A psychological
fact, as such, is ultimate. So is a chemical or a biological fact. If by
analysis you reduce the psychological fact to its chemical and
biological equivalents, its character as a psychological fact is
destroyed. That is the product of the synthesis, and to seek in analysis
for what only exists in synthesis, is surely to altogether misunderstand
the spirit of scientific method. The curious thing is that a mere layman
should have to correct men of science on this matter.
We can now return to Prof. Thomson's attempt to claim for religion a
special place in the sphere of emotion. He claims, in the passage
already cited, that "as the great mathematicians and metaphysicians
represent the aristocracy of human intellect so the great religious
geniuses represent the aristocracy of human emotion." There is nothing
new in this claim, neither is there any evidence of its truth.
Coleridge's dictum that the proper antithesis to religion is poetry is
open to serious objection, but there is more to be said for it than may
be said for the antithesis set up by Prof. Thomson. As a matter of fact,
religious geniuses have often pursued their work with as much attention
to scientific precision as was possible, and have prided themselves that
they made no appeal to mere emotion. Justification by emotion has only
been attempted when other means of securing conviction has failed. And
the appeal to emotion has become popular for very obvious reasons. It
enables the ordinary theologian to feel a comfortable superiority over a
Spencer or a Darwin. It enables mediocrities to enjoy the feeling of
being wise without the trouble of acquiring wisdom. It enables inherited
prejudices to rank as reasoned convictions. And, in addition, there is
nothing that cannot be conveniently proved or disproved by such a
method.
In whatever form the distinction is met with it harbours a fallacy.
Intellectual activity is not and cannot be divorced from emotion. There
are states of mind in which feeling predominates, and there are others
in which reason predominates. But all intellectual states involve a
feeling element. The often-made remark that feeling and intellect are
in conflict is true only in the sense that ultimately certain
intellectual states, _plus_ their associated feelings, are in conflict
with other intellectual states plus _their_ associated feelings. To
realise this one need only consider the sheer pleasure that results from
the rapid sweep of the mind through a lengthy chain of reasoning, and
the positive pain that ensues when the terms of a proposition baffles
comprehension. The force of this is admitted by Prof. Thomson in the
remark that man at the limit of his endeavour has fallen back on
religion. Quite so; that is the painful feelings evoked by an
intellectual failure have thrown a certain type of mind back on
religion. In this they have acted like one who flies to a drug for
relief from a pain he lacks the courage to bear. They take a narcotic
when, often enough, the real need is for a stimulant.
In sober truth religion is no more necessarily connected with the
emotions than are other subjects of investigation. Those who have made
the pursuit of "cold scientific truth" their life's work have shown
every whit as much ardour and passion as those who have given their life
to religion. The picture of man sacrificing himself in the cause of
religion is easily matched by a Vesalius haunting the charnel houses of
Europe, and risking the most loathsome diseases in the interests of
scientific research. The abiding passion for truth in a character such
as that of Roger Bacon or Bruno easily matches the enthusiasm of the
missionary monk. The passion and the enthusiasm for science is less
advertised than the passion and the enthusiasm for religion, but it is
quite as real, and certainly not less valuable. The state of mind of
Kepler on discovering the laws of planetary motion was hardly less
ecstatic than that of a religious visionary describing his sense of
"spiritual" communion. Only in the case of the scientist, it is emotion
guided by reason, not reason checked and partly throttled by emotion.
When, therefore, Matthew Arnold defined religion as morality touched
with emotion, he substituted a fallacy for a definition. Primarily
religion is as much a conviction as is the Copernican system of
astronomy. It exists first as an idea; it only exists as an emotion at a
later stage. There is really no such thing as a religious emotion, there
are only emotions connected with religion. Originally all religion is in
the nature of an inference from observed or experienced facts. This
inference may not be of the elaborate kind that we associate with modern
scientific work, but it is there. The inference is an illogical one, but
under the conditions inevitable. And being an inference religion is not
primarily an emotion but a conviction, and it must stand or fall by its
intellectual trustworthiness. It seems, indeed, little less than a
truism to say that unless men first of all _believed_ something about
religion they could never have emotions concerning it. Hope and fear may
colour our convictions, they may prevent the formation of correct
opinions, but they originate in connection with a belief in every case.
And an emotion, if it be a healthful one, must be ultimately capable of
intellectual justification. When this cannot be done, when we have mere
emotion pleaded as a ground for rejecting rational examination, we have
irrationalism driven to its last ditch.
FOOTNOTE:
[4] "The present powerlessness of science to explain or originate life
is a convenient weapon wherewith to fell a pseudo-scientific antagonist
who is dogmatising too loudly out of bounds; but it is not perfectly
secure as a permanent support.... Life in its ultimate elements and on
its material side is such a simple thing, it is but a slight extension
of known chemical and physical forces.... I apprehend that there is not
a biologist but believes (perhaps quite erroneously) that sooner or
later the discovery will be made, and that a cell discharging all the
essential functions of life will be constructed out of inorganic
material." ("Man and the Universe," Chap. I.).
CHAPTER IV.
THE ARGUMENT FROM EXISTENCE.
What, now, are the facts upon which the modern believer in deity
professes to base his belief and what are the arguments used to defend
the position taken up?
Premising that the reasons advanced for the belief in deity are more in
the nature of excuses than aught else, we may take first of all the
argument derived from the mere existence of the universe, with the
alleged impossibility of conceiving it as self-existent. Along with that
there may also be taken as a variant of the argument from existence, the
alleged impossibility of a natural "order" that should result from the
inherent properties of natural forces. Now it is at least plain that
whatever difficulty there is in thinking of the universe as either
self-existing or self-adjusting is in no degree lessened by assuming a
God as the originator and sustainer of the whole. The most that it does
is to move the difficulty back a step, and while with many "out of sight
out of mind" is as true of their attitude towards mental problems as it
is towards the more ordinary things of life, the policy can hardly be
commended in serious intellectual discussions. It is not a bit easier to
think of self-existence or self-direction in connection with a god than
it is in connection with the universe. And if we must rest ultimately
with an insoluble difficulty, it is surely better to stop with the
existence we know rather than to introduce a second existence which for
all we know may be quite mythical.
It is no reply to say that the idea of God involves self-existence. It
does nothing of the kind, or at least it can do so only by our making
yet another assumption that is as unjustifiable as the previous one. If
God is a personality, we have no conception of a personality that is
self-existent. The only personality that we know is the human
personality, and that is certainly derived. Our whole knowledge of human
personality is that of something which is derived from pre-existing
personalities, each of which is a centre of derived influences. Of
personality as either the cause or the commencement of a series we have
not the slightest conception. And the man who says he has can never have
carefully examined the contents of his own mind.
The truth is that the fact of the existence of the universe provides no
ground for argument in favour of either Atheism or Theism. Existence is
a common datum for all. Some existence must be assumed in all argument
since all argument implies something that is to be discussed and
explained. And for that very reason we can offer no explanation of
existence itself, since all explanation means the merging of one class
of facts in a larger class. The largest class of facts we have is that
which is included in the term "universe," and we cannot explain that by
assuming another existence--God--about which we know nothing. To explain
the unknown by the known is an intelligible procedure. To explain the
known by the unknown is to forsake all intellectual sanity. Thus every
difficulty that surrounds the conception of the universe as an ultimate
fact, surrounds the existence of God as an ultimate fact. You cannot get
rid of a difficulty by giving it another name. And whether we call
ultimate existence "God," or "matter," or "substance," is of no vital
importance to anyone who keeps his mind on the real issue that has to be
decided. If the question, What is the cause of existence? be a
legitimate one, it applies no less to the existence of God than it does
to the existence of matter, or force, or substance. All that we gain is
another problem which we add to the problems we already possess. We
increase our burden without enlarging our comprehension. If, on the
other hand, it is said that we need an all embracing formula that will
make our conception of the universe coherent, it may be replied that we
have that in such a conception as the persistence of force. And it is
surely better to keep to a formula that does at least work, than to
devise one that is altogether useless.
The inherent weakness of the theistic conception will be best seen by
taking an orthodox presentation of the argument under consideration. In
his well-known work on "Theism," Professor Flint says "that granting all
the atoms of matter to be eternal, grant that all the properties and
forces, which with the smallest degree of plausibility can be claimed
for them to be eternal and indestructible, and it is still beyond
expression improbable that these atoms, with these forces, if
unarranged, uncombined, unutilised by a presiding mind, would give rise
to anything entitled to be called a universe. It is millions to one that
they would never produce the simplest of the regular arrangements which
we comprehend under the designation of course of nature." (_Theism_; pp.
107-8.)
Now this is an admirably clear and terse statement of an argument which
is often presented in so verbose a manner that its real nature is, to a
considerable extent, disguised. But in this case, clearness of statement
makes for ease of refutation, as will be seen.
For, instead of the statement being, as the writer seems to think,
almost self-evidently true, it is almost obtrusively false. Instead of
its being millions to one, given matter and force with all their present
properties, against the present arrangement of things occurring, it is
inconceivable, assuming that nothing but the atoms and their properties
exist, that any other arrangement than the present one should have
resulted. For the present natural order is not something that is, so to
speak, separable from our conception of natural forces, it is something
that has grown out of and is the expression of the idea of nature. Thus,
given a proper understanding of the principle of gravitation, and it is
impossible to conceive an unsupported stone _not_ falling to the ground.
Given a proper conception of the properties of the constituents of a
chemical compound, and we can only conceive one result as possible. In
all cases our conception of what _must_ occur follows from the nature of
the forces themselves. This is necessarily the case since the conception
of the ultimate properties of matter has been built up by the
observation of the actual results. And one simply cannot conceive an
alteration in these results without thinking of some alteration or
modification of the causes of which they are the expression. What is
true of the part is true of the whole. The present structure of the
world stands as the inevitable outcome of the play of natural forces.
This is both the expression of an actual fact and a condition of
coherent thought. Uniformity of results from uniformity of conditions is
a pre-requisite to sane thinking.
In reality, the expression "millions to one" is no more than an appeal
to man's awe in facing a stupendous mechanism, and his feeling of
impotence when dealing with so complex a subject as the evolution of a
world. It can only mean that to a certain state of knowledge it _seems_
millions to one against the present order resulting. But to a certain
state of knowledge it would seem millions to one against so fluid a
thing as water ever becoming solid. To others it is a commonplace thing
and a necessary consequence of the properties of water itself. To a
savage it would be millions to one against a cloud of "fire mist" ever
becoming a world with a highly diversified fauna and flora. To a
scientist there is nothing more in it than antecedent and consequent.
Such expressions as its being "millions to one" against certain things
happening is never really more than an appeal to ignorance; it means
only that our knowledge is not great enough to permit our tracing the
successive stages of the evolution before us. Once the scientific
conception of the universe is grasped, the marvel is not that the
present order exists, the marvel would be that any other "order" should
be, or that any radical alteration in it should occur.
And there really is no need to throw the whole universe at the head of
the sceptic. That is an attempt to overcome him with sheer weight.
Intrinsically there is nothing more marvellous in the evolution of a
habitable globe from the primitive nebula, than there is in the fact
that an unsupported stone always falls to the ground. It is only our
familiarity with the one experience and our lack of knowledge concerning
the other that gives us the condition of wonder in the one case and lack
of it in the other. In the light of modern knowledge "order" is, as W.
H. Mallock says, "a physical platitude, not a divine paradox."
Moreover, if the odds are a million to one against the existence of the
present arrangement existing, the odds would be equally great against
the existence of any other arrangement. And as the odds are equally
great against all--seeing that _some_ arrangement must exist--there can
be no logical value in using the argument against one arrangement in
particular. The same question, "Why this arrangement and none other?"
might arise in any case.
Finally, the absurdity of arguing that the "order" of nature compels a
belief in deity may be seen by realising the fact that our conception of
order is itself the product of the experienced sequence which
constitutes the order in question. Our ideas of order are not
independent of the world, they are its product--an expression of the
relation between organism and environment. Given a different organism,
with different sense organs, and the world would appear different. On
the other hand the whole structure of man is the result of the existing
conditions. Assume the order to be changed, and the human
organism--presuming it still to exist, will undergo corresponding
modifications. It would not find less order or less beauty, the order
and the beauty would simply be found in another direction. And,
presumably, the theist would still point to the existence of _that_
order as clear proof of a designing intelligence.
Something needs to be said here on a more recent form of the argument
from the "order" of nature than the one we have been discussing. There
is no vital distinction between the old and the new form, but a
variation in terms seems to produce on some minds a conviction of
newness--itself a proof that the nature of the old form had never been
fully realised.
This new form is that based upon what is called "Directivity."
Recognising that it is no longer possible to successfully dispute the
scientific proposition that the state of the universe at any one moment
must be taken as the result of all the conditions then prevailing, and,
therefore, it is to the operation of the ultimate properties of matter,
force, ether,--or whatever name we choose to give to the substance of
the universe--it is argued that we nevertheless require some directing
force which will set, and keep the universe on its present track.
But there is really nothing in this beyond the now familiar appeal to
human impotence. "We do not know," "We cannot see," are quite excellent
reasons for saying nothing at all, but the very worst ground on which to
make positive statements, or on which to base positive beliefs. The
only condition that would justify our making human ignorance a ground
on which to make statements of the kind named would be that we had
demonstrably exhausted the possibilities of natural forces, and no
further developments were possible in this direction. Far from this
being the case there is not a single man of science who would dissent
from the statement that we are only upon the threshold of a knowledge of
their possibilities.
And this assumption of "direction" is unconvincing, if not suicidal in
character. Assuming that direction may have occurred, the fact of
direction adds nothing to the qualities or possibilities of existence,
any more than the "directivity" of a chemist adds to the possibilities
of certain elements when he brings them into combination. Unless the
possibilities of the compound were already in the elements guidance
would be useless. And, in the same way, unless the capacity for
producing the universe we see already existed in the atoms themselves,
no amount of "direction" could have produced it. God simply takes the
place of the chemist bringing certain chemical elements in, of the
engineer guiding certain forces along a particular channel. But no new
capacity is created, and all that is done by either the chemist or the
engineer _might_ occur without their interference. Otherwise it could
not occur at all.
Now there is no denying that natural forces _do_ produce the phenomena
around us. That is undeniable. And whether there be a god or not this
fact remains quite unaffected. All that God can do is to set up certain
combinations. But this does not exclude the possibility of this
combination taking place without the operation of deity. In fact, it
implies it. Either, then, natural forces possess the capacity to produce
the universe as we see it, or they do not. If they do not, then it is
impossible for us to conceive in what way even deity could produce it.
If, on the other hand, they have this capacity, the argument for the
existence of deity loses its force, and the theist is bound to admit
that all that he claims as due to the action of deity might have
happened without him. The theists own argument, if logically pursued
ends in divesting it of all coercive value.
It is curious that the theist should fail to see that a much stronger
argument for the operation of deity would have been of a negative
character, to have proved that in some way God manifested an inhibitive
influence and thus prevented certain things occurring which would have
transpired but for his interference. Regularity, or "order" is, as we
have seen, the necessary consequence of the persistence of force. And so
long as natural forces continue to express themselves in the way in
which experience has led us to expect there is no need for us to think
of anything beyond. The principle of inertia is with us here, for if it
be true that force will persist in a given direction unless deflected
from its course by some other force, it must be equally true that _all_
forces will work out a given consequence unless they are deflected from
their course by the operation of some superior force.
Now if it were possible for the theist to show that in certain cases the
normal consequences of known forces did not transpire, and that the
aberration could not be accounted for by the operation of any other
conceivable force, it might be argued with some degree of plausibility
that there exists a controlling power beyond which answers to God. That
might afford a plausible case for "directivity." But to insist upon the
prevalence of "natural order" will not help the case for theism. It will
rather embarrass it. It may, of course, impress all those whose
conception of scientific method is poor--and sometimes one thinks that
this is all that is deliberately aimed at--but it will not affect anyone
else. To the informed mind it will appear that the Goddite is weakening
his case with every step he takes in the direction of what he apparently
believes to be a demonstration of its logical invulnerability.
CHAPTER V.
THE ARGUMENT FROM CAUSATION.
The argument from causation may logically follow that from existence, of
which it may be regarded as a part. It is presented under various forms,
and when stated in a persuasive manner, is next to the argument from
design, probably as popular as any. The principal reason for this is, I
think, that very few people are concerned with thinking out exactly what
is meant by causation, and the proposition that every event must have a
cause, wins a ready assent, and when followed by the assertion that
therefore the universe must have had a cause, which is God, the
reasoning, or rather the parody of reasoning, appeals to many. There is
a show of reason and logic, but little more.
Quite unquestionably a great deals depends upon what is meant by
causation, and still more upon the use made of the law of causation by
theists. Thus we have seen it urged against Materialists that neural
activity cannot be the equivalent of thought because they do not
resemble each other. And in another direction we meet with the same idea
in the assertion that the cause must be equal to the effect, by which it
is apparently meant that the cause must be _similar_ to the effect, and
that unless we can discern in the cause the same qualities manifested by
the effect, we have not established the fact of causation at all.
The complete and perfect answer to this last view is that the qualities
manifest in an effect never are manifest in the cause, were it so it
would be impossible to distinguish one from the other. The theist is,
as is often the case, saying one thing and meaning another. What he says
is that the cause must be adequate to the effect. There is no dispute
here. But what he proceeds to argue is that the effect must be
discernible in the cause, which is a different statement altogether.
When he says that an effect cannot be greater than its cause, what he
means is that an effect cannot be different from its cause, which is
downright nonsense. He asks, How can that which has not life produce
life? as though the question were on all fours with the necessity for a
man to possess twenty shillings before he can give change for a
sovereign.
Of course, the reply to all this is that the factors which when combined
produce an effect always "give" something of which when uncombined they
show no trace. There is no trace; of sweetness in the constituents of
sugar of lead, or of blueness in the constituents of blue vitriol. In
not a single case, if we are to follow the logic of the theist, is there
a cause adequate to produce an effect, if we are to follow the reasoning
of some theists; in each case we should have to assume some occult agent
as responsible for the result. In reality and in strict scientific
truth, it is of the very essence of causation that there shall be
present in the effect some quality or qualities that are not present in
the cause. And all the confusion may be eliminated if there is borne in
mind the simple and single consideration that in studying an effect it
is the qualities of a combination with which we are properly concerned.
And to expect to find in analysis that which is the product of synthesis
is in the highest degree absurd.
Sir Oliver Lodge in his little work on "Life and Matter" properly
corrects the fallacy with which I have been dealing, and points out that
"properties can be possessed by an aggregate or an assemblage of
particles, which in the particles themselves did not in the slightest
degree exist." But in his desire to find a basis for his theism
immediately falls into an error in an opposite direction. We are on safe
ground, he says, in asserting that "whatever is in a part must be in the
whole." This is true if it is meant that as the whole contains the part,
the part is in the whole. But in that sense the statement was hardly
worth the making. What his argument demands is the meaning that as man
is possessed of mind, and as man is part of nature, therefore nature, as
a whole, manifests mind. And that is not true. Mind may be a special
manifestation of a special arrangement of forces, and only occurring
under special conditions. What Sir Oliver says, then, is that the
properties of a part are in the whole, because the part is included in
whole. What he implies, and without this implication his argument is
meaningless, is that the properties of a part belong to all parts of the
whole. And that is a statement so grotesquely untrue that I suspect Sir
Oliver would be the first to disown the plain implications of his own
argument.
And here is Sir Oliver's illustration of his argument:--
"the fact an apple has pips legitimises the assertion that an apple
tree has pips ... but it would be a childish misunderstanding to
expect to find actual pips in the trunk of a tree."
Now, why should the fact that an apple has pips legitimise the
statement that an apple tree has pips, any more than it legitimises the
statement that the soil from which it springs has pips? And if the tree
has not actual pips, in what sense does it possess them? If the reply is
that it possesses them potentially, one may meet that with the rejoinder
that potentially pips, and everything else, including Sir Oliver Lodge,
were contained in the primitive nebulæ. As a matter of fact the apple
tree does not contain pips either actually or potentially. In his
championship of theism our scientist forgets his science. What the apple
tree possesses is the capacity for building up a fruit with pips _with
the aid of material extracted from the soil beneath and from the air
around_. These pips are no more in the tree than they are in the air or
the soil--not even as a figure of speech. One might, from any point of
view, as reasonably look for the colour and shape and smell of an apple
in the tree as to look for the pips. The properties of the tree is
really one of the factors in the production of a result. Sir Oliver
makes the mistake of writing as though the tree was the only factor in
the problem.
This is not the place in which to enter on an exhaustive inquiry as to
the nature of causation. It is enough to point out that the whole
theistic fallacy rests here on the assumption that we are dealing with
two things, when as a matter of fact we are dealing with only one. Cause
and effect are not two separate things, they are the same thing viewed
under two different aspects. When, for example, I ask for the cause of
gunpowder and am told that it is sulphur, charcoal, and nitre, or for a
cause of sulphuric acid and am given sulphide of iron and oxygen, it is
clear that considered separately these ingredients are not causes at
all. Whether charcoal and sulphur will become part of the cause of
gunpowder or not will depend upon the presence of the third agent;
whether sulphide of iron will rank as part of the cause of sulphuric
acid will depend upon the presence of oxygen. In every case it is the
assemblage of appropriate factors that constitute a real cause. But
given the factors, gunpowder does not follow their assemblage, it is
their assemblage that is expressed by the result. There is no succession
in time, the result is instantaneous with the assemblage of the factors.
The effect is the registration, so to speak, of the combination of the
factors.
Now if what has been said be admitted as correct the argument for the
existence of God as based upon the fact of causation breaks down
completely. If cause and effect are the expressions of a relation, and
if they are not two things, but only one, under two aspects, "cause"
being the name for the related powers of the factors, and "effect" the
name for their assemblage, to talk, as does the theist, of working back
along the chain of causes until we reach God, is nonsense. Even if we
could achieve this feat of regression, we could not reach by this means
a God distinct from the universe. For, as discovering the cause of any
effect means no more than analysing an effect into its factors, the
problem would ultimately be that of dealing with the question of how
something already existing transformed itself into the existing
universe. A form of a very doubtful Pantheism might be reached in this
way, but not theism.
But here a fresh difficulty presents itself to the theist. A cause, as
I have pointed out, must consist of at least two factors or two forces.
This is absolutely indispensable. But assuming that we have got back to
a point prior to the existence of the universe, we have on the theistic
theory, not two factors, but only one. The essential condition for an
act of causation is lacking. A single factor could only repeat itself.
By this method the theist might reach "God." But having got there, there
he would remain. He is left with God and nothing else, and with no
possibility of reaching anything else.
We land in the same dilemma if we pursue another road. Philosophers of
certain schools place existence in two categories. There is the world of
appearance (phenomena), and there is the world of reality or substance
(noumena). We know phenomena and their laws, they say, but no more. We
do not know, and cannot know, Substance in itself; and the theist
promptly adds that this unknown substance is but another name for God.
The philosopher also warns us against applying the laws of the
phenomenal world to noumena, reminding us that what we call "laws of
nature" have been devised to explain the world as it presents itself to
our consciousness. And to this we have the theological analogue in the
warning not to measure the infinite by the finite or to judge God by
human standards.
Now granting all this, let us see how the argument stands. The laws of
phenomena belong exclusively to the phenomenal world. Their application
and their validity are restricted to the world of phenomena. When we
leave this region we are in a sphere to which they are quite
inapplicable. What, then, can be meant by speaking of God as a "First
Cause"? Cause is a phenomenal term, it expresses the relations between
phenomena, and it has no meaning when applied to this assumed and
unknown reality. We are in the position of one who is trying to use a
colour scale in a world where vision does not exist. The theist is
trying, in a similar way, to use the conception of "cause," which is
created to express the relations between phenomena, in a world where
phenomena have no existence. Thus, when the theist, to use his own
words, has traced back an effect to a cause, and this to a prior cause,
and so on, till he has reached a "First Cause," what happens? Simply
this. At the end of the chain of phenomena the theist makes a mighty
jump and gains the noumenon. But between this and the phenomenon he can
establish no relation whatever. It cannot be a cause of phenomena
because on his own showing causation is a phenomenal thing. He has
worked back along the chain of causation, discarding link after link on
his journey. Finally, he reaches God and discards the lot. And here he
is left clinging with _no intelligible way of getting back again_. If on
the other hand, he relates God to phenomena he has failed to get what he
requires. He has merely added one more link to his chain of phenomena,
and the "first cause" remains as far off as ever. For if God is not
related to phenomena he ceases to be a cause of phenomena in the only
sense in which he is of use to the theistic hypothesis.
Further, one may ask, Why travel back along the chain of causation to
discover God? What is gained by travelling along an infinite series,
and saying suddenly, "At this point I espy God." Confessedly we may
trace back phenomena as far as we will without finding ourselves a step
nearer a commencement. All we get is a transformation of pre-existing
material into new forms. Consequently all the evidence that exists at
the moment we cease our journey existed when we began it. In short, if
God can be shown to be the efficient cause of phenomena anywhere, he can
be shown to be the cause everywhere, and the proof may be produced
through phenomena immediately at hand as well as from those removed from
us by an indefinite number of stages. The evidence becomes neither
stronger nor more relevant by being put farther back. Proof is not like
wine, its quality does not improve with age. To say that we must pause
somewhere may be true, but that is only reminding us that both human
time and human energy are limited. But it is certainly foolish to first
of all induce mental exhaustion, and then use it as the equivalent of a
positive and valuable discovery.
And even though by some undiscovered method we had reached that
metaphysical nightmare a cause of all phenomena, and in defiance of all
intelligibility had christened it a "First Cause," how would that
satisfy the "causal craving"? Professor Campbell Fraser very properly
says that "the old form of each new phenomenon as much needs explanation
as the new form itself did, and this need is certainly neither satisfied
nor destroyed by referring one form of existence to another." If A. is
explained by B. we are driven to explain B. by C., and so on
indefinitely. Or if we can stop with A. or B. then the causal craving
is not so persistent as was supposed, and man can rest content within
the limit of recognised limitations. For what Professor Fraser calls an
"absolutely originating cause" is only such so long as we have not
reached it. We are satisfied with an imaginary B. as an explanation of
the actual A. so long as B. does not come within our grasp. So soon as
it has become the originating cause of the phenomenon in hand we are off
on a further search. "First" has no other intelligible sense or meaning
than this. "First" in relation to a given cluster of phenomenon we may
grant; "First" in the sense of calling for no further explanation is
downright theological lunacy.
An eternal "First cause" could only be such in relation to an eternal
effect. And in that case it could not be _prior_ to the effect since the
effect is only the existing factors combined. Causation cannot carry us
_beyond_ phenomena since it has no meaning apart from phenomena. The
notion that because every phenomenon has a cause therefore there must be
a cause for phenomena as a whole--meaning by this for the sum total of
phenomena--is wholly absurd. It is not sound science, it is not good
philosophy, it is not even commonsense. It is simply nonsense which is
given an air of dignity because it is clothed in philosophic language.
You cannot rise from phenomena to the theist's God; first, because, as I
have said, cause and effect are names for the relation that is seen to
exist between one phenomenon and another, and the theist is seeking
after something that is above all relations. To postulate something that
is not phenomena as the cause of phenomena, is like discussing the
possibility of a bird's flight and dismissing the possibility of an
atmosphere. Secondly, causation can give no clue to a God because the
search for causes is a search for the conditions under which phenomena
occur. And when we have described these conditions we have fulfilled all
the conditions required to establish an act of causation. The theist, in
short, commences with a wrong conception of causation. He proceeds by
applying to one sphere language and principles from another, and to
which they can have no possible application, and where they have no
intelligibility. And having completely confused the issue, he ends with
a conclusion which, even on his own showing, has no logical relation to
the premises laid down.
CHAPTER VI.
THE ARGUMENT FROM DESIGN.
Kant called the argument from design "the oldest, the clearest, and the
most adapted to the ordinary human reason," of all the arguments
advanced on behalf of the belief in God. Kant's dictum, it will be
observed, omits all opinion as to its quality, and his own criticism of
it left it a sorry wreck. John Stuart Mill treated it far more
respectfully, and commenced his examination of it with the flattering
introduction, "We now at last reach an argument of a really scientific
character," and, although he did not find the argument convincing, gave
it a most respectful dismissal. The purpose of the present chapter is to
show that the argument from design in nature is in the last degree
unscientific, that the analogy it seeks to establish is a false one,
that it is completely and hopelessly irrelevant to the point at issue,
and that one might grant nearly all it asks for, and even then show that
it does not prove what it sets out to prove. That such an argument
should have, and for so long, exerted so much influence over the human
mind, gives one anything but a flattering impression of the power of
reason in human affairs.
True it is that of late years the argument from design has felt the
influence of the growth of the idea of evolution, and the champions of
theism have used it with much greater caution, and under an obvious
sense that it no longer wielded its old authority. The fact that this
is so forms a commentary on the statement so often made that man's
craving for an ultimate cause leads to the belief in God. The truth
being that man--the average man--only seeks for an explanation of
immediate happenings. Once the immediate thing before him is explained
his curiosity is allayed. The average man lives mentally from hand to
mouth, and troubles as little about ultimate explanations as he does
about the exhaustion of the coal supply.
It is a point of some significance that the perception of design in
nature, as with the belief in deity, is, if one may use the expression,
pre-scientific in point of origin. What I mean by that is that it
originates at a time when no other explanation of the origin of natural
adaptations existed. It did not establish itself as one of several rival
explanations and in virtue of its own strength. It was established
simply because no other explanation was at the time conceivable. And so
soon as another explanation, such as that of natural selection, was
placed before the world, the origin of adaptations as a product of an
extra-natural designing intelligence became to most educated minds
simply impossible. The perception of design in nature was, as a matter
of fact, no more than a special illustration of the animistic frame of
mind which reads vitality into all natural happenings. It is impossible
to find in the statement that particular adaptations in nature are
designed anything more scientific than one can find in the belief that
rain is the product of a heavenly rain-cow, or that flashes of lightning
are spears thrown by competing heavenly warriors. It is the language
only that differs in the two cases. The frame of mind indicated in the
two cases are identical.
The attractiveness of the argument from design lies in its nearness to
hand and in its appeal to facts, combined with the impossibility of
verification. That nature is full of strange and curious examples of
adaptation is clear to all, although the significance of these
adaptations are by no means so clear. Moreover, a very casual study of
these cases show that they are better calculated to dazzle than to
convince. The presentation of a number of more or less elaborate facts
of adaptation, followed with the remark that we are unable to see how
such cases could have been brought about in the absence of a designing
intelligence, is, at best, an appeal to human weakness and ignorance.
The reverse of such a position is that if we had complete knowledge of
the causes at work, the assumption of design might be found to be quite
unnecessary. "We cannot see" is only the equivalent of we do not know,
and that is a shockingly bad basis on which to build an argument.
When, therefore, an eminent electrician like Professor Fleming says, "We
have overwhelming proof that in the manufacture of the infinite number
of substances made in Nature's laboratory there must be at all stages
some directivity," this can only mean that Professor Fleming cannot see
the way in which these substances are made. It does not mean that he
sees _how_ they are made. And in saying this he is in no better position
than was Kepler, who after describing the true laws of planetary motion,
when he came to the question of _why_ the planets should describe these
motions fell back on the theory of "Angelic intelligences" as the
cause. The true explanation came with the physics of Galileo and Newton,
and with that, farewell to the angelic "directivity." The only reason
for Kepler's angels was his ignorance of the causes of planetary motion.
The only reason why Professor Fleming says that the atoms "have to be
guided into certain positions to build up the complex molecules" is that
he is unable to isolate this assumed directive force and to show it in
operation; he is like a modern Kepler faced with something the cause of
which he doesn't know, and lugging in "God" to save further trouble. It
is an assumption of knowledge where no knowledge exists. "God" is always
what Spinoza called it, the asylum of ignorance. When causes are unknown
"God" is brought forward. When causes are known "God" retires into the
background. "God" is not an explanation, it is a narcotic.
The argument from design rests upon the existence in nature of
adaptations either general or special. And quite obviously the value of
evidence derived from adaptations will be determined by the existence of
non-adaptations. If, that is, it can be shown that a certain assemblage
of forces produce adaptation, while in another instance they fail to
produce it, it would then be logical to argue that the difference was
due to the directive power being withdrawn in the latter case. But that
as we know is never the case. What we see is always the same conditions
producing the same effects. We are never able to say, "Here are natural
forces working _minus_ a directing intelligence, and here is an
assemblage of the same forces working _plus_ the addition of a
directing intelligence." If we could do that we should be able to
attribute the difference to the new factor. But this we are never able
to do. And it is an elementary principle of scientific method that
before we can assert the existence of a distinct force or factor, the
possibility of isolation must be shown. Adaptation can, then, only be
demonstrated by non-adaptation. And _non-adaptation in nature simply
does not exist, except in relation to an ideal end created by
ourselves_.
Surprising as this may appear to some, examination shows it to be no
more than a truism, and that granted, the whole strength of the argument
from adaptation, whether in the inorganic or the organic world,
disappears.
To see the matter the more clearly, let us drop for a time the word
"adaptation" and substitute the word "process." For that after all is
what nature presents us with. We see processes and we see results. It is
because we create an _end_ for these processes that we class them as
well or ill adapted to achieve it. We make a gun, and say it is ill or
well made as it shoots well or ill. But whether it carries straight or
not the relation of the shooting to the construction of the gun remains
the same. Judging the gun merely from its construction, the product
answers completely to the combination of its parts. Constructed in one
way the gun cannot but shoot straight. Constructed in another way the
gun cannot but shoot crookedly. And the only reason we have for calling
one good and the other bad is that _we_ desire a particular result. But
the goodness or badness has nothing to do with the thing itself. Its
adaptation to the end produced is as perfect in the one case as in the
other. It could produce no other result than the one that actually
emerges without an alteration in the means employed. A thing is what it
is because it is the combination of all the forces that produce it. And
to ask us to marvel at the result of a process, when the one is the
product of the other is like asking us to express our surprise that
twice two equal four. Twice two equal four because four is the sum of
the factors, and no one dreams of praising God because they don't
sometimes make four and a half. The argument from adaptations in nature
is, when examined, just about as impressive as the reasoning of the
curate who saw the hand of Providence in the fact that death came at the
end of life instead of in the middle of it.
Adaptation is not, then, a singular fact in nature, but a universal one.
It is everywhere, in the case of death as in that of life. It is the
same in the case of a child born a marvel of health and beauty as in
that of one born deformed and diseased. There is nothing else but
adaptations of means to ends in nature, however displeasing some of them
may be to us. The "harmony" which the theist perceives in nature is not
the expression of "plan," it is the inevitable outcome of the properties
of existence. Given matter and force, and it requires no "directive
intelligence" to produce the existing order, it would indeed require a
God to prevent its occurrence.
It is the same if we take the case of animal life alone. To say that
animal life is adapted to its environment, and to say that animal life
exists, is to say the same thing in two ways. Whether animal forms are
fashioned by "divine intelligence" or not, the fact of adaptation
remains; for adaptation is the essential condition of existence. And as
adaptation is the condition of existence, it follows that an animal's
feelings, structure, and functions will be developed in accordance with
the nature of the environment. If the conditions of existence were
different from what they are animal life would show corresponding
modifications. But all the same we should observe the same
correspondence between animal life and its surroundings. Here, again, we
have a fact transformed, without the slightest warranty, into a purpose.
Now, if the theist could prove that out of a number of equally possible
lines of development living beings show one fixed form, and that against
the compulsion of environmental forces, he would do something to prove
the probability of some sort of guidance. But that we know cannot be
done. The forms of life are infinite in number. They vary within all
possible limits; and always in terms of environmental conditions. In
brief, what is said to occur with God, can be shown to be inevitable
without him. "God" in nature is a wholly gratuitous hypothesis.
Later it will be seen that the whole basis of the argument from design
is fallacious; that it proceeds along altogether wrong lines, and that
the final objection to it is that it is completely irrelevant to the
point at issue. For the moment, however, we proceed with a criticism of
the argument as usually stated.
It must be borne in mind that what the theist desires to reach is a
_Creator_, but it is obvious that this plea can never give us more than
a mere designer working on materials that already exist. Of necessity
design implies two things, difficulties to be overcome, and skill or
wisdom in overcoming them. Design is an understandable thing in
connection with man, because man is always occupied in overcoming the
resistance of forces that exist quite independently of him, and which
operate without reference to his needs or desires. But it would be
absurd to assume design on the part of one for whom difficulties had no
existence, or on the part of one who himself created the forces that had
to be overcome, and endowed them with all the properties which made the
work of design necessary. Granting the relevance of the data upon which
the belief in design rests, one could only assume, with Mill, that "the
author of the Cosmos worked under limitations; that he was obliged to
adapt himself to conditions independent of his will, and to attain his
ends by such arrangements as these conditions admitted of."
In the next place, the argument for design is an argument from analogy,
and an analogy can by its very nature never give a complete
demonstration. It can never offer more than a probability, more or less
convincing as the analogy is more of less complete. But in the case
under consideration the analogy is considerably less rather than more.
Paley's classical illustration--taken almost verbatim from Malebranche,
but as old otherwise as the days of Greek philosophy, where a statute
took its place--was that of a watch. And the conclusion was drawn that
as the parts of a watch bear obvious marks of having been made with a
view to a particular end, so the animal structure and the universe as a
whole bear similar marks of having been designed. It is true that of
late years the Paleyan form of the argument has been disavowed by most
scholarly advocates of theism, but as they immediately proceed to make
use of arguments that are substantially identical with it, the
repudiation does not seem of great consequence. It reminds one of a
government that is compelled by the force of public opinion to openly
repudiate one of its officials, and having removed him from the office
in which the misdemeanour was committed, immediately appoints him to one
of an increased dignity and with a larger salary.
Thus, we have Professor Fiske saying that "Paley's simile of a watch is
no longer applicable to such a world as this" ("Idea of God"; p. 131),
and Prof. Sorley telling us that "the age of Paley and of the
Bridgewater Treatises is past" (Moral Values and the Idea of God; p.
327), and Mr. Balfour repudiating Paley as having been ruled out of
court by Darwinism ("Humanism and Theism," chapter II.). But as Fiske
puts the flower in the place of the watch, Sorley, the moral nature of
man, and Balfour, the conditions of animal life, it is not quite clear
why if the Paleyan argument is invalid, the new form is any more
intellectually respectable. The essence of the Paleyan argument was the
assertion of a mind behind phenomena, the workings of which could be
seen in the forms of animal life. And whether we find that proof in the
growth of a flower, or in the moral sense of man, or in the creation of
natural conditions that impel the development of life along a certain
road, the distinction is not vital. We are still finding proofs of God
in the structure of the world (where otherwise, indeed, are we to find
it?) and we are still depending on the supposed likeness between the
works of human intelligence and natural products.
And that analogy is wholly false. The argument from design aims at
proving that _all_ things are made by a creative intelligence. It is not
merely animals that are designed; they are selected as no more than
striking individual examples of a general truth. Everything, if theism
be true, must be ultimately due to manufacture. But the whole
significance of the Paleyan argument from design is that behind the
manufactured article which we recognise as such, there are other
articles or other things that are not manufactured. The traveller, says
Paley, who comes across a watch recognises in the relation of its parts
evidences of workmanship. But he does not see in the breaking of a wave
on the shore, or in the piling up of sand in the desert, or in a pebble
on the beach, the same tokens of workmanship. In the very act of
attempting to prove that _some_ things _are_ made, the theist is
compelled to assume that _all_ things are not made. He can only gain a
victory at the price of confessing a defeat.
But is there any real analogy between the works of man and the universe
at large? Let us take a familiar example. It is, we are told in a very
familiar illustration, as absurd to imagine that the world as it exists
is the work of unguided natural forces, as it would be to believe that
the rows of letters in a compositor's "stick" had of their own
contained force arranged themselves in intelligible sentences. The
absurdity of the last supposition is admitted, but why is that so?
Obviously because we have the previous knowledge that the type itself is
a manufactured thing, and that its arrangement in orderly sentences is
the work of intelligent men. Thus, what occurs when we come across a
particular example of type setting is that we compare our present
experience with other experiences and recognise it as belonging to a
particular class. So with the watch. The only reason we have for
believing that a watch is made is that of our previous knowledge that
such things are made. The present judgment is based upon past
experience. But the case of animal forms, and still more the universe at
large, offers no such analogy. We know nothing of world makers nor of
animal makers. We have no previous experience to go upon, nor have we
any things of a similar kind, known to be made, with which we can
compare them. Instead of the points of resemblance between the two
things being so numerous as to compel belief, they agree in one
particular only, that of existence. At most all we are left with is the
palpably absurd position that because man selects and adjusts means to a
given end, therefore any combination of forces in nature which produce a
certain result must also be the expression of conscious intention.
Some apparent force even to this flimsy conclusion might be given if
nature could be said to be working towards a given end. But we do not
find this. What we see is a multitude of forces at work, the action of
each of which often results in the negation of the other. Put on one
side the larger, but not the least pregnant fact that animal life is
only maintained in the face of numerous agencies, inorganic and organic,
that are apparently bent upon its destruction; put on one side also the
fact that multitudes of parasites--as much the result of design as any
other form of life--are constantly preying upon and destroying forms of
life higher than themselves, and there still remain myriads of facts
altogether inconsistent and completely irreconcilable with the
hypothesis of a creative intelligence shaping the course of affairs to a
given end. To take only one illustration of this. What is to be said of
the myriads of animals that are born into the world only to perish
before reaching an age at which they can play their part in the
perpetuation of the species? Are we to believe that the same deity who
fashioned these forms of life created at the same time a number of
forces that were certain to destroy them? Clearly we are bound to
assume, either that this hypothetical Being pursues a number of mutually
destructive plans, or that there are a number of designers at work and
at war with each other, or that none at all exist.
If we are to judge nature from the standpoint of human intelligence,
then we must logically decide that it is full of waste, full of
bungling, full of plans that come to nothing, of ends that are never
realised, of pain and misery that might have been avoided by the
exercise of almost ordinary intelligence. There are few animals
concerning which a competent anatomist or physiologist could not suggest
some improvement in their construction by which their functions might be
more efficiently performed. Nor does it seem quite impossible to have
so adjusted natural forces that the development of life might have been
accomplished without the present enormous waste of material. It is
almost stupid to ask, as did the late Dr. Martineau, what right have we
to judge the world from "a purely humanistic point of view." The whole
argument from design is based upon a humanistic point of view. The
Atheist is only calling the attention of the theist to the consequences
of his own argument.
I leave for a later chapter, the moral aspect of the design argument. I
am at present concerned with its purely logical presentation. And the
crowning charge here is not that it is inconclusive, not that it falls
short, as Mill thought, of a complete analogy, the decisive rejection of
it is based upon the fact that it is absolutely irrelevant. The argument
has no bearing on the issue; the evidence has no relation to the case.
What is the essence of the argument from design? It is based upon
certain adaptations that are observed to exist. But adaptation is, as we
have shown, a universal quality of existence. It exists in every case,
and no more in one case than in another. And when the theist says that
because certain things work together therefore god arranged it, an apt
query is, How do you know? One may even say, Granting there is a God,
how do you know that what is was actually designed by him? It is no use
replying that the way things work together prove design, for things
always work together. They cannot do otherwise. Any group of forces work
together to produce a given result. That is part of the universal fact
of adaptation which the theist holds up as though it were a divine
miracle instead of, as Mallock says, a physical platitude.
Let us take an illustration from everyday life. A man tries his hand at
building a bicycle. When it is finished the wheels are not true, the
frame is unsteady, the whole thing is ready to fall to pieces and is
absolutely unrideable. Is any one warranted in declaring that because
the parts have all been brought together by me therefore the resulting
machine was an act of design? Clearly not. What I designed was a machine
perfect after its kind. What appeared was the miserable structure that
is before us. On the other hand that machine with all its imperfections
might have been designed by me. I might, for some purpose deliberately
have intended to make a machine that would not carry a rider. And when
would anyone be logically justified in saying which of the two kinds of
machines express my design? Clearly, only when he had a knowledge of my
intention. Apart from a knowledge of an intention preceding an act the
inference of design is unwarrantable.
Now, assuming the existence of a God, and who stands in the same
relation to the world that I do to the machine, how can anyone know that
the world as it is expresses design any more than did my home-made
bicycle? In this case, as in the former, what is needed to justify the
assumption of design is a knowledge of intention. One must know what the
assumed maker intended and then see how far the actual result realises
it.
Design, in short, although it may be expressed in a physical form is not
a physical thing, but a psychic fact. You cannot by examining physical
processes and results reach design. You cannot start with a material
fact and reach intention. You must begin with intention and compare it
with the physical result. Things may be as they are whether design is
involved or not. It is only by a knowledge of intention, and a
comparison of that with the fact before us that we can be certain of
design. Proof of design is not found in the capacity of certain clusters
of circumstances or forces to realise a particular result, but in a
knowledge that they correspond with an intention which we know to have
existed before the result occurs.
To warrant a logical belief in design in nature three things are
essential. First, one must assume that a God exists. Second, one must
take it for granted that one has a knowledge of the intention in the
mind of the deity before the alleged designed thing is brought into
existence. Finally, one must be able to compare the result with the
intention and demonstrate their agreement. But the impossibility of
knowing the first two things is apparent. And without the first two the
third is of no value whatever. For we have no means of reaching the
first except through the third. And until we get to the first we cannot
make use of the third. We are thus in a hopeless impasse. No examination
of nature can lead back to God because we lack the necessary starting
point. All the volumes that have been written, and all the sermons that
have been preached depicting the wisdom of organic structures are so
much waste of paper and breath. They prove nothing, and can prove
nothing. They assume at the beginning all they require at the end. Their
God is not something reached by way of inference, it is something
assumed at the very outset.
What the theist does at every step of his reasoning is to read his own
feelings and desires into nature. The design he talks so glibly about is
in him, not outside of him. As well might a maggot in a cheese argue
that the world was designed for him because the agreement between his
structure and it are so harmonious. In relation to their surroundings
man and the maggot are in the same position. And in the economy of
nature man is of no more consequence than the maggot. There is a more
complex synthesis of forces here than there, a more subtle exhibition of
nature's infinite capacity for evolving fresh forms of life, and that is
all. It is man himself who paints a distorted picture of himself on the
surface of things, who reads his own passions and desires into nature,
and then admires a marvel created by himself. To he who correctly
visualises the process of the evolution of deity, the existence of God
is hardly to-day a question for discussion. There is a discussion only
of the history of the belief, and in that is found its strongest
condemnation.
CHAPTER VII.
THE DISHARMONIES OF NATURE.
It has already been indicated that it is not really necessary, in order
to prove design, to establish the fact that the design is perfect or
that it exhibits complete goodness. It is enough that there be design.
Its moral quality or value is quite another question. Nevertheless, it
will be as well to deal with this latter aspect of the subject, and to
see what kind of "plan" it is that nature does exhibit, even assuming
the existence of some design.
Now it is evident that if there be design in nature, and if the design
is the expression of a single supreme mind one quality of that plan
should be unity. The products should, so to speak, dovetail into each
other in such a way that they work together, and even harmonise with
each other. But this is, notoriously, not the case. If from one point of
view there is a certain harmony throughout the world of living beings in
virtue of which life is preserved, it is at least equally true that from
another point of view the harmony is one of destruction. And in the end
death wins. Sooner or later death overtakes all forms of life, while in
the grand total of living beings born into the world, a far larger
number perish than can reach maturity. Wasted effort is the mildest
judgment that can be passed upon these abortive attempts. And not only
does death eventually win in the case of each individual, and against
which may be set the consideration that in the economy of nature death
plays a part in the development of life, but eventually death will, if
we are to trust science, reap a sweeping and universal triumph by the
consummation of terrestrial conditions that will render the maintenance
of life impossible.
Or, again, the relations of species are clearly not what we have a right
to expect in the working out of a reasonably wise and benevolent plan.
It is a general truth that, with the exception of a few instances,
chiefly connected with the relations existing between insects and
flowers, the development of one species in relation to another is not
that of mutual helpfulness. The general rule here is that of mutual
injury. The carnivora prey on the herbivora and upon each other; and the
herbivora crush each other by methods that are as effective as the
method of direct attack. Any variation is "good" provided it be of
advantage to its possessor. And the "good" of the one kind may mean the
destruction of another order. All the exquisite design shown in the
development of the finer feelings of man, and upon which theistic
sentimentalists love to dwell, may be seen in the structure of those
parasites which destroy man and bring his finer feelings to naught. The
late Theodore Roosevelt says of the Brazilian forests:--
In these forests the multitude of insects that bite, sting, devour,
and prey on other creatures, often with accompaniments of atrocious
suffering, passes belief. The very pathetic myths of beneficent
nature could not deceive even the least wise being if he once saw
the iron cruelty of life in the tropics. Of course, "nature"--in
common parlance a wholly inaccurate term, by the way, especially
when used to express a single entity--is entirely ruthless, no less
so as regards types than as regards individuals, and entirely
indifferent to good or evil, and works out her ends or no ends
with utter disregard of pain and woe (Cited by E. D. Fawcett in
_The World as Imagination_; pp. 571-2).
And Mr. Carveth Reade expresses the same thing in a more elaborate
summing up:--
The merciless character of organic evolution appears to us, first,
in reckless propagation and the consequent destruction. Every
species is as prolific as it can be compatibly with the development
of its individuals; and the deaths that ensue from inanition,
disease, violence, present a stupefying scene. The best one can say
for it is that, as life rises in the organic scale, the death rate
declines. Yet even man still suffers outrageously by violence,
disease, inanition; the notion that "Malthus's Law" no longer holds
of civilised man is a foolish delusion. But more sinister than the
direct destruction of life is the spectacle of innumerable species
profiting by a life, parasitic or predatory, at the expense of
others. The parasites refute the vulgar prejudice that evolution is
by the measure of man, progressive; adaptation is indifferent to
better or worse, except as to each species, that its offspring
shall survive by atrophy and degradation. The predatory species
flourish as if in derision of moral maxims; we see that though
human morality is natural to man, it is far from expressing the
whole of Nature. Animals, at first indistinguishable vegetables,
devour them and enjoy a far richer life. Animals that eat other
animals are nearly always superior not only in strength, grace and
agility but in intelligence. There are exceptions to this rule;
some snakes eat monkeys (thanking Providence), and the elephant is
content with foliage; but compare cats and wolves with the
ungulates that make a first concoction of herbs for their sake. It
is true that our monkey kin are chiefly frugivorous; for it may be
plausibly argued that man was first differentiated by becoming
definitely carnivorous, a sociable hunter, as it were, a wolf-ape.
Hence the advantage of longer legs, the use of weapons, the upright
gait and defter hands to use and make weapons, more strategic
brains, tribal organisation, and hence liberation from the tropical
forest, and citizenship of the world. The greater part of his
subsequent history is equally unedifying: having made the world his
prey, he says that God made the world to that end, and those who
have preyed upon their fellows, and enslaved them, and flourished
upon it, have declared that to have been the intention of nature.
(_The Metaphysics of Nature_; pp. 344-5).
A perpetual pulling down and building up, and the building altogether
dependent upon the demolition. The tiger built with tastes and
capacities for catching the gazelle: the gazelle built with capacities
that enable it to escape the tiger. There is no evidence here of the
existence of a single mind working out an intelligent plan. At most we
have either the proof for a number of warring powers, each one striving
to destroy what the other is striving to create, or a single mind that
has deliberately fashioned things so that each part may work for the
destruction of the other part, the whole to presently end in a grand
catastrophe.
But that is not all. If we limit our attention to man, can it be said
that we find in the human structure what we might reasonably expect to
find if man be indeed the crown of the divine plan, the event to which,
for untold ages, all things were designedly tending? What we actually do
find is that the structure of man, physically and mentally, is such as
to altogether negative the notion of complete or harmonious adjustment
to environment. That the human has within it a large number of vestigial
structures--some scientists place it as high as one hundred and
seventy--is now well known, and forms at the same time one of the
evidences of evolution and an impeachment of the theistic theory. There
is only need to instance now the vermiform appendage, which forms the
seat of appendicitis, the "wisdom" teeth, of very little use, and one of
the most fruitful of causes of disease of the teeth, the hair which
covers the human body, now of no use whatever, except to form a lodgment
for microbes, and so makes the acquisition of disease the more certain.
In addition to the number of rudimentary organs that actually encourage
disease--Metchnikoff counts among these the larger intestine--the body
is full of rudimentary muscles and structures that when not positively
harmful, impose a tax on the organism for which no corresponding service
is performed.
The meaning and significance of these structures are, however, so well
recognised that one need not dwell upon their existence. Not so well
known is the complementary fact that just as in his physical structure
man bears evidence of his emergence from lower forms of life, which
result in a certain degree of disharmony between him and an ideal
environment, so in his psychic life his instincts and feelings are often
such as to prevent that ideal adaptation which so many desire. The
earlier conception of optimistic evolutionists that the instincts of man
were, through the operation of natural selection, converted into
beneficent guides is quite faulty. In itself this was probably a
survival of the theism which tried to prove that this was the best of
all possible worlds, and which led evolutionists to try and prove that
their theory was also ethically desirable. At any rate, the theory of
the wholly beneficent nature of human instincts is not tenable. Our
instincts are inherited from our animal ancestors; they were brought to
fruition under conditions different in form from those which obtain with
human beings, with the result that whether an instinct is helpful or the
contrary depends largely upon the educational quality of the
environment, and even then inherited tendencies may be so strong as to
make them a source of danger to the community rather than of benefit.
It is noted, for example, that a deal of what may be called crime, or at
least lawlessness, is the result of an individual being born with
tendencies developed in a way that fits him for an environment of
centuries ago, rather than an environment of to-day. Very many of our
national heroes of a few centuries ago would rank as criminals to-day,
just as many of our criminals to-day would, had they been born a few
centuries since, have been handed down to us as examples of chivalry or
of national heroism. Instead of what one may call the natural endowments
of man pointing towards a more civilised form of life, they point to a
less civilised form, while it is the artificially or socially induced
feelings and ideas that point to a better future.
Thus, if we take the primitive or brute feeling of retaliation we find
it assuming the form of war. And without discussing the value of war in
the past, or even its admissibility in special circumstances in the
present, I do not think it will be seriously disputed that the great
need of the present is to transfer that feeling from the lower level of
brute force to the higher one of adventure in the interests of science
and human betterment. Here it is not the existence of a lofty
"god-given" endowment that puts man out of harmony with his environment;
it is, on the contrary, the operation of an earlier form of feeling
manifestation which retards the coming of a better day.
There is, in fact, not a single quality of human nature that can be
said to act with inerrancy. The baby seizes objects indiscriminately and
puts them in its mouth. The man falling into the water does the very
thing he should not do--throws up his arms. Intense cold lulls to
somnolency, instead of rousing to activity. The love of children, on
which the preservation of the race depends, is absent with many; while
with others the sexual instinct undergoes strange and morbid
manifestations. A complete list of these disharmonies would fill a
volume--indeed, Metchnikoff, in his "Nature of Man," has filled half a
volume with describing some of the instances of physiological
disharmony, and then has not exhausted the list.
It would indeed seem as if nature, with its method of never creating a
new organ or structure, but only transforming and utilising an old one,
had attached a penalty to every successful attempt to rise above a
certain level. If man will walk upright she sees to it that his doing so
shall involve a great liability to hernia. If he will live in cities,
she has ready the ravage of consumption. If he will use clothing she
makes him carry round a coating of useless hair as a method of trapping
disease microbes. So soon as one disease is conquered another is
discovered. Pleasures have their reverse side in pains, and to some
pains the pleasures bear a small relation, being chiefly of the
character of the pains being absent. As a social animal man is only
imperfectly adapted to the state, there going on a constant warfare
between his egoistic and altruistic impulses. In fact, it would
certainly be an arguable proposition, if we allow intention in nature,
to say that man was intended to remain at the animal level, and that,
having so far defeated nature's intention, he is dogged by a
disappointed creator, and made to pay the fullest price that can be
exacted for every step of progress achieved.
Of course, of proof of design in nature there is positively none.
Design, as I have said, is not a natural fact, but a purely human
construction. But, if admitted, it is a two edged weapon. For, if
assumed anywhere, it must be assumed to exist everywhere. And designing
intelligence must be made responsible for the whole scheme. But this the
most extravagant piety refuses to do. Either we have the primitive
theory of a devil who divides with God the responsibility for the state
of the world, or we have the plea that evil may be only good disguised,
or good in the making, or it is argued that we have to contemplate the
"plan" as a whole, and must wait for some future state to pass judgment.
And whichever view we take, there is the implied admission that the plan
of creation as we know it cannot be harmonised with the theory of God
that modern theism places before us. And instead of man being the
miracle of perfection that an earlier generation saw in his structure,
we know that the human structure is such that, given the power to
create, science could really fashion, in the light of its present
knowledge, a better organism.
Finally, disharmony is implied in and necessitated by the very fact of
progress. Progress means a better adjustment, and the discomfort of
maladjustment is the spur to improvement. A perfect equilibrium is as
impossible as perpetual motion, and it is only with a perfect
equilibrium that change, which is the condition of progress, would
cease. The ceaseless desire for something better is, therefore, in
itself an impeachment of things as they are. It is an indication of
there being something wanting, of the existence of a want of complete
harmony between man and his surroundings. Nor is the case of the theist
bettered if he retorts that without the sense of imperfection or of
dissatisfaction there would be no such thing as a conscious striving
after improvement. That may be admitted, but that is only proving that
perfection can never be achieved, and that even in this last resort
"God" has so designed things as to make a mock of man at the end. The
want of complete harmony that is seen in the physical structure of man
is carried over into his mental life. If theism be true man is mocked by
a mirage. And the knowledge is made the more depressing by the belief
that the plan is not accidental, it is not a product of the working of
non-conscious forces, it is the preordained outcome of a plan that was
deliberately resolved on by a being with full power to devise some thing
wiser and better. At the side of that, any theory of things is, by
comparison, hopeful and inspiring.
CHAPTER VIII.
GOD AND EVOLUTION.
There is no logical connection between what is called the "Moral
government of the universe" and the belief in God, but it must be
confessed that the criticism of the belief from the point of view of
moral feeling is of considerable importance. This is in itself a
striking illustration of the reaction of social developments on
religious beliefs. For there is originally no connection between
morality and the belief in God. Man does not believe in the gods because
they are moral, but because they are there. If they are, to his mind,
good, that is so much the better. But whether they are good or bad they
have to be faced as facts. The gods, in short belong to the region of
belief, while morality belongs to that of practice. It is in the nature
of morality that it should be implicit in practice long before it is
explicit in theory. Morality belongs to the group and is rooted in
certain impulses that are a product of the essential conditions of group
life. It is as reflection awakens that men are led to speculate upon the
nature and origin of the moral feelings. Morality, whether in practice
or in theory, is thus based upon what is. On the other hand, religion,
whether it be true or false, is in the nature of a discovery. However
crude or uninformed the thinking, the belief in God must be regarded as
the product of reflection. The situation is not unfairly described by
Dr. Jastrow:--
The various rites practiced by primitive society in order to ward
off evils, or to secure the protection of dreaded powers or
spirits, are based primarily on logical considerations. If a
certain stone is regarded as sacred, it is probably because it is
associated with some misfortune, or some unusual piece of good
luck. Someone sitting on the stone may have died; or on sleeping on
it may have seen a remarkable vision, which was followed by a
signal victory over a dangerous foe.... In all this, however,
ethical considerations are remarkable for their absence.... Taking
again so common a belief among all peoples as the influence for
good or evil exerted by the dead upon the living and the numerous
practices to which it gives rise ... it will be difficult to
discover in these beliefs the faintest suggestion of any ethical
influence. It is not the good but the powerful spirits that are
invoked; an appeal to them is not made by showing them examples of
kindness, justice, or noble deeds, but by bribes, flatteries, and
threats. (_The Study of Religion_; Ch. VI.).
So we have Tylor also endorsing this opinion by remarking that, "The
popular idea that the moral government of the universe is an essential
tenet of natural religion simply falls to the ground. Savage animism is
almost devoid of that ethical element which, to the educated, modern
mind, is the very mainspring of religion." And Hoffding says that, "In
the lowest forms of it with which we are acquainted religion cannot be
said to have any ethical significance. The gods appear as powers on
which man is dependent, but not as patterns of conduct or administrators
of an ethical world order.... Not till men have discovered ethical
problems in practical life and have developed an ethical feeling ... can
the figures of the gods assume an ethical character." ("Philosophy of
Religion"; pp. 323-4).
It is quite unnecessary to multiply evidence, the truth of the matter
would seem obvious. One cannot conceive man actually ascribing ethical
qualities to his gods before he becomes sufficiently developed to
formulate moral rules for his own guidance, and to create moral laws for
his fellow man. The moralisation of the gods will then follow as a
matter of course. And thereafter we can plainly observe the operation of
the moral sense on the belief in god, and upon the recognition of crude
power. Man really modifies his gods in terms of the ideal human being.
Paul's picture of a god who uses man as the potter uses his clay could
never flourish in a society which believed in the "rights of man." And
so soon as that conception developes so soon does man begin to revise
his conception of god. So with almost every great change in the form of
government or in the notions of right and wrong. In a slave state, God
favours slavery. When slavery gives place to another form of labour the
gods are equally vigorous in its condemnation. The history of the belief
in witch burning, heresy hunting, eternal damnation, etc., all
illustrate the same point--religious teachings are all modified and
moralised in accordance with the changing moral conceptions of mankind.
It is not the gods who moralise man, it is man who moralises the gods.
The gods have their beginnings as mere powers. They are feared because
they are, not for the moral value of what they are. Social development
does all the rest. But with that development the feeling of
helplessness, of weakness, decays and there arises the demand that if
god is to be worshipped he must prove worthy of it. The conviction
arises very gradually, but it is there, and it becomes a powerful
solvent of religious ideas. Merely to govern is not enough, God must
govern well, and in terms of what we have come to understand by the word
"Justice." And to the minds of millions of moderns, when tried by that
test the idea of god breaks down. That there is a god who rules the
universe is one question; that he rules it well and in accord with what
is understood when we talk of morality, is quite another. The two
questions are quite distinct since the first might be true and the
second false. We have already seen how slender are the grounds for
believing in the first; we have now to show that the reasons for
believing in the second are quite as unsatisfactory.
Theism has been defined as consisting in the belief in a God who is
wise, powerful, and loving, and who has selected man as the object of
his preferential care, and to this may be added the statement that most
modern theists would extend that care to the whole of sentient life.
"God's care" must be "over all his creatures," and although this care
may be subservient to some wide and far-seeing plan, there must be
nothing that looks like obvious carelessness or criminal neglect.
To what conclusion do the facts point when they are examined in the
light of modern knowledge? Does the world supply us with the kind of
picture that one would expect to see if it were really presided over by
divine love under the guidance of divine wisdom, and backed by divine
power? The proof that it does not is shown in the almost endless
attempts made to harmonise the world as it is with the world as theory
would have it be. And a theory that needs so much defending, explaining,
and qualifying must have something radically weak about it. That there
is evil in the world all admit, that it offers _prima facie_ objection
to the theistic hypothesis is confessed by the many attempts made to fit
in this evil with the existence of God, to prove that it works in some
mysterious way for some larger good, or that its presence cannot be
dispensed with profitably. The question of why the world is as it is
with a god such as we are told exists, is, as Canon Green says, "the
really vital question, for it touches the very heart of religion." ("The
Problem of Evil"; p. 46.) How, then, does the Theist deal with it?
Broadly, two methods are adopted. In the one case we are presented with
the order of the world, or the course of evolution, as indicative of a
beneficent scheme. This claims to freely adopt all that science has to
say concerning the development of life and to prove that this is in
harmony with the legitimate demands of the moral sense. The second is
the more orthodox way, and taking the world as it is, claims that pain
and suffering play a disciplinary and educational part in the life of
the individual. We will take these in the order named.
When dealing with the argument from design little was said concerning
the evolutionary explanation of the special adaptations that meet us in
the animal world. It was thought better to fix attention on the purely
logical value of the argument presented. It is now necessary to look a
little closer at the ethical implications of the evolutionary process.
It has been pointed out that all life involves a special degree of
adaptation between an organism and its environment. Destroy that
adjustment and life ceases to exist. How is that adjustment secured? The
answer of the pre-Darwinian was that it represented a deliberate design
on the part of God. Against this Darwinism propounds a theory of
automatic or mechanical adjustment which makes the calling in of deity
altogether gratuitous. And it remains gratuitous, no matter how far the
scope of the theory of natural selection may be modified. But given the
continuous variations which we know to exist with all kinds of life,
given any sort of competition between animals as to which shall live,
given even a degree of adaptation below which an animal cannot fall and
live, and it is at once plain that the better adaptations will live and
the poorer adapted will be eliminated. This process is analogous to that
by which man has managed to breed so many varieties of domesticated
animals and plants, some of the varieties presenting so marked a
difference from the original type that if found in a state of nature
they would often be classed as a distinct species. Man _selects_ the
variation that pleases him, eliminates or segregates the type that does
not, and by following up the process eventually produces a distinct and
fixed variation. It was because of the likeness of what goes on in the
case of the breeder to what we see actually going on in nature that
Darwin used the phrase "Natural Selection" as descriptive of the
process. It was not an exact phrase, and it was not meant to be exact.
For one thing--a very important thing, while a breeder selects, nature
eliminates. Man's action, in relation to the type preserved, is
positive. Nature's attitude in relation to the type preserved is
negative. This is a very important distinction; and it is one that is
fatal to the claims of theism. For if it points to a plan in nature it
points to one that aims at killing off all that can be killed, and only
sparing those who are able to protect themselves against its attack. And
one is left wondering at the type of mind which can see goodness and
wisdom in a plan that goes, on generation, after generation
manufacturing an inferior or defective type in enormous numbers in order
that a few superior specimens may be found, these in their turn to
become inferior by the arrival of some other specimens a little more
fortunate in their endowment. One hardly knows at which to marvel the
most--at the clumsiness of the plan, or at the brutality of the design.
It was soon realised that the old argument from design was no longer
possible. But if one can only get far enough away from the possibility
of proof or disproof there is always a chance for the Goddite. So it was
argued that inasmuch as natural selection meant the emergence of a
"higher" type, and as there was no room for design within the process,
might not the process itself be an expression of design? There might
still be room for what Huxley, with one of those foolish concessions to
established opinion which is the bane of English thought, called the
"wider teleology." This was a teleology which placed a designing mind at
the back of the evolutionary process, and arranging it with a view to a
preconceived end. The process then becomes, to use Spencer's phrase, a
"beneficent" one, since it eliminates the poorer specimens and leaves
the better ones to perpetuate the species. We are thus asked to imagine
a divine wisdom selecting the better and destroying the inferior much as
an omniscient Eugenist might destroy at birth all human beings of an
undesirable type.
The weakness of the thesis lies primarily in the fact that in the case
of the breeder he has to take the animal as he finds it, subject to the
play of forces, the characteristics of which are determined for him. He
has to make the best of the situation. In the case of the deity he
creates the animals with which he is assumed to be experimenting, he
creates the forces with all their qualities, and thus determines the
nature of the situation. Quite certainly no breeder would waste his time
in breeding over a number of generations if he could secure the desired
type at once. The whole of the argument of the advocate of the wider
teleology is that God wanted the higher type. But if that is so why did
he not produce it at once? What useful purpose could be served by
producing at the end of a lengthy and murderous process what might just
as well have been secured at the beginning? It is not wisdom but
unadulterated stupidity to take thousands of years securing what might
have been as well done in the twinkling of an eye.
There is, in short, no justification in the creation of a process so
long as the end at which the process is aiming can be reached by a less
tortuous method. As Mr. F. C. S. Schiller says:--
So long as we are dealing with finite factors, the function of pain
and the nature of evil can be more or less understood, but as soon
as it is supposed to display the working of an infinite power
everything becomes wholly unintelligible. We can no longer console
ourselves with the hope that "good becomes the final goal of ill,"
we can no longer fancy that imperfection serves any secondary
purpose in the economy of the universe. A process by which evil
_becomes_ good is unintelligible as the action of a truly infinite
power which can attain its end without a process; it is absurd to
ascribe imperfection as a secondary result to a power which can
attain all its aims _without_ evil. Hence the world process, and
the intelligent purpose we fancy we detect in it must be
illusory.... God can have no purpose, and the world cannot be in
process.... If the world is the product of an infinite power it is
utterly unknowable, because its process and its nature would be
alike unnecessary and unaccountable. (_Riddles of the Sphinx_; pp.
318-19).
Besides, as I have already pointed out, in the process as it meets us in
nature there is not a selection for preservation, but a selection for
killing. With the breeder preservation is primary. It is of no value to
him to kill, it is the preservation of a desired type that is all
important. In nature, so far as we can see, the whole aim is to destroy.
It is not the fittest that are preserved so much as it is the unfittest
that are killed. The fittest are left alive for no other apparent reason
than that nature is unable to kill them. The truth of this is seen in
the fact that where there is no death there is no evolution of a
"higher" type. In the case of diseases that kill there is a gradual
development of an immune type--which introduces the paradox that the
healthiest diseases from which a race may suffer are those that are most
deadly. Where a disease does not kill there is no development against
it. It is the winnowing fan of death that makes for the development of
animal life. And the correct picture of nature--if we must picture an
intelligence behind it--would be that of an intelligence aiming at
killing all, and only failing in its purpose because the natural
endowment of some placed them beyond its power.
And, without examining the question begging word "higher," it may be
said that natural selection does not make for the uniform covering of
the earth with representatives of higher types. If in some parts of the
world the higher have replaced the lower types, elsewhere the lower have
replaced the higher. Natural selection, in fact, works without reference
to whether the form which survives is "higher" or "lower." All that
matters is adaptation. The germ of malaria renders whole tracts of the
earth uninhabitable to those whom we consider representative of the
higher culture. In other parts an alteration of the rainfall may crush
out a civilisation, and leave a handful of nomadic tribes as the sole
denizens of lands where once a lofty civilisation flourished. Throughout
the whole of nature there is never the slightest indication that forces
operate with the slightest reference to what we are accustomed to
consider the higher interests of the race.
Moreover, from the standpoint of an apologetic theism, we are entitled
to ask precisely what is meant by this justification of the evolutionary
process in terms of the production of a higher type. The justification
of a painful or a costly experience by an individual is two-fold. First,
it is the only way, perhaps, in which certain things may be learned or
accomplished, and, second, it is the individual who passes through the
experience who benefits thereby. But suppose a person entered on a
course of training with the absolute certainty that he would never
survive it. Should we be justified in forcing the course on him?
Clearly not. The whole would be regarded as a wasted effort and as an
exhibition of gratuitous cruelty.
Now when we look closely at this evolutionary process, who is it that
benefits thereby? In a vague way we speak of the race benefiting. But
the race is made up of individuals, and while it may be said the
individual benefits from the experience through which the race has
passed, it cannot be truthfully said that he is the better because he
has gained from experience. He does not pass through the discipline, he
simply registers, so to speak, the result. And, therefore, so far as he
is concerned, he is exactly in the position that the first man would
have been had he possessed the endowment, social, and individual, which
the present man has. There is no greater fallacy than that contained in
the common saying that man learns through experience. Individually, so
far as civilisation is concerned, that is not true. Were it true,
civilisation would be impossible. If each man had to start where our
primitive ancestors started, and learn from experience, we should end
where the first generation of socialised human beings ended, and the
generations of men would represent an endless series of first steps to
which there would be no second ones. What the individual learns from
experience is very little and would never serve to lift him from out the
ranks of savagery. What he learns from the experience of the race is
much, and gives the whole distinction between the civilised man and the
savage. It is the discipline of the race, that experience which meets
each of us in the form of traditions, counsels, institutions, etc.,
from which we get the really vital lessons of life. But if that is so
the attempted justification of natural processes on the ground that God
designed them as they are so that man might learn from experience breaks
down. The individual does not so learn, but is presented with the
products of the experience of others, and which he accepts in the vast
majority of cases without even putting it to the test. And, therefore,
the method by which man learns was open from the start. Had there been
some _man_ who could have told us generations ago all that has been
slowly discovered since, we should all have been the better for it, and
we should have learned then exactly as we have learned since. And if God
was really anxious to teach us, what possible objection could there be
to his teaching us in some such way? In other words, how can we justify
the process if the result is possible by any other method?
The standpoint of the theist is that God develops the species in order
to benefit the individual. But the order is that the individual is
sacrificed to benefit the species--so far as any benefit can be traced.
For it must be noted that it is not the individual who has passed
through all the suffering, who has lived through the years of
semi-animal life, or through the years of tyranny, that finally emerges
strengthened and triumphant. It is a different individual altogether.
The greatest benefit is secured by those who come latest, and who have
done the least to secure it. The reward bears no relation to the
personal desert. And at the end what happens? If we are to be guided by
the lessons of science, we must believe that one day the human race
will cease to exist, just as certainly as one day it began to exist.
And what are we to think of the almighty wisdom and goodness which is
responsible for all? An almighty intelligence designs a process to
produce a perfect animal through the sufferings of myriads of other
animals. It takes thousands and thousands of generations to complete the
process, and meantime every year is bringing the whole plan nearer to
extinction. Divine wisdom! Anything nearer complete stupidity and
futility it would be difficult to conceive.
I know that at this point it will be said that I am leaving out of
account the future life, and that the story of human growth is to be
continued elsewhere. But that will certainly not meet all that has been
said above. And it is a curious manner of meeting an objection based
upon the only phase of existence that we know with assurance to tell us
that our indictment will receive a complete refutation in another state
of existence of which we know nothing at all. The reply is in itself an
admission of the truth of the charges. If life admitted of a moral
justification here there would be no need to appeal to some other life
in which these blemishes are made good. If some other life is needed to
correct the moral abnormalities of this one, then the indictment of the
Atheist is justified. And one is left again wondering why, if almighty
intelligence could make all things straight in the next world, why the
same intelligence could not have made the necessary corrections in this
one.
The truth is that the God of the evolutionary process is as much a myth
as is the god of special creation. He has all the blemishes of the other
one--one step removed. The Paleyan God had at least the merit of coming
to close grips with his work. The evolutionary one shields himself
behind the fact that the work is done by his agents, and then it is
found that he created the agents for this special work and all that they
do is the product of the qualities with which he endowed them. If
anything the evolutionary deity is more objectionable than the older
one. And if theists will examine nature candidly and with an open mind,
they will see that it is so. I do not know that anyone has drawn a more
truthful picture of natural processes as they appear from the point of
view of being the product of a divine intelligence than has Mr. W. H.
Mallock, and his picture is the more deadly as coming from a champion of
theism. If, he says, theists will look the facts of the universe
steadily in the face:
What they will see will astonish them. They will see that if there
is anything at the back of this vast process, with a consciousness
and a purpose in any way resembling our own--a being who knows what
he wants and is doing his best to get it--he is instead of a holy
and all-wise God, a scatter-brained, semi-powerful, semi-impotent
monster. They will recognise as clearly as they ever did the old
familiar facts which seemed to them evidences of God's wisdom,
love, and goodness; but they will find that these facts, when taken
in connection with the others, only supply us with a standard in
the nature of this Being himself by which most of his acts are
exhibited to us as those of a criminal madman. If he had been
blind, he had not sin; but if we maintain that he can see, then his
sin remains. Habitually a bungler as he is, and callous when not
actively cruel, we are forced to regard him, when he seems to
exhibit benevolence, as not divinely benevolent, but merely weak
and capricious, like a boy who fondles a kitten and the next moment
sets a dog at it, and not only does his moral character fall from
him bit by bit but his dignity disappears also. The orderly
processes of the stars and the larger phenomena of nature are
suggestive of nothing so much as a wearisome Court ceremonial
surrounding a king who is unable to understand or to break away
from it; whilst the thunder and whirlwind, which have from time
immemorial been accepted as special revelations of his awful power
and majesty, suggest, if they suggest anything of a personal
character at all, merely some blackguardly larrikin kicking his
heels in the clouds, not perhaps bent on mischief, but indifferent
to the fact that he is causing it....
The truth is, if we consider the universe as a whole, it fails to
suggest a conscious and purposive God at all; and it fails to do so
not because the processes of evolution as such preclude the idea
that a God might have made use of them for a definite purpose, but
because when we come to consider these processes in detail, and
view them in the light of the only purposes they suggest, we find
them to be such that a God who could deliberately have been guilty
of them would be a God too absurd, too monstrous, too mad to be
credible. (_Religion as a Credible Doctrine_; pp. 176-8).
As we have already seen, the attempt to find a plan in the processes of
evolution breaks down hopelessly. On analysis, the supposed plan turns
out to be nothing more than a perception of some sort of regularity, and
as regularity is an inescapable condition of existence, all that it
proves _is_ existence. On that point there is no dispute. And the moral
justification of the cosmic process while intellectually indefensible,
adds an element of moral repulsion. That the process as we know it is
morally repugnant is shown by the appeal to the future, the request to
suspend judgment till such time as the plan is completed, when it is
hoped that the end will justify the means. God, it is trusted, will
justify himself in the future. But in his anxiety to impress upon us
the fact that God has a moral future the theist forgets that he has had
a past, and that past is a black one. The uncounted generations of
suffering in the past is not to be compensated by a probable happiness
in the future. The myriads of organisms that have lived incomplete
lives, and ended them in deaths of suffering are not cancelled by the
probability that at some time, still in the future, a comparatively
small number will lead lives of happiness. The record is there, "there
is blood upon the hand," and not all the apologies of a self-convicted
animism can ever wipe it clean.
CHAPTER IX.
THE PROBLEM OF PAIN.
The problem of how to harmonise the existence of a God as believers
picture him to be with a world such as experience discloses, is as old
as theology. And the problem will disappear only when theology is given
up as an aggregate of question begging words and gratuitous hypotheses
based upon a foundation of primitive ignorance and inherited delusion.
For the majority of those questions that are properly called theological
are not of the necessary order. Questions such as those connected with
the mutations of matter, the development of life, the growth of society,
or the nature and clash of human passions cannot be evaded. They are
present in the facts themselves. But the problems of theology are
self-created; they arise out of certain beliefs, and have no existence
apart from those beliefs. They are the joint product of beliefs which
are wholly useless, in conflict with facts with which they cannot be
squared.
What is known as "The Problem of Evil" is an apt illustration of the
truth of what has been said. Here there is created a problem which is
not alone quite gratuitous, but it succeeds in inverting the real
question at issue. For unless we accept the world as the product of a
good and wise God, there is no problem of evil for us to explain. The
problem of evil is, given such a deity, how to account for the existence
of evil, or, if it exists, how account for its continuance. The problem
is created by the theory. Dismiss the theory and no problem is left.
And it is in line with what is done in other directions, that, having
created the difficulty, the theist should present it to the non-theist
as one of the questions that he must answer.
In reality there is no problem of evil in connection with ethics. The
ethical problem is not the existence of evil, but the emergence of good;
not, that is, why do men do wrong, but why do they do right. That life
should cease to be is not at all wonderful, but that with so many
potential dangers around the organism, the actions of living beings
should become so automatically adapted to their surroundings as to shun
the actions which destroy life, and perform such actions as maintain
it--at least, to such an extent as secures the preservation of the
species--may well arouse surprise and give birth to enquiry. So with the
question of evil and suffering in the world. That these exist is
undeniable, but the enquiry they suggest is only on all fours with the
enquiry suggested by any other natural fact, while the ethical problem
centres, not around the existence of wrong action, but around the
emergence of right conduct. It is the evolution of happiness that forms
the kernel of the ethical problem, not the evolution of pain.
The earlier form of the Christian apologetic took the form of a
dualistic theory of the world. There were two powers, God and the devil,
and between them they shared the responsibility for all good and evil.
So far, good. But this was clearly saving the goodness of God at the
expense of his omnipotence. Moreover, if God was to be thought of as the
creator of the universe, the theory, as Mill said, paid him the
doubtful compliment of making him the creator of Satan, and, therefore,
the creator of evil once removed. Or, if not, God and the devil were
left as rival monarchs quarrelling over a territory that appeared to
exist apart from and independent of either.
But nowadays the devil has gone out of fashion. Very few of the clergy
ever mention him, and although an attempt was made to reinstate him some
years ago by the author of "Evil and Evolution," the endeavour was a
failure. And bereft of the convenient scapegoat, the devil, the present
day theist is compelled to attempt an apology for evil that will appeal
to natural and verifiable facts for confirmation, or which must, at
least, not be in conflict with them. If theism is to stand, a place and
a meaning must be found for the evil in the world, and found in such a
way that it either relieves God of the responsibility for its existence
or its being can be shown to harmonise with his assumed character. It is
no longer possible to fall back on Paul's position that the potter is at
liberty to doom one pot to honour and the other to dishonour. The moral
responsibility for the kind of pots he turns out cannot be so easily
evaded. As Professor Sorley says, "If ethical theism is to stand, the
evil in the world cannot be referred to God in the same way as the good
is referred to him." Somehow, he must be relieved of the responsibility
for its existence, or a purpose for it must be found.
Now, curiously enough, modern theists hover between the two positions.
Professor Sorley, representing one position, says that the only way to
avoid referring evil to God is by "the postulate of human freedom."
("Moral Values and the Idea of God," p. 469.) This is also the way out
adopted by Canon Green in "The Problem of Evil," and it turns upon a
mere play on words. Thus, Canon Green says that there is one thing God
could not do. "He could not force him to be good, i.e., to choose virtue
freely, for the idea of forcing a free being to choose involves a
contradiction." And Professor Sorley says more elaborately that "things
occur in the universe which are not due to God's will, although they
must have happened with his permission ... a higher range of power and
perfection is shown in the creation of free beings than in the creation
of beings whose every thought and action are pre-determined by their
Creator," and while he admits there is limitations to man's power of
choice, he holds that there is one form of choice that is always there,
and that is the choice of good and evil. ("Moral Values and the Idea of
God," pp. 469-70.)
In all this one can see little more than verbal confusion. To commence
with Canon Green, which will also cover much that Prof. Sorley says on
the same point. When we are told man must choose virtue freely in order
that what he does shall partake of the character of morality, it is
plain that he is using the word "forced" in two senses. In the one sense
force may mean no more than a determinant. Thus we may say that our
sympathies _force_ us to act in such and such a way. Or the religious
man may say that the love of God forces him to act in such and such a
manner. Force here means any consideration that will lead to action, and
no one can object to its use in this sense.
A second meaning of force is that of compulsion from without, as when a
strong man gets hold of a weak one and by exertion of physical strength
compels him to do something that he is disinclined to do, or when one
forces another by threat of punishment. In this latter sense no one
dreams of harmonising force with moral action. Neither law nor common
sense does so. But compulsion in the sense of one's actions being forced
by a mental or moral disposition no one outside an asylum would dispute.
And what Canon Green does is to ask us to reject the idea of a moral
action being forced, in the sense of external compulsion, and then uses
it in the sense of an absence of dispositions that will lead to certain
courses of conduct.
It is probable that the Canon would reject this interpretation of his
statement, but if it does not mean this, then his argument is
unintelligible. For if it is admitted that what man does is the product
of his mental or moral dispositions, in other words, of his nature, and
if, as is undeniable, the nature with which he fronts the world is the
product of heredity and environment, he would no more be "forced" to do
good had God given him impulses strong enough to overcome all tendency
to evil than he is now when his impulses come to him from his ancestors
and his general social heredity.
All that is implied in a moral act is free choice. But choice is free,
not when it is independent of organic promptings; that is absurd; but
when those organic promptings are allowed to find expression. There is
no other rational meaning to "choice" than this. Choice does not tell us
how it is determined, on that point it can say nothing, any more than a
child can say why it chooses sugar in preference to cayenne pepper. Its
choice, we say, is determined by its taste. And its taste is determined
by--? To answer that question we must call in the chemist and the
physiologist, and they probably will tell us why our choice moves in one
direction rather than in another.
When men like Canon Green talk of the morality of an action being
dependent upon our _choice_ between right and wrong, what they probably
have in their minds is the perception of right and wrong. For we may
perceive the possibility of one course while we are performing another.
But the power of choice is clearly limited. A man cannot choose to be a
mathematician, however much he may see the desirability of becoming one.
And many a man may in the moral sphere see the advisability of his being
different in character from what he is, but may altogether lack the
capacity of becoming such. And the power of choice differs not only with
each individual, but with the same individual at different times.
Finally, the more fixed the character of the individual the less
conscious he is of choice, or of a sense of freedom to do differently
from what he actually does, and as this applies with equal force to
character, whether it be good or bad, we reach, finally, the suicidal
position that the more fundamentally moral a man becomes, the less moral
he is.[5]
Now seeing that all our educational processes aim at making the good
character, so to speak, automatic, that is, to quite fill the mind with
worthy motives and wise power of choice, and seeing also that a
character is good so far as this is done, will some one explain in what
way moral character would have suffered had God so made man that he
would have had intelligence enough to always choose the good and reject
the bad? For, be it noted, the apology put forward for the present state
of affairs is that man is in a state of probation, he is passing through
a course of moral discipline, and it is essential that he should
experience the possibility to do wrong, and even to occasionally do the
wrong. And the end of the process of tuition is, what? The production of
a perfect being in whom there shall not be a proneness to do wrong, to
whose purified moral nature wrong doing shall be quite foreign. That is
to say that we are to reach as a result of this long roundabout process,
with all its waste and bungling, just what might have been established
at the beginning. For either the perfect moral being is without the
quality which we have just been assured is essential to morality, or the
whole argument is reduced to nonsense.
For it is impossible to assume that the bad man chooses to be bad with a
full perception of the consequences of his actions, and at the same time
with the power to do otherwise. We all agree that the _right_ choice is
ultimately a _wise_ choice, and that if we could all trace out the
consequences of all we do, we should realise that it was to our real
interest to act rightly. And if that is admitted, it follows that the
"choice" to do evil is the product of short-sightedness, or of some
defect of temperament which prevents our standing up against the
temptations of the moment. And our ethical education is mainly directed
to making good this defect in our make up. But suppose that amount of
wisdom or strength had been an endowment of our nature from the outset,
is there any conceivable way in which we should have been the worse for
it? For even as it is there are some people who do make a fairly wise
and right choice, and whose high-water mark of excellence is not reached
through the crime and folly of the revival meeting convert. Are they the
worse because they have never yielded to evil? Is the naturally good man
really a less worthy character than the one whose comparative goodness
is only reached through and after a lengthy course of evil living? And
if not, in what way would the race have been worsened had we all been as
fortunately circumstanced? If it was really God's purpose to have a race
of men and women who should be both good and wise, it remains for the
theist to show in what way the plan would not have been as well served
by making them at once with a sufficiency of intelligence to act in the
real interests of themselves and of all around them.
Coming closer to earth the theist attempts to find a justification for
the existing order of things by finding a use for pain and suffering in
their educational influence on human nature, and in the impossibility of
altering for the better the consequences of natural law.
The real question at issue, says one of the most eloquent of modern
theists, the late Dr. Martineau, is "whether the laws of which complaint
is made work such harm that they ought never to have been enacted; or
whether, in spite of occasional disasters in their path, the sentient
existence of which they are the conditions has in its history a vast
excess of blessing." (Study of Religion II., p. 91.) And Canon Green,
who uses some of Dr. Martineau's ideas without the latter's eloquence or
power of reasoning, asks, "If God were to say, 'You condemn me for this
suffering! Well, take my creative power and re-create the world to
please yourself and to suit your own sense of justice and mercy'" could
we think out a world that should be better than this one? (Problem of
Evil, p. 48.)
Now both these methods of raising the question--and they are
representative of a whole group--serve but to confuse the issue. For no
one denies that some benefit may result from the present cosmical
structure. But that does not touch the complaint that the structure is
not such as fits in with the existence of a presiding intelligence such
as theism asks us to accept. And the question of Canon Green's whether
we could turn out a better universe than the one that actually exists,
is wide of the mark also. If I purchase a motor car as the work of a
genius in car-building, and find when I get my purchase home that it
cannot be made to run, it does not destroy the justice of my complaint
to ask whether I could build a better one or not. The important thing is
that the car is not what it should be, and judging by the product the
builder is not what he is represented to be either. Dr. Martineau was
far too keen a controversialist to adopt Canon Green's foolish retort,
but he does seek to parry the force of the atheist criticism by saying
that God "if once he commits his will to any determinate method, and for
the realisation of his ends selects and institutes a scheme of
instrumental rules, he thereby shuts the door on a thousand things that
might have been done before." (_Study_, p. 85). To that one may reply,
so much the worse for his judgment; while if the fact of his having once
adopted a "determinate method" caused him to resolve to stick to it, in
spite of its consequences in practice, and irrespective of the
beneficial results that might have followed its modification, we can
only regret that the deity was not acquainted with Emerson's opinion
that "a foolish consistency is the bugbear of little minds." Even what
is said to be the greatest mind of all might easily have benefited from
the warning.
Canon Green tries another line of reply, which is not in the least more
convincing. He pictures to us a father who, by misappropriating trust
funds, brings disgrace to the whole of his family. The mother is driven
to despair and drink. The sister dies for want of food, the brother
finds his career ruined. The disaster is complete, and Canon Green says
it is inevitable because we cannot have a world in which the relations
of parents and children exist without having them suffer from each
other's faults. So far as the present world goes that is true. But it is
certainly a strange reply to the complaint that an arrangement is unjust
to say that as the injustice results from the arrangement, therefore, we
have no cause for complaint. And that _we_ are unable to make a better
world is beside the mark. Between the perception of an injustice, and
the ability to remove it there is a world of difference, and although we
may be unable to remedy the defect the defect remains.
But, indeed, human nature does try to produce a world in which such
happenings as those depicted shall either not occur or their
consequences shall be reduced to a minimum. We do not hang a son for
his parents' crime, nor do humane people blame children for the
shortcomings of their parents. To some extent we try to correct the
consequences that follow, and even though the endeavour be futile, that
is in itself an indictment of the existing order. Man does at least try
to correct the injustices his God is said to have created.
It is overlooked also that the evils which follow from wrong actions are
not confined to those immediately connected, and who may conceivably
have their resentment to some extent dulled, if not lessened, by that
fact. People in no way connected, and who can have no perception of the
cause of their suffering, who are unconscious of everything, save the
one fact that they are suffering, feel its consequences. When a great
war spreads devastation all over the world, can it be said that any
useful purpose is served by the sufferings of millions who are not in
the slightest degree aware of the cause of their agony? When a shady
financial operation brings an innocent man to ruin, and effects all the
consequences which Canon Green imagines resulting from the defaulting
parent, how can it be said that the catastrophe admits of ethical
justification? In many cases the thought of the injury experienced acts
itself as a fresh cause of degradation. It creates a rankling and a
bitterness which depresses and inhibits the power to struggle, unless it
be the desire to struggle for revenge against a condition of things of
which the evil results are only too apparent. People are not merely
punished for the evil they do; they are punished for the evil that
others do, and the punishment, so far as we can see, bears no observable
relation to the wrong done. There is no _ethical_ relation between
actions and consequences. Not alone is the incidence of an action
dependent upon personal qualities--some will suffer more from having
accidentally told an untruth than others will suffer from having
committed gross and deliberate fraud--but nature is absolutely careless
of whether what I do is motived by good or bad intentions. If I get a
wetting through going out to help some one in distress, the consequences
will be exactly the same as though I had got wet going out to commit a
burglary or a murder. And when Dr. Martineau talks of the "natural
penalties for guilt," and adds that "sin being there, it would be simply
monstrous that there should be no suffering and would fully justify the
despair which now raises its sickly cry of complaint against the
retributory wretchedness of human transgression" (_Study_ II., p. 106),
the reply is that there are no such things as "_natural_ penalties for
guilt." There are only consequences of actions, and they are the same
whatever be the moral quality of the actions performed. In the same way
that nature may in the course of an earthquake destroy the homes of a
dozen worthy families and leave a gambling hell untouched, so it will in
other directions punish where a man, from good intentions, places
himself in the path of punishment, and refrain from afflicting one whose
selfishness or greed has guarded him against attack. There are natural
consequences of actions, there are no natural penalties for guilt, and
there are no natural rewards for innocence. Rewards and penalties are
the creation of man, and it is only in the form of a figure of speech
that we can apply them to nature.
It is equally idle to speak of pain as a form of discipline. Professor
Sorley says that if the pain in the world can be turned to the increase
of goodness, then its existence offers no insuperable objection to "the
ethical view of reality." So Dr. Martineau says that suffering is "the
moral discipline" through which our nature arrives at its "true
elevation." It is needless to multiply quotations; such statements are
the commonplaces of theistic controversy, and almost any book that one
cares to pick up will supply further illustrations, if they be required.
None can reject them, because no theist can afford to candidly admit
that the world we know offers no justification for his belief. The
belief in the goodness of God, as Canon Green says, is a belief that is
"absolutely fundamental to all religion," and if the facts as we see
them do not support the belief, some apology must be found that will
marry the theory to the fact.
Nevertheless, the belief in the disciplinary power of pain or suffering
is, if not quite illusory, so nearly so that it is useless for the
purpose for which it is brought forward. In the first place, it does not
require very profound study to see that whatever are the lessons taught
by suffering they are seldom proportionate to the conduct which cause
them, nor do those who suffer reap the alleged disciplinary benefit of
their suffering. Let us take a common case. A mother goes out and leaves
a child near an unguarded fire. The mother returns to find the child
burned to death. Where is the discipline here? Certainly the child
cannot have gained any. But there is, of course, the mother. The mother
has learned such a lesson that she will never forget it, and will never
again commit the same blunder. There we have it. A child is allowed to
die by a hideously cruel death in order that a mother may learn a lesson
in carefulness. It is good to learn from other sources that God's ways
are not our ways. A man who tried to imitate them, and who burned one of
his children in order to teach its mother how to look after the rest,
would soon find himself in the criminal court, or in an asylum. But what
would be insanity or criminal cruelty in the case of man, becomes, in
the alembic of religious apologetic, goodness and wisdom in God.
The theory that it is the function of pain to elevate and to discipline
is simply not true. One has only to look to see that in countless cases
the effect of pain is disaster. The world's best work is not born of
pain but of pleasure. There is no pain and no suffering, there is hardly
even toil, in the work of a genius. In all the higher walks of music, of
art, of literature, the work is perfect in proportion as the worker
finds himself in agreeable and pleasant surroundings. And what is true
of the higher aspect of art is true also of life in general. Life may be
lived in spite of pain, as good work may be done in spite of
discouraging circumstances, but one might as well talk of a plant
flourishing because of poor soil, or sharp frosts, as to speak of life
becoming better because of pain.
The normal function of pain is to depress, that of pleasure is to
heighten. As Spencer said, every pain lowers the tide of life; every
pleasure raises the tide of life. It is one of the commonest of sights
to see those suffering from illness becoming more self-centred, less
careful of others, and to see the disintegrating consequences of
disease on character. Here and there one may find a character that has
had its rough edges smoothed down by suffering, but for every case of
that kind one may find a score of an opposite order. It is not the
underfed, badly clothed, neglected child that is likely to make the best
citizen, but the one that has the best chance of developing itself in
healthy surroundings. And it is a curious commentary, if it were true,
to argue that a good and wise God so arranged things that pain and
suffering, even undeserved suffering, should be the main way for the
development of character.
A strange but not uncommon argument is used by Canon Green in dealing
with the suffering incidental to the various disasters that overtake
mankind from time to time. Suffering, he says, has a certain element of
martyrdom about it. Even evils due to human greed and carelessness bring
some benefit in their train. Thus, apropos of the _Titanic_ disaster:--
Every such disaster tends to produce some improvement for future
generations. Shipowners are forced to supply more boats, wireless
instalment is required on all ships; the idle rich are led to think
less of saving useless time and more of saving lives, their own and
those of men in the stokeholds. In a sense those who perish may be
said to be unwilling martyrs who by their deaths purchase some
advantage for others. It will be said that it is a great price to
pay for a small advantage, and one which might have been cheaply
gained in some other ways. That is so. But so too the ways of
nature are cruel. So many seeds must be sown, so many young animals
or birds or fishes born, so many must be trampled out of existence,
that only the best may survive. (_Problem of Evil_; pp. 163-4).
That certainly puts all the owners of slum property, all the grasping
shipowners, all those who batten and fatten on other people's welfare in
a most favourable light. We have been thinking them almost criminals
when they were in reality public benefactors. They lead to many
improvements, and even though the improvements come too late to benefit
those who suffer from the evils, yet they do come--sometimes. Certainly
it might give some comfort if the sufferers knew what it was they were
being sacrificed for, and that others would be benefited by their death.
But they do not, and we are therefore bound to conclude that whatever
satisfaction is felt is by those who survive. When a _Titanic_ sinks it
must be the people on shore who see the element of goodness in it since
it makes travelling easier for _them_. And the kindness developed in one
who can excuse the brutalities of nature because it brings some benefit
to himself is of a rather startling nature.
The fundamental fault in all reasoning of this order lies in the
assumption that pain ceases to be pain if it can be shown to bring good
to _some_ one. But that it not so. Pleasure and pain are not
quantitative things, increments of which can be carried on from
generation to generation and a balance struck at the end, much as one
strikes a balance between the profits and losses of a year's trading.
All suffering and all enjoyment are of necessity personal. Suffering is
not increased by extending it over a million instances. There was not
more pain because a larger number happened to be be killed in the
European war than are killed in a borderland skirmish. There were a
larger _number_ of people involved in the one case than in the other,
but that is all. Multiplying the number of cases makes a greater appeal
to a sluggish imagination, but it adds nothing substantial to the fact.
Feeling, whether it be pleasant or painful, is a matter of individual
experience, and that being so it is not the number of people who suffer
through no fault of their own, and, so far as one can see, without any
benefit proportionate to the suffering experienced, but the fact of
there being this suffering at all. That is the point the theist must
face; it is the one point he systematically avoids.
Another form of the same argument meets us in the familiar plea that
bodily pain "sounds the alarm bell of disease in time for its removal."
In some sense it may be admitted that a painful feeling, in certain
circumstances, does act as a warning that persistence will lead to
disaster. But it is not universally true in the sense and in the degree
that is needed to justify the argument, and it is a "warning" out of all
proportion to the danger faced. In the first place, pain cannot be a
warning against disease, it can only be an indication of its presence.
It does not warn us against the dangers of a contemplated course of
conduct, nor can it tell us what conduct has led to the pain
experienced. And in the case of contagious diseases, what amount of
warning is there given? In some case the victim is stricken and is dead
in so short a time as not to know with what it is he has been afflicted,
and certainly without any chance of being warned. What warning is there
in the case of a violent poison? Or what relation is there between pains
felt and dangers run? The most dangerous diseases may have painless
beginnings, and be well rooted in the system before the victim is
driven by discomfort to seek medical advice. On the other hand, a corn
or a toothache, neither of them very deadly ailments, create pain out of
all proportion to their gravity. And if we take the case of excessive
cold we have here an instance where instead of pain acting as a warning,
the danger just acts as an anæsthetic. The victim is oppressed by
drowsiness, sinks into insensibility, finally death. Here it is not the
approach of death that is painful, but the return to life, the pain of
restoring circulation being very severe indeed.
Fear, which may be classed as a species of pain, appears to act, in the
majority of instances, as an enemy, rather than as a friend to the
animal experiencing it. Thus Professor Mosso points out that in the
animal organism there exists a number of harmful reactions that increase
in number the graver the peril becomes. We have all read of the
"fascination" of the bird by the serpent, and there are other animals
that in the presence of an enemy become so palsied with fear as to
become incapable of defence, even that of flight. And with man it is not
as the danger becomes most acute that his nerves become steadier and his
courage firmer. The opposite is probably more often the case. In all
these cases it is as though nature had lured the animal or man into a
position of grave danger, and then does its best to divest him of
adequate means of defence against it.
Common sense revolts against the doctrine that pain is a good thing, and
the fact of this is everywhere seen in the attempt of man to get rid of
it. No one trusts it as a sure warning against disease, no one turns to
it as a means of purifying character. All these pleas are the mere
platitudes of a religious apologetic trying to harmonise a primitive
theory of things with a larger knowledge and a more developed moral
sense. Pain and suffering in the world remain facts whether we believe
in the existence of a God or not, but we are at least freed from the
paralysing horror of the belief that all the suffering and pain in
nature is part of a plan. If man realised all that that belief involved
it might indeed rob his mind of all strength to struggle against the
forces that make for his destruction. Fortunately no race of people
could act upon the logical implications of the theistic theory and
maintain its existence. In practice, as well as in theory, theism has
had to come to terms with facts. And now the series of adjustments have
almost reached their end. The belief in God has been traced to its
origin, and we know it to have issued in an altogether discredited view
of the world and of man. We know that man does not discover God, he
invents him, and an invention is properly discarded when a better
instrument is forthcoming. To-day the hypothesis of God stands in just
the same relation to the better life of to-day as the fire drill of the
savage does to the modern method of obtaining a light. The belief in God
may continue awhile in virtue of the lack of intelligence of some, of
the carelessness of others, and of the conservative character of the
mass. But no amount of apologising can make up for the absence of
genuine knowledge, nor can the flow of the finest eloquence do aught but
clothe in regal raiment the body of a corpse.
FOOTNOTE:
[5] I have discussed this question at length in my "Determinism or Free
Will."
Part II.
SUBSTITUTES FOR ATHEISM.
CHAPTER X.
A QUESTION OF PREJUDICE.
It affords some ground for surprise that there should be so great a
resentment shown against religious disbelief in general and against
Atheism in particular. We have here more than the mere rejection of a
theory or view of life. There is a certain emotional resentment, a
shrinking from the one who is guilty of disbelief, such as is not
explainable on ordinary grounds. The attitude is ridiculous, so
ridiculous that many who adopt it are ashamed to openly acknowledge it,
but it is there, and its existence calls for explanation.
We believe this is to be found in the peculiar history of the god-idea
combined with primitive theories of social life. Like many frames of
mind that persist in civilised society, this attitude towards disbelief
has its roots in a conception of the world that has been generally
discarded and in social conditions that have ceased to exist among
civilised people. To begin with, we have the fact that religion
dominates the life of primitive man to a degree that is almost
inconceivable to the modern mind. The anger of the tribal gods has to be
always reckoned with. What they desire must be done, what they do not
desire must be avoided. In the next place there exists a very strong
sense of collective responsibility. What one member of a tribe does the
whole of the tribe is responsible for, both to the members of other
tribes and to the gods. We see a survival of this in the reversion to a
more primitive state of things that takes place during a war. In some
circumstances hatred of the whole of a people with whom a nation is at
war becomes a duty, and all are responsible for the offences of each. So
in primitive times an offence against the gods became an act of treason
against the tribe. It might expose the whole of the tribe to disaster.
It is not, it must be noted, that primitive man is fond of the gods, or
jealous of their honour; he is not any more fond of them than is the
modern citizen of the tax-collector. And no one will ever really
understand the question of religion until he rids himself of the notion
that primitive man spends his time _looking_ for gods or that he is
happy in their company. He is simply afraid that a single unruly member
may get the whole tribe into a serious difficulty. The savage is
severely practical; his conduct rests upon grounds of, to him, the most
obvious utility, and his treatment of the heretic leaves little to be
desired on the score of effectiveness. The unbeliever is a dangerous
person, and he is promptly suppressed. The first heretic died a martyr
to the tribe; the last heretic will die a martyr to the race.
Primitive conditions die out, but primitive feelings linger, and
although in theory we have reached the stage of believing that each
person must bear the consequences of his own religious opinions, the
deeply rooted dislike to the man who rejects the rule of the gods
remains.
Historically we have also to reckon with the operations of an interested
priesthood, but leaving that on one side as a secondary development it
would seem that one must trace to some such cause as the one above
indicated the deep and widespread dislike to such a term as atheism,
even by many who to all intents and purposes are atheist in their
opinion. Certainly in this country, where compromise is more fashionable
than in many other places, the dislike to the word is partly due to its
uncompromising character. It is clear cut and definite. Its connotations
cannot be misunderstood by any one who takes the word in its literal
meaning. The Theist is one who believes in a personal God. The Atheist
is one who is without belief in a personal God. The meaning is clear,
and the implied mental attitude is plain. It is opposed to theism, and
has no significance apart from Theism. And, as will be seen, when
non-theists quarrel with it, it is only because it is mis-stated or
misunderstood.
But most people dislike clear cut terms. They prefer to exist in an
atmosphere of mental ambiguity and intellectual fog which blurs outlines
and obscures differences. Unbeliever is preferable to some,
sceptic--presumably because of its age and philosophical associations,
is a greater favourite, and Agnostic is more beloved than either--the
latter has indeed been pressed into the service of a more or less
nebulous "religion." As it is said, "We are all Socialists nowadays," so
it is said that we are unbelievers or Agnostics nowadays. But no one
says we are all Atheists nowadays. Timidity can find no use for a word
of that character. Of course, if a man believes that some word other
than Atheism best describes his state of mind, he has a perfect right to
select the one that seems fittest. But when one finds non-theists
repudiating the name of Atheist with as much moral indignation as though
they had been accused of shoplifting, one cannot help the suspicion
that the heat displayed is not unconnected with some lurking fear of the
"respectabilities." It does seem that while many may have outgrown all
fear of the God of orthodoxy, the fear of the god of social pressure
remains.
So far as the Theist is concerned it is quite understandable that his
objection to Atheism should involve a certain moral element. That would
result from what has already been said concerning the cause of the fear
of heresy. Still one would have thought that in these days it would
require a person of almost abnormal stupidity to assume that disbelief
in God has its roots in a defective moral character. The facts would
warrant a quite opposite conclusion. In the first place, the rejection
of any well-established belief argues a degree of independence of mind
that is, unfortunately, not common. The ordinary mind follows the common
route. It is the extraordinary mind that strikes out from the beaten
path. The heretic, whether in politics or in religion, may be wrong, but
there is always with him the guarantee of a certain measure of mental
strength that is not, on the face of the matter, present with one who
follows the orthodox path. And that in itself represents a type of mind
of no little social value. Moreover, I for one, am quite ready to assert
that, class for class, the Freethinker does represent a type of mind
considerably above the average. That this is not more generally
recognised is due to the policy of the religious advocate in contrasting
the uneducated Freethinker with the educated believer.
Secondly, it strikes one as almost insane to assume that in a Christian
country Atheism should be professed as a cloak or as an excuse for
misconduct. They who talk in this strain greatly undervalue the
accommodating power of religion. Is there a single form of rascality
known to man for which religion has not been able to provide a sanction?
If there is I have failed to come across it. The use of religion made by
tyranny in all ages and in all countries is proof of how accommodating
it is to man's passions and interests. The picture of the dying murderer
meeting his end, filled with the consolation of religion, and certain of
his speedy salvation, contains a lesson that all may read if they will.
Error there may be in any case where opinion is concerned, but
profession of an opinion that paves the way for suspicion and
persecution provides a _prima facie_ guarantee of honesty that cannot be
furnished by the advocacy of one that stands high in the public favour.
For aught I know to the contrary, every one of England's Bishops may be
quite honest men. But there can be no certainty about it so long as the
profession carries with it all it does. The dice are loaded in favour of
conviction. But the man who faces social ostracism, and even loss of
liberty in defence of an opinion, is giving a hostage to truth such as
none other can give.
This association of heresy with a defective moral character is a very
old game. It has been played by all religions, and, it must be admitted,
with considerable success. Writing in the second century Lucian shows us
the same policy at work in his day. In one of his dialogues, when the
Atheist has refuted one after another the theistic arguments of his
opponent, the defender of the gods turns on his opponent with--
You god robbing, shabby, villainous, infamous, halter-sick
vagabond! Does not everybody know that your father was a
tatterdemalion, and your mother no better than she should be? that
you murdered your brother and are guilty of other execrable crimes?
You lewd, lying, rascally, abominable varlet.
That type of disputant is still with us, and is still supporting his
beliefs with the same tactics. And it is successful with some. There is
a certain snobbishness in human nature that makes it seek the
association of well-known names and shun all of those with an
unfashionable reputation. To observe the way in which some people will
introduce into their conversation, speeches, or writings, the names of
well-known men, is a revelation of this mental snobbery. And the moral
equivalent of this is the fear of being found in the company of an
opinion that has been branded as immoral. Such people have all the fear
of an unpopular opinion that a savage has of a tribal taboo--it is, in
fact, a survival of the same spirit that gave the tribal taboo its
force. It is, thus, not a very difficult matter to warn people off an
undesirable opinion. Samuel Taylor Coleridge relates how the clergy
raised the cry of Atheism against him, although he had never advanced
further than Deism. And it is to his credit that in referring to this
charge he said:--
Little do these men know what Atheism is. Not one man in a thousand
has either strength of mind or goodness of heart to be an Atheist.
I repeat it. Not one man in a thousand has either strength of mind
or goodness of heart to be an Atheist.
And we have also the oft-quoted testimony of the late Professor
Tyndall:--
It is my comfort to know that there are amongst us many whom the
gladiators of pulpit would call Atheists and Materialists, whose
lives, nevertheless, as tested by any accessible standard of
morality would contrast more than favourably with the lives of
those who seek to stamp them with this offensive brand. When I say
"offensive," I refer merely to the intention of those who use such
terms, and not because Atheism or Materialism, when compared with
many of the notions ventilated in the columns of religious
newspapers has any particular offensiveness to me. If I wish to
find men who are scrupulous in their adherence to engagements,
whose words are their bond, and to whom moral shiftiness of any
kind is subjectively unknown, if I wanted a loving father, a
faithful husband, an honourable neighbour, and a just citizen, I
would seek him among the band of Atheists to which I refer. I have
known some of the most pronounced amongst them, not only in life,
but in death--seeing them approaching with open eyes the inexorable
goal, with no dread of a "hangman's whip," with no hope of a
heavenly crown, and still as mindful of their duties, as if their
eternal future depended upon their latest deeds.
Still the moral cry is too useful with the crowd to lead to the
conviction that anything one could say would lead to its disuse. In the
dialogue of Lucian's to which we have referred, and after the theist has
been refuted by the Atheist, Hermes consoles the chief deity, Zeus, by
telling him that even though a few may have been won over by the
arguments of the Atheist, the vast majority, "the whole mass of
uneducated Greeks and the Barbarians everywhere," still remain firm in
their faith. And although Zeus replies that he would prefer one sensible
man to a thousand fools, when a case depends upon the adherence of the
relatively foolish, numbers will always bring some consolation to the
champions of an intellectually distressed creed.
CHAPTER XI.
WHAT IS ATHEISM?
Between Atheism and Theism there is no logical halting place. But there
are, unfortunately, many illogical ones. Few possess the capacity for
pushing their ideas to a logical conclusion, and some position is
finally discovered which has the weakness of both extremes with the
strength of neither. With many there is vague talk of a "Power"
manifested in the universe, and by giving this the dignity of capital
letters it is evidently hoped that ether people will recognise it as an
equivalent for God. But power, with or without capitals, is not God. It
is not the existence of a "Power" that forms the kernel of the dispute
between the Theist and the Atheist, but what that power is like. The
issue arises on the point of whether it is personal or not. That it is,
is what the religious man believes. As Mr. Balfour says, when the plain
man speaks of God he means "a God whom men can love, to whom men can
pray, who takes sides, who has purposes and preferences, whose
attributes, however conceived, leaves the possibility of a personal
relation between Himself and those whom he has created." ("Theism and
Humanism," p. 21.) What the genuine believer has in view is not the
worthless abstraction of a rationalised metaphysic, but the personal
being of historic theology.
It is now my purpose to take a few of these substitutes for Atheism by
the aid of which some persons seek to mark themselves off from a
declared and reasoned unbelief. As outstanding examples of this one may
take two men of no less eminence than Herbert Spencer and Professor
Huxley. Both of these men have rendered great service to advanced
thought, but both have only succeeded in repudiating Atheism by
misstating and misrepresenting it. In addition to the service that
Spencer unwittingly rendered the current religion by his use of the
"Unknowable" (with which we deal fully later), a further help was given
by his destruction of an Atheism that had no existence. This remarkable
performance will be found in the first part of his "First Principles."
Respecting the origin of the universe, he tells us, there are three
intelligible propositions--although neither of these, on his own
showing, is intelligible. We may assert that it is self-existent, that
it is self-created, or that it is created by an external agency. All
three propositions, he proceeds to show, are equally inconceivable. The
noticeable thing about the performance is that Atheism is identified
with the proposition that the universe is self-existent. A very slight
acquaintance with the writings of representative Atheists would have
shown Mr. Spencer that "the origin of the universe" is one of those
questions on which Atheism has wisely been silent, and it has also
insisted that all attempts to deal with such a question can only result
in a meaningless string of words. To the Atheist, "the universe"--the
sum of existence--is a fact that no amount of reasoning can get behind
or beyond. To think of the universe as a whole is an impossibility;
while to talk of its origin is to assume, first, that it did originate,
and, second, that we have some means by which we can transcend all the
known limits of the human mind. The Atheist can say, and has said, with
Mr. Spencer himself--whose final statement of Agnosticism differs in no
material respect from Atheism, that in discussing the "origin of the
universe," we can only succeed in multiplying impossibilities of thought
"by every attempt we make to explain its existence." No one has pointed
out more clearly than Mr. Spencer that "infinity" is not a conception,
but the negation of one. The pity is that he did not realise that in
taking up this position he was on exactly the same level of criticism
that Atheists have pursued. For them the universe is an ultimate fact;
all that we can do is to mark the ceaseless changes always going on
around us, and to develope our capacity for modifying their action in
the interests of human welfare. Farther than this our knowledge does not
and cannot go; and it may be added that even though our knowledge could
go beyond the world of phenomena, such knowledge would not be of the
slightest possible value.
It may also be pointed out that, just as it is not true that Atheism
attempts to explain the origin of the universe, so it is unfair to tie
the Atheist down to any particular theory of cosmic evolution. As a
mental attitude Atheism is quite independent of any theory of cosmic
working, so long as that theory does not involve an appeal to deity. As
we shall see, Atheism, from the point of view both of history and
etymology, stands for the negation of theism, and its final
justification must be found in the untenability of the theistic
position.
Rightly enough it may be argued that the acceptance of Atheism implies a
certain general mental attitude towards both cosmic and social
questions, but the Atheist, as such, is no more committed to a special
scientific theory than he is committed to a special theory of
government. Of course, it is convenient for the Theist to first of all
saddle his opponent with a set of social or scientific beliefs, and then
to assume that in attacking those beliefs he is demolishing Atheism, but
it is none the less fighting on a false issue. All that Atheism
necessarily involves is that all forms of Theism are logically
untenable, and consequently the only effective method of destroying
Atheism is to establish its opposite.
Professor Huxley's treatment of Atheism proceeds on similar lines to
that already dealt with, but is more elaborate in character. Discussing
the nature of his own opinions he repudiates all sympathy with Atheism,
because:
"the problem of the ultimate cause of existence is one which seems
to me to be hopelessly out of reach of my poor powers. Of all the
senseless babble I have ever had occasion to read, the
demonstrations of those philosophers who undertake to tell us about
the nature of God would be the worst, if they were not surpassed by
the still greater absurdities of the philosophers who try to prove
there is no God." (_On the Hypothesis the Animals are Automata._)
And on another occasion, replying to a correspondent, he expresses the
opinion that "Atheism is, on philosophical grounds, untenable, that
there is no evidence of the god of the theologians is true enough, but
strictly scientific reasoning can take us no further. When we know
nothing we can neither affirm nor deny with propriety." (_Life and
Letters_, p. 162.)
Here, again, we have the common error that Atheism seeks in some way to
explain the ultimate cause of existence. And this in spite of continuous
disclaimers that all search for a "first cause," or for a "cause of
existence" is midsummer madness. The fault here, we suspect, is that
both writers took their statement of Atheism, not from Atheistic writers
but from their opponents. But it is none the less surprising that it was
not recognised that both "a first cause" and an "ultimate cause of
existence," are, strictly speaking, theistic questions. I do not mean
that these questions may not suggest themselves to non-theists, but that
when they are raised clearly and definitely they are seen to belong to a
class of questions to which no rational answer is possible. To the
Theist, however, the questions arise from his primary assumptions. His
theory is one of final causes; his deity is postulated as the cause of
existence, and he cannot give up the questions as hopeless without
admitting his position to be indefensible. It is quite usual for the
theist to propound problems which only arise on his own assumptions, and
then call upon his opponents for answers to them, but there is no
justification whatever for non-theists playing the same game. Atheism
has nothing to do with final causes, and therefore is not concerned with
defending its illogicalities. Theism is a doctrine of final causes, and
in arguing that it is absurd to express an opinion upon the subject
Professor Huxley was adding a good reason in support of the position he
believed himself to be destroying.
Huxley's other objection to Atheism is that it perpetuates the absurdity
of trying to prove there is no God. How far is that true? Or in what
sense is it true? The danger in all discussion on this point lies in our
taking it for granted that "God" conveys a definite and identical
meaning to all people. But this is very far from being the case. What
anyone means by "God" it is impossible to say until some further
description has been given. When this has been done, and not until then,
"God" may become the subject of affirmation or denial. Until then we are
playing with empty words. By itself "God" means nothing. It offers the
possibility of neither negation nor affirmation.
Now Professor Huxley would have readily admitted that the truth of a
proposition may be denied whenever its terms involve a contradiction.
And the ground of this is the sheer impossibility of bringing the terms
together in thought. That a circle may be square, or that parallel lines
may enclose a space, are propositions the truth of which may be denied
offhand. The ground of this is that the conception of squareness and
circularity, of straight lines and an enclosed space are mutually
destructive, they cancel each other. And so far as Atheism may be said
to involve the denial of particular gods that denial is based upon
precisely similar grounds. When defined it is seen that the attributes
of this defined god cancel each other as effectually as squareness rules
out the idea of a circle; either this or they are simply unthinkable.
You cannot have an infinite personality any more than you can have a
six-sided octagon, nor can you posit an infinite personality without
divesting the terms of all meaning.
It may also be noted in passing that both the theist and the Agnostic
actually do deny the existence of particular gods without the least
hesitation. No rational Agnostic would hesitate to deny the existence of
Jupiter, Javeh, Allah, or Brahma. No Christian would hesitate to deny
the existence of the gods of a tribe of savages. Even believers in the
current theology have evolved beyond the stage of the primitive
Christians, who accepted the existence of the Pagan deities with the
proviso that they were demons. And it is a mere verbal quibble to say
that these people merely deny each other's conception of deity. Each
man's conception of god _is_ his god, and to say that no being answering
to that conception exists is to say that his god does not exist, and in
relation to the god denied the denier is in exactly the position in
which he places the Atheist.
So far then the Atheism of each is just a question of degree or of
relation. So far as Atheism involves the denial of deity the follower of
one religion is an Atheist in relation to the followers of every other
religion. Each religion--among civilised people--is atheistic from the
standpoint of the followers of other gods. The affirmation of one god
involves the denial of other gods. This would really seem to be the
historical significance of the term. The early Christians were called
atheists by the Pagans, and some of them accepted it without demur. At a
later date Spinoza, Voltaire, Paine, and others were called atheists,
and the epithet has lost its force to-day only because the evolution of
thought has broken down many religious barriers, and is rapidly dividing
people into two groups--those who believe in some god and who believe
in none at all. Now all that Atheism--conscious and reflective
Atheism--does is to carry a step further the restricted denial of the
ordinary religionist. The Christian theist denies every god but his own.
The Atheist, seeing no more evidence for the existence of the Christian
deity than for the existence of any of the deities discarded by the
Christian, seeing, further, that there are exactly the same
contradictions involved in assuming the existence of any one of the
world's deities, places the Christian deity on the list as among those
gods in whose existence he does not believe, and whose existence, so far
as it is defined, may be logically denied.
The really distinguishing feature of philosophic Atheism is its
comprehensiveness, the ranking of all known deities, big and little,
ancient and modern, savage and civilised, gross and subtle, upon the
same level. Historically, we see them all originating in the same
conditions, passing through substantially the same phases of
development, finally to meet with the same fate as civilisation
developes. In this respect Atheism has to be considered in its historic
developments. It begins, as we have seen in the rejection of a
particular god, in favour of some other deity. It is only at a very much
later stage that the whole idea of god is subjected to examination and
analysis in such a way as to lead to the rejection of the conception of
god as a whole. But with that aspect of the subject we shall be
concerned later.
But does Atheism deny the existence of any possible god? This question
might admit of a simple answer if one only knew precisely what it meant.
It is easy enough to understand what is meant by God so long as we keep
to any or all of the gods of the world's religions. But what is meant by
god standing alone and undefined? Historically "God" means a deity
believed in by some people, some where, at some time. And if we put on
one side these particular gods we have nothing left that can be either
affirmed or denied. God in the abstract is not a real existence any more
than tree in the abstract is a real existence. There is a pine tree, a
pear tree, an apple tree, etc., but there is and can be no "tree" apart
from some particular tree. So with "god." There are particular gods, but
if we do away with these, we have no god left as a separate existence.
"God" then becomes a mere word conveying no meaning whatever. Atheism
does not deny the existence of _a_ god for the same reason that it does
not deny the existence of Abracadabra--both terms mean as much, or as
little. And it is more than absurd for people who have rejected theism
to continue using the word "god" as though it had a quite definite
meaning apart from the gods of the various theologies. We have Professor
Huxley admitting that "there is no evidence of the existence of the god
of the theologians," and we imagine that he would have met the
affirmation of their existence with a flat contradiction. At any rate he
would have been quite justified in doing so. But when he asserts, with a
show of logical precision, but in reality with great looseness, that "it
is preposterous to assert that there is no god because he cannot be such
as we think him to be," he is using language for which no precise
meaning can be found. To be intelligible, the sentence implies that we
have some conception answering to the terms used, and this, as we have
pointed out with almost wearisome insistence, is not the case. It is not
a case of saying to the theist, "I fully understand your hypothesis, but
as at present I do not see enough evidence to convince me of its truth
or to demonstrate its error I must suspend judgment." We do _not_
understand it. And when we seek to we discover that the terms of the
proposition we are asked to accept refuse to be brought together within
the compass of a single conception. Suspended judgment where the subject
under discussion is understandable is right and proper, but it is quite
out of place, and indeed cannot exist, where the proposition before us
is void of meaning. In such circumstances suspended judgment is absurd,
and it may be added that the affirmation or negation of such a
proposition is absurd likewise.
Only one other word need be said on this point. It may be urged that
educated believers mean by "God" not the anthropomorphic deity of the
theologies, but a personal intelligence controlling things. But this is
really not less anthropomorphic than the form in which the god idea
meets us in the popular theologies. Its anthropomorphism is only, to
unobservant minds, less apparent. The conception of an intelligent,
personal being controlling nature is not fundamentally less
objectionable than the frankly man-like being of the early theologies.
Intelligence, as we know it (and to talk of an intelligence that is
unlike the intelligence we know is absurd) is as much a characteristic
of human, or animal, organisation, as arms and legs are. Mind, after
all, is only known to us as a function of an organism. That it is more
than this, or other than this, is a pure assumption. And to divest "God"
of all physical parts, while retaining his functions, is sheer nonsense.
There is the personal intelligence of Smith, or Brown, or Robinson, but
it is absurd to wipe out all the particular Smiths, and Browns, and
Robinsons, and then talk as though their qualities continue in
existence. So with God. If we reject all the gods of the theologies one
after another, what god have we left to talk about? All we have left is
the memory of a delusion.
It is equally fallacious to talk of "God" as an equivalent of force in
the abstract, or as the equivalent of some non-intelligent force. This
is not what people ever meant, or mean, by god. What religious folk
believe in, what they pray to, is a person who can hear them, and who
can do things. A god only dimly apprehended may be tolerated, but for
how long will faith continue to worship an existence that can neither do
nor hear nor sympathise? There is a limit to even religious folly. And
even a savage only worships "sticks and stones" _after_ he endows them
with life and intelligence.
Finally, if there is one thing clear to the modern mind it is that
science has no room in its theory of things for an over-ruling
intelligence. Sir Oliver Lodge well sums up the attitude of science in
the following sentences:--"Orthodox science shows us a self-contained
and self-sufficient universe, not in touch with anything above or beyond
itself--the general trend and outline of it known--nothing supernatural
or miraculous, no intervention of beings other than ourselves, being
conceived possible." (_Man and the Universe_, p. 14, Popular ed.)
Personally, we question whether there are any scientists of repute who
really believe in the existence of a personal intelligence above or
beyond nature. Some may make professions to the contrary, but it will
usually be found that the qualifications introduced rob their
professions of all value. Certainly their teaching is destitute of any
such conception. Modern scientific thought leaves no room for the
operations of deity. The miraculous is generally discarded. Response to
prayer is whittled down to a species of self-delusion, to be valued on
account of its subjective influence only. The scientific theory of
things, incomplete as it may be in many of its details, leaves no room
for the operations of a god. Not alone does it leave no room for a god,
but if the scientific conception of the world is to stand, then it would
be necessary to repeat Bakunine's _mot_, and to say, "If there were a
god it would be necessary to destroy him." You simply cannot have at one
and the same time a universe in which all that occurs is the consequence
of calculable and indestructible forces, the operations of which can be
foreseen and relied upon, and a universe controlled by a
self-determining deity, capable of modifying the action of these same
forces. You may have one or the other, but it is sheer lunacy to imagine
that you can have both. Either uniformity with invariable causation, or
a world in which every scientific calculation must be prefaced with the
"D.V." of a prayer meeting. And the Atheist, who accepts the principles
of modern science, says, not merely that he is without a belief in god,
but that he fails to see any necessity for his existence, or anything
for him to do if he did exist. He passes the gods of the world in review
and categorically dismisses each one as a myth. In doing this he has the
concurrence of all theists in discarding every god save one--his own.
The Atheist simply applies the same rule to each, and metes out the same
judgment to all.
CHAPTER XII.
SPENCER AND THE UNKNOWABLE.
We have already referred to the use made by religionists of Spencer's
"Unknowable." This theory was not without its forerunners, and in
England was already in the field in the teachings of Hamilton and
Mansel. Spencer gave it a still greater vogue. As he presented it, it
came before the world with all the prestige attaching to its association
with one of the most comprehensive of modern thinkers, and one of the
most influential in the schools of evolutionary philosophy. It was also
connected with a world theory that claimed to be strictly scientific in
its character. It became not only a fashion in certain circles, it
founded a school, and gained numerous followers in the religious world.
Its author propounded it as a basis on which to reconcile religion and
science, and many were ready to accept it as such. Printed in all the
glory of capital letters, appearing sometimes as "The Ultimate Reality,"
sometimes as the "Unconditioned," sometimes as an "Infinite and Eternal
Energy," it was equally impressive under all its forms. It provided just
that solemn kind of formula that the religious mind is accustomed to
hear, and if it was as meaningless as the Athanasian Creed, is was, for
that reason, quite as satisfying. It gave all the comfort of a religious
confession of faith, and it has been the parent of a whole host of more
recent apologies for God.
In itself the "Unknowable" was harmless enough. Its philosophic value
is not great, its scientific utility is nil. To say that everything
proceeds from an "Ultimate Reality" is not very helpful, and to follow
on with the declaration that we know nothing about it, and that it would
be of no use to us if we did, does not sound very encouraging. It
reminds one of the description of the horse that had only two
faults--one that it was hard to catch, and the other that it was no good
when it was caught. We repeat with all solemnity the formula that all
things proceed from an infinite and eternal energy, and that this is the
Ultimate Reality, and then find that in relation to any and every
question we are precisely where we were. Its acceptance in certain
religious circles, and its use later, may be taken as evidence of the
fact that what the pious mind longs for is not sense but satisfaction.
Still there remains cause for wonder that this "Unknowable" should ever
have been taken as affording foundation for the belief in deity. The
most extreme materialist or Atheist need not be in the slightest degree
disconcerted on being told things proceed from an "Infinite and Eternal
Energy." It is only what the Atheist has said, minus the capital
letters. He has affirmed his conviction, that all phenomena result from
the permutations of matter and force, which are eternal because no time
limit can be placed to their operations. And you do not add anything
material to the statement by printing it in capital letters. That the
Spencerian abstraction should have been taken as a substitute for deity
proves how desperate the situation is. Drowning men clutch at straws,
and a disintegrating deity hopes to renew his strength by the lavish
use of capital letters.
For, after all, what the theist needs is, not an eternal energy, but a
personality. An inscrutable existence will not do. There is no dispute
that something exists. There is no quarrel over mere existence. It is
with the nature of what exists and the mode of its operation that the
issue arises. The theist needs a special kind of energy, a special form
of existence, a special kind of "reality" if his case is to be
established. It will not do for Mr. Spencer to assure him that this
"Ultimate Reality" is higher than personal. How Mr. Spencer knows that
something, the nature of which is unknown, is higher than something
else, is more than one can tell. But that does not matter. Higher or
lower, it is all the same. Either way it is different from personal, and
if it is different it is not the same, it is not personal. Whatever
other qualities this "Ultimate Reality" has or lacks, it must have that
one if it is to be of use to the theist. And to say that it is higher
than personal is to say that it is not personal at all, and to repeat in
a roundabout manner what the Atheist has been saying all the time.
What now is Spencer's theory of an ultimate reality that must for ever
remain unknowable? Following a line of thought that had been steadily
gaining ground since Hume--although much older than Hume--Spencer holds
that in final analysis all our knowledge is a knowledge of mental states
and their relations. Beyond this we _know_ nothing, and can never know
anything. Nevertheless, while we cannot know anything beyond
consciousness, the conditions of thinking oblige us to assume that
something exists as the cause of our states of mind. Just as black
implies something that is not black, hard something that is not hard, so
we must conceive, as against the conditioned, relative existence of our
conscious states, an unconditioned, absolute existence as their cause.
It is this assumed, but completely unknown cause of our conscious
states, and of all else, that Spencer distinguishes as the Unknowable,
the Unconditioned, the Absolute, etc., and which appears to have brought
so much consolation to hard-pressed theists.
I have no intention of discussing here the philosophic value of the
"Unknowable." But one may say, in passing, that even from that point of
view Spencer is untrue to his own Agnosticism in speaking of the
Unconditioned as the _cause_ of phenomena. For causation is a category
of the conditioned, it belongs to the world we know. It is not something
that exists beyond consciousness, it is something that is supplied by
consciousness and which possesses validity only within the world of
phenomena. On Spencer's own theory of relativity a cause only exists in
relation to an effect. Destroy the one and you destroy the other. Thus,
if the Unknowable is a cause of phenomena it ceases to be the
unconditioned and becomes part of the phenomenal order. If, on the other
hand, it is not part of the phenomenal sequence, it cannot stand to
phenomena in a genuine casual relation. It is, however, only fair to
point out that between the Unknowable and the evolutionary philosophy of
Spencer the only connection between them is that they are both in the
same work. In all probability it is an unconscious survival of
Spencer's earlier theism, which was active at the time the Synthetic
Philosophy was originally planned, but which became more and more
attenuated as Spencer grew older, and disappears entirely from the more
important volumes of the series. And but for the help it has been
supposed to give the belief in god, the "Unknowable" would only have
ranked as a harmless speculation of no value to anyone or to anything.
This is substantially admitted in a postscript to the 1899 edition of
"First Principles." At the conclusion of the section entitled "The
Unknowable," he says:--
The reader is not called on to judge respecting any of the
arguments or conclusions contained in the foregoing five chapters
and in the above paragraphs. The subjects on which we are about to
enter are independent of the subjects thus far discussed; and he
may reject any or all of that which has gone before while leaving
himself free to accept any or all of that which is now to come.
In other words, the "Unknowable" is a pure abstraction, having no
organic connection with the Synthetic Philosophy, or indeed with any
philosophy of value. Mr. Spencer's warning to his readers seems to quite
justify Mr. Bradley's rather caustic comment, "I do not wish to be
irreverent, but Mr. Spencer's attitude towards his Unknowable strikes me
as a pleasantry, the point of which lies in its unconsciousness. It
seems a proposal to take something for God simply and solely because we
do not know what the devil it can be." (Note to p. 128 of _Appearance
and Reality_.)
The curious thing is that Mr. Spencer really offers his readers two
theories of the nature of religion. One is contained in his "Principles
of Sociology," and so far as it traces all religious ideas to the
delusions and illusions of the primitive savage is substantially that
held by all modern anthropologists. The other is contained in his "First
Principles," and the two theories, like parallel lines, never meet.
Though born in the same brain they are quite distinct, and even
contradictory.
The substance of this second theory may be summarised as follows:--
1. The conditions of human thought compel the recognition of an
unknowable reality of which all phenomena are the expression.
2. The function of religion, from the earliest time, has been the
assertion of the existence of an unknowable reality, and to keep alive a
consciousness of the insoluble mystery surrounding it.
3. The function of science is to deal with the known and the knowable,
with all that is presented in experience, with the world of phenomena
exclusively.
4. Religion having for its subject matter the unknown and unknowable,
while science has for its subject matter the known and the knowable,
religion and science are not antagonistic, but complementary. Conflicts
only arise when one trespasses on the other's department, and a
recognition of the true line of demarcation effectually reconciles these
hitherto hostile forces.
A very obvious criticism of number one is in affirming a consciousness
of an "Unknowable," its quality of unknowableness is annihilated.
Existence can only be predicated of that which affects consciousness in
some manner; and so far as I have the slightest apprehension or
consciousness of anything existing, to that extent it ceases to be the
unknowable. Our knowledge of it may be imperfect or altogether
erroneous; we may feel it impossible that we should ever rightly
understand it; but so far as we think about it we are bound to
assimilate it to the best of our knowledge, even though it be only under
the category of force. In brief, "unknowableness" is not a property or
quality by which a thing may be apprehended; it is a name for complete
mental vacuity. It does not refer to the thing itself, it refers only to
us. It is a pure negation which Spencer, by sheer verbal play converts
into a quasi-positive conception. A consciousness of things unknown can
never be more than a consciousness of ignorance. There is only one way
to prove the existence of an unknowable, and that is to know nothing
about it--not even to know that there is something about which we know
nothing.
But, says Spencer, "to say that we cannot know the absolute is, by
implication, to affirm that there is an absolute." Certainly, if we take
an infirmity of language to be the equivalent of a necessity of
existence, not otherwise. When I say that we cannot know a four-sided
triangle I do not affirm by implication that a four-sided triangle
exists. I am asserting that the phrase, a four-sided triangle, involves
conceptions that cannot be brought together in consciousness, and so
dismiss it as being without meaning.
The truth is that every one of Spencer's attempts to prove the existence
of an unknowable turns out on examination to be no more than a proof of
the existence of an unknown, and this is not disputed at any time or by
anyone. Thus, after being told that a known cannot be thought of apart
from an unknown, we are informed:--
Positive knowledge does not, and never can, fill the whole region
of possible thought. At the utmost reach of discovery there arises,
and must ever arise, the question, What lies beyond? As it is
impossible to think of a limit to space so as to exclude the idea
of space lying outside that limit, so we cannot conceive of any
explanation profound enough to exclude the question, What is the
explanation of the explanation?
With this we can all agree, but it does not bring us any nearer an
"unknowable." It is perfectly true that thought can never be
comprehensive enough to exhaust the possibilities of existence, since it
is of the essence of thinking to limit and define. But it is a sheer
impossibility to think of what lies beyond the boundary of our knowledge
as unknowable, so far as we think of it at all, we must conceive it as
the unknown but possibly knowable. The unknown can only be thought of
thus because it is only as it is, by assumption, brought into line with
what is already known that it can be thought about at all. We are
compelled to think of what lies beyond the limits of our actual
knowledge in the same way as a traveller thinks of the fauna and flora
of an untravelled country. The new region may present many new features,
but until actual observation has taken place, these new features will
only be thought of as more or less unusual combinations of known animal
and vegetable life. They are substantially identical with what is
already known.
No stranger notion ever occurred to a great thinker than that religion
and science represent parallel and distinct lines of development, each
having its own sphere of operation. It is all the more remarkable when
we remember that with Spencer "religion" means all religion, past and
present, civilised and savage. And no one is more precise in pointing
out how all religious ideas find their beginnings in the conditions of
primitive life. And that being the case, one wonders whether we are to
picture primitive man as a profound metaphysical philosopher,
speculating on that which lies behind phenomena, contemplating an
"insoluble Mystery," and paying homage to an "Ultimate Reality"? Nothing
could be more absurd. Thinking begins in concrete images, not in
abstractions. We have only to note the development of intelligence in
children to realise this. And primitive man, not being a mystic nor a
metaphysician, bases his religion, not upon a reality that transcends
experience, but upon a presumed fact, and what is to him the best known
of all facts. And even with modern men it may safely be said that they
worship God for what they believe they know about him, not because they
believe him to be unknown and unknowable.
Spencer himself may be cited in support of this. In his "Principles of
Sociology," where the Unknowable plays no part whatever, he concludes
after an elaborate survey of the facts, that the imagination of
primitive man is reminiscent, not constructive; his power of thought is
feeble, he is without the quick curiosity of civilised man, there is an
absence of the conception of causation, he accepts things as they
appear, without any vivid desire to inquire into their real nature or
their connection with other events, and is without abstract ideas.
Clearly, here is not a very promising subject from which to derive even
the germ of the idea of a "Reality transcending experience." Spencer
also, and quite properly, insists that religious ideas are, under the
condition of their origin, national ideas; that we must accept the truth
that the laws of thought are everywhere the same, and that, given the
data as known to primitive man, the inference drawn by him is a
reasonable inference.
With this we agree, but it gives the death blow to the previous
statement as to the essential nature of religion, and its essential
differentiation from science. For given the constitution of the
primitive mind, its ignorance of causation and general lack of
knowledge, religion commences not in some search after an eternal
reality, but in a natural misunderstanding of observed facts. Primitive
religion is just a reasoned misunderstanding of phenomena that in later,
and better informed ages, are given an altogether different explanation.
That this is so, Spencer himself makes plain. For he shows, step by
step, how the experience of dreams, echoes, shadows, etc., combine to
produce the belief in unseen agencies differing in no essential from man
save that of possessing greater power and in being invisible. From
dreams and other subjective experiences he derives the idea of a double,
from death that of a ghost. Hence the ceremonies round the grave, and
the attention paid to the double of the dead man, which subsequently
developes into ancestor worship. The same train of thought gives a
double to objects other than human beings. Hence Animism, Totemism, and
their numerous subsidiary developments. Spencer insists, not only that
"all religions have a natural genesis," but also that "behind
supernatural beings of all orders" there has been in every case a human
personality--in other words, every god is developed from a ghost,
"ancestor worship is the root of every religion." To this he will admit
no exception, and referring to the Jewish religion, he asks
contemptuously:--
Must we recognise a single exception to the general truth thus far
verified everywhere? While among all races in all regions, from the
earliest times down to the present, the conceptions of deities have
been naturally evolved in the way shown, must we conclude that a
small clan of the Semitic race had given to it supernaturally a
conception which, though superficially like the rest, was in
substance absolutely unlike them.
And in about half a dozen pages he shows conclusively that the Biblical
God had exactly a similar origin to other gods.
Now if this account of religious origins means anything at all (and in
spite of differences between anthropologists it is in substance the
account of the origin of religion given by all) it means that instead of
religion and science moving along parallel lines, religion is simply
primitive science. Religion and science, as a very able theistic writer
says, "touch and oppose each other as rival methods of explaining, not
solely or mainly the life and nature of man, but the universe taken as a
whole, man forming a part of it." (W. H. Mallock, _Religion as a
Credible Doctrine_, p. ii.) Both are concerned with the same facts, and
their respective claims to consideration depend entirely on their
ability to explain the facts. For the reasons given by Spencer, man's
earliest interpretation of things is inevitably vitalistic. Ghosts--the
primitive protoplasm from which the gods are made--are assumed, and once
assumed dominate the savage intelligence. Fear combines with ignorance
to resist any conception that will wrest power from the hands of these
extra-natural agents, "Nature's haughty lords," rule all, and their
dynasty is the hardest of all to overthrow.
In spite, however, of all opposition the mechanical theory of things
develops, and in developing establishes a clear division between the two
conceptions of nature. But the line of demarcation is not that stated by
Spencer. Religion no more asserts the existence of an "Unknown Verity,"
than it asserts a fourth dimension of space. Nor is science concerned
with denying the existence of something of which we know nothing, and
can never know anything. The essential feature of religion is that it
offers a vitalistic explanation of the world as against the mechanical
explanation offered by science. And in this religion stands for the
earlier as against the later expression of human knowledge. It is the
eternal champion of savage thought against civilised intelligence. Its
whole significance lies in the persistence of animistic modes of
thinking under civilised conditions.
This conclusion, be it observed, is one that is quite borne out by
Spencer's own explanation of the nature of religion. Nor do we know of a
more remarkable instance of a front rank thinker propounding in one
part of his work a theory bearing no relation whatever to the remaining
portion, and in addition disproving his own theory at every point.
Spencer's reconciliation of science and religion, which in one form or
another is continually in evidence, is only one degree less remarkable
than the fact of its being accepted by so many religionists as
satisfactory. Following the line of his untenable theory that religion
and science pursue parallel lines, he points out that "the agent which
has effected the purification (of religion) has been science." That is,
the growth of the mechanical theory has driven back the vitalistic one.
This is purification only in the sense that a defaulting cashier
purifies the firm he robs. "As fact or experience proves that certain
familiar changes always happen in the same sequence, there begins to
fade from the mind the conception of a special personality to whose
variable will they were before ascribed." This process of annexation is,
says Spencer, science teaching religion its true function. As a matter
of fact, science has given religion no instruction, it has merely issued
prohibitions. It has warned religion that there are certain things it
must not meddle with, certain departments on which it must not encroach.
In this way religion has been forced farther and farther back, until it
is left with what? Not with anything that can be known, or is known; it
is left supreme in the kingdom of nowhere, ruling over an empire of
nothing at all. And so long as religion strives for a more tangible
possession so long must there be a conflict between science and
religion. But--"as the limits of possible cognition are established, the
causes of possible conflict will diminish. And a permanent peace will be
reached when science becomes fully convinced that its explanations are
proximate and relative; while religion becomes fully convinced that the
mystery it contemplates is ultimate and absolute." So, when science has
monopolised the entire field of human knowledge, actual and possible,
and when religion is satisfied that it knows nothing, and never can know
anything of the object of its worship, that it can offer nothing in the
shape of counsel or advice, but that its function is to sit in owl-like
solemnity, contemplating nothing, meanwhile offering man an eternal
conundrum that he must everlastingly give up, then, and not till then,
there will be peace between science and religion. And this is called a
reconciliation. Mr. Spencer finds two combatants engaged in deadly
conflict, he murders one and offers the other the corpse, with the hope
that now they will live peacefully together. The scientist is asked to
be content with all there is. The religious man is asked to find comfort
in the reflection that science must eventually monopolise the entire
field of knowledge, but that, in return, religion will be left free to
work in an unknowable region, to occupy itself with an unknowable
object, and to eternally cry "all is mystery" in an amended philosophic
version of the Athanasian Creed.
As a piece of humour this is superb. So also is the following: "Science
has been obliged to abandon the attempt to include within the boundaries
of knowledge that which cannot be known, and so has yielded up to
religion that which of right belonged to it." Capital! Science gives up
to religion that which cannot be known, and as it does not know what it
is, that cannot be known, it surrenders to religion absolute vacuity as
the proper sphere for its operations. And even this is accompanied with
the proviso that if it happens to have made a mistake, the ceded
territory will be at once reclaimed. Science would certainly be
vindictive if after having murdered religion it declined to live
peaceably with its corpse.
The distinction between science and religion is, in truth, neither
fundamental nor original. It is one that arises gradually in the history
of mental development. And, therefore, when a man such as Professor
Arthur Thomson describes religion as being concerned with the
recognition of the existence of an independent "spiritual reality," the
reply is that religion commences as just an explanation of nature in
terms of the then existing knowledge and culture. Religion is just a
crude form of science. The separation of the world into a religious and
a scientific sphere arises when the religious interpretation of natural
happenings gets discredited by advancing knowledge. If one takes such an
illustration as that of witchcraft the nature of the process is clear.
First we have the interpretation of certain forms of dementia and
delusion in terms of religion. Later we have the same facts interpreted
in terms of positive knowledge and the religious explanation is
rejected. And that, in a sentence is the whole history of religion, once
we have cleared away the verbiage with which the subject is surrounded.
The truth of what has just been said is often obscured by
unintelligible talk of growth in religion. It is claimed that we acquire
truer views of deity, and a process of growth is asserted analogous to
that which meets us in knowledge in general. Let us see what truth there
is in this.
In ordinary instances when we speak of growth we imply one of three
things. Either there is increase in size, or there is an enlargement of
function, or there is an increase in knowledge. So long as we keep to
these plain meanings of "growth" there can be no confusion. But none of
these meanings fit the case of religion. Certainly there has been no
increase in the size of religion--it does not, that is, cover a larger
area. On the contrary it is continually being warned off more and more
territory. It becomes more and more a negligible quantity. One need not
go back to primitive times to prove this, any country will supply
instances. The displacement of religious by other considerations is
observable on all sides.
There has certainly been no growth in the functions exercised by
religion. Its function as law-giver in the physical world is now
definitely abandoned, and all it asks is that science will let it alone.
In ethics and sociology it still maintains a precarious kind of an
existence, but it no longer claims supreme power. It is content to urge
its utility as a source of inspiration, to rank as one among a number of
other forces that are frankly secular in nature. Finally there has been
no growth in the shape of an extension of knowledge of the object of
religious belief. Of the nature of deity we know no more than did our
earliest ancestors. In earlier generations the nature of God, his aims
and intentions, were discussed with the same degree of confidence that
one now sees displayed in discussing schemes of sanitation. The modern
believer is now more anxious to impress upon the world how little he
knows about God, or how little it is possible for him to know. This is
not surprising except in the fact that it is called religious growth.
And if this be a sign of growth one wonders what would be considered
indications of decay. Historically religious life presents us, not with
a process of growth, but one of shrinkage. To reduce the gods from many
to few, and from a few to one is not growth. To limit the functions of
deity from those of a direct, particular, and universal character, to an
indirect, general form is not growth. To refine the idea of a personal
deity until it becomes that of a mere abstract force, is not growth. All
these are so many modifications of the religious idea under pressure of
advancing knowledge--so many attempts to state religion in such a way
that it can conflict with nothing we know to be true because it answers
to nothing of which we are certain.
The idea of God, the idea of religion, does not begin in a mystery or in
some abstract conception, but in an assumed knowledge of certain
concrete facts of experience. Man believes in the gods because of what
he thinks he knows about them, not because of what he does not know. The
talk of a mystery is the jargon of a priesthood which finds it
profitable to keep the lay mind at a distance. Increased emphasis is
placed on mystery because religious teachers are alive to the danger of
basing their beliefs upon matters that can be brought to the test of
experience. Mystery mongering is not the beginning of religion, but a
sign of its approaching demise. Mysticism, too, is no more than a cover
for a sanctuary that has been emptied of all worthy of respect. But if
religion is to really live, it must have some knowledge, no matter how
little or how imperfect, of the subject with which it professes to deal.
A religion that does not possess this, but is compelled to hand over the
whole of life to secular science, signs its own death warrant. It
commits suicide to save itself from execution. And as people realise
this they turn to clear-eyed science for guidance, leaving religion to
such representatives of primitive animism as still survive in a
civilised community.
CHAPTER XIII.
AGNOSTICISM.
The primary difficulty in dealing with Agnosticism is its elusive
character. It is a word of various and vague meanings, and many of those
who use it seem to have no great anxiety to fix its meaning with any
degree of precision. It is used now in a philosophic and now in a
religious sense, and its use in the one connection is justified by its
use in another. It has become, in the half century of its existence, as
indefinite as "religion," and about as enlightening. On the one side it
appears as a counsel of mental integrity with which everyone will agree,
and on the other, the religious side, it will vary from a form that is
identical, with that much-dreaded "Atheism," to a religious or
"reverent" Agnosticism that reminds one--mentally and morally--of
Methodism minus its creed. Indeed, to say that a man is an Agnostic
nowadays tells one no more than calling a man religious indicates to
which one of the world's sects he gives his adherence.
The only aspect of Agnosticism that we are here vitally concerned with
is its relation to religion, or specifically with the god-idea. But it
will be necessary to say a word, in passing, on at least one other
phase.
And first as to the origin of the term. The credit for the first use of
the term has always been given to the late Professor Huxley. Mr. R. H.
Hutton says that Huxley first suggested the word at a meeting of friends
in the house of Mr. James Knowles in 1869. Professor Huxley says that he
deliberately adopted it because, "When I reached intellectual maturity
and began to ask myself whether I was an atheist, a theist, or a
pantheist; a materialist, or an idealist, a Christian, or a freethinker,
I found that the more I learned and reflected the less ready was the
answer, until at last I came to the conclusion that I had neither art
nor part with any of these denominations except the last.... So I took
thought and invented what I conceived to be the appropriate title of
'agnostic.'" And he goes on to explain that the term was used as
antithetical to the "gnostic" of Church history who knew all about
things of which Huxley felt himself in ignorance. To all of which one
may say that Huxley appears to have given himself a lot of needless
trouble. In philosophy there was the term "Sceptic," and in relation to
religion the term "Atheist" was ready to hand. The latter term certainly
covered all that Huxley meant by Agnosticism as applied to the god-idea.
The plain, and perhaps brutal truth, is that Huxley was just
illustrating the fatal tendency of English public men to seek for a
label that will mark them off from an unfashionable heresy even more
clearly than it separates them from a crumbling orthodoxy. It is
certainly suggestive to find, in this connection, a French writer of
distinction, M. Emile Boutmy, pointing out that in France, Spencer,
Mill, and Huxley would all have been professed atheists. (_The English
People_, p. 44.) But France is France, and has always possessed the
courage to follow ideas to their logical conclusion.
When it comes to a definition of Agnosticism Professor Huxley's position
becomes still more difficult of understanding. Agnosticism, he says, is
a method the essence of which may be expressed in a single principle.
"Positively the principle may be expressed; in matters of the intellect
follow your reason so far as it will take you without regard to any
other consideration. And negatively; in matters of the intellect, do not
pretend that conclusions are certain which are not demonstrated or
demonstrable." So far as this goes we have here perfectly sound advice.
But why call it Agnosticism? It is no more than the perfectly sound
advice that we must be honest in our investigations, and make no claim
to certainty where the conditions of certainty do not exist. But we have
no more right to call this Agnosticism than we have to give the
multiplication table a sectarian or party label.
Nor do we believe for a moment that what Huxley had in view, or what
other agnostics have in view, is no more than a counsel of intellectual
perfection. What is really at issue here is one's attitude of mind in
relation to the belief in God. It is in pretending to know about God
that the theist finds himself at issue with the Agnostic, and it is to
mark himself off from the theist that the Agnostic gives himself a
special label. And the trouble of the Agnostic is that so soon as he
begins to justify his position, either he states the atheistic case or
he fails altogether to make his case good.
There is, perhaps, one other topic on which agnosticism may be
professed, and that is in connection with the question of what is known
as the problem of existence. We may profess our belief in the reality of
an external world, but deny that any _knowledge_ of it is possible. Here
we assert that what "substance," or "reality," or "thing in itself," is
we do not know and cannot know. But while many attempts are made under
the name of "the Absolute," etc., to identify this with "God," it is
really nothing of the kind. The belief or disbelief in an external
"reality" is a problem in philosophy, it has no genuine connection with
theology. To identify the two is a mere dialectical subterfuge. Mere
existence is an ultimate fact that must be accepted by all. It is only
on the question of its nature that controversy can arise.
Whatever may be claimed on behalf of Agnosticism, it certainly cannot be
claimed that it carries a clear and a definite meaning. As we have seen,
Professor Huxley used the word to indicate the fact that he was without
knowledge of certain things. But what things? To answer that we have to
go beyond the word itself--that is, we have to define the definition. As
it stands we may profess agnosticism in relation to anything from the
prospects of a general election within a given period to the question of
whether Mars is inhabited or not. If, then, it is said that what is
implied is that the Agnostic is without a knowledge of God, or without a
belief in God, the reply is that is exactly the position of the Atheist.
And there was no need whatever to coin a new word, if all that was
wanted was to express the atheistic position. Still less justifiable was
it to proceed to misinterpret Atheism in order to justify a departure
that need never have been made.
One cannot at this point forbear a word on Mr.--afterwards Sir--Leslie
Stephen's curious justification of his choice of the word Agnosticism.
After the enlightening remark that the word "Atheist" carries with it an
unpleasant connotation, he says:--
Dogmatic Atheism--the doctrine that there is no God, whatever may
be meant by God--is to say the least of it a rare phase of opinion.
The word Agnosticism, on the other hand, seems to imply a fairly
accurate appreciation of a form of creed already common and daily
spreading. The Agnostic is one who asserts--what no one
denies--that there are limits to human intelligence. (_An
Agnostic's Apology_; p. 1).
And he then goes on to assert that the subject matter of theology lies
beyond these limits.
Now putting on one side this perversion of the meaning of Atheism, was
it really worth while to coin a new word to affirm what no one denies?
Theists do not deny the limitations of knowledge, on the contrary, they
are always affirming it. Neither do all theists deny that "God" is
unknowable. That has been affirmed by them over and over again. What
they have claimed is that "God" is apprehended rather than known, and
they affirm his existence on much the same grounds that others assert
the real existence of an external world. Professor Flint's comments on
Stephen's performance are quite to the point, and the more noteworthy as
coming from a clergyman. He says:
The word Atheist is a thoroughly honest, unambiguous term. It means
one who does not believe in God, and it means neither more nor
less. It implies neither blame nor approval, neither desert of
punishment nor of reward. If a purely dogmatic Atheism be a rare
phase of opinion critical Atheism is a very common one, and there
is also a form of Atheism which is professedly sceptical or
agnostic, but often in reality dogmatic or gnostic. (_Agnosticism_;
p. 69).
The more carefully one examines the reasons given for the preference for
the word Agnosticism, the clearer it becomes that the real motive is not
the wish to obtain mental clarity, but the desire to avoid association
with a term that carries, religiously, disagreeable associations. The
care taken by so many who call themselves Agnostics to explain to the
religious world that they are not atheists, is almost enough to prove
this. Indeed, the position is well summed up by Mr. John M. Robertson:--
The best argument for the use of the name Agnostic is simply that
the word Atheist has been so long covered with all manner of
ignorant calumny that it is expedient to use a new term which
though in some respects faulty, has a fair start, and will in time
have a recognised meaning. The case, so stated, is reasonable; but
there is the _per contra_ that whatever the motive with which the
name is used, it is now tacked to half a dozen conflicting forms of
doctrine, varying loosely between Theism and Pantheism. The name of
Atheist escapes that drawback. Its unpopularity has saved it from
half-hearted and half-minded patronage.
So that, on the best showing, we are to take "Agnostic" on the professed
ground that it is more exact than "Atheism," but on the real ground that
it is less unpopular, waiting meanwhile for the time when it shall have
become more exact than it is by becoming accepted in the same sense as
the Atheism that has previously been rejected. Courage and
straightforwardness saves a lot of trouble.
Mr. Bailey Saunders (_Quest of Faith_, p. 7) calls agnosticism "a plea
on behalf of suspended judgment," and this is a favourite expression.
It gives one an air of impartiality, with the comforting reflection that
it will please the socially stronger side. But suspended judgment on
what? To hold one's judgment in suspense implies that we have at least a
workable comprehension of the subject in dispute, and that judgment is
suspended because the evidence produced is not adequate to command
decision. But is that the case here? Does the Agnostic claim that the
evidence produced by the theist is merely inadequate, or that it is
irrelevant? Surely he holds the latter position. And if that is the
case, then he does not suspend judgment, for the simple reason that
there is no case made out concerning which judgment is to be suspended.
There is simply no case before the court. For the Agnostic, no more than
the Atheist, can attach no intelligible meaning to "God." He must have
it defined to understand it, and when it is defined he rejects it
without ceremony. And it is quite obvious that when an Agnostic says, "I
know nothing about God," he means more than that; otherwise it would not
be worth the saying. He really means that no one else knows either. He
asserts that a knowledge of god is impossible to anyone, because it does
not present the possibility of being known. "God," standing alone is a
meaningless word, and how can one suspend judgment concerning the truth
of an unintelligible proposition?
For here are the plain facts of the situation. If we ask the Agnostic
whether he suspends judgment concerning the existence of the gods of any
savage peoples, the reply is in the negative. If we put the same
question concerning the god of the Bible, or of the Mohammedan, or of
any other of the world's theologies we receive the same answer. There is
nothing here to suspend judgment about, the characters and qualities of
the gods being such that there admits of no doubt as to their imaginary
character. Or if it is said that the Agnostic, while dismissing the gods
of the various theologies, savage and civilised, as being impossible,
suspends judgment as to the existence of a "supreme mind," or of a
"creative intelligence," the reply is that one cannot suspend judgment
as to the possible existence of an inconceivability. For "mind" must be
mind, as we know it. And it is a downright absurdity to speak of the
possible existence of a "mind" while divesting it of all the qualities
that characterise mind as we know it. Really between the statement that
A. does not exist, and the affirmation that A. does exist, but differs
in every conceivable particular from all known A.'s there is no
difference whatever. We are denying its existence in the very act of
affirming it.
Further, we quite agree with Mr. F. C. S. Schiller (_Riddles of the
Sphinx_, pp. 17-19) that in practice such suspense of judgment is
impossible. We suspend our judgment as to whether we shall die to-morrow
or at some indefinite future date, and for that reason we make our
arrangements in view of either contingency. We suspend judgment as to
the honesty of an employee, and our attitude towards him is governed by
that fact. And so with the question of a god. In one way or another we
are bound to indicate our judgment on the subject. We must act either as
though we believe in the possibility or in the impossibility of "divine"
interference. If the mental hesitancy of the respectable Agnostic were
accompanied by a corresponding timidity in action life would be
impossible.
A less common plea on behalf of Agnosticism, but one on which a word
must be said, is that the agnostic attitude is more "reverential" than
that of atheism. But why in the name of all that is reasonable should
one profess reverence towards something of which one knows nothing?
Reverence, to be intelligible, must be directed towards an intelligent
object, and we must have grounds for believing it to be worthy of
reverence. Reverence towards our fellow creatures is a reasonable enough
sentiment, but what is there reasonable in an expression of reverence
towards something that can only be thought of--and even this is
unwarranted--as a force? The truth is that this expression of reverence
is no more than the flickering survival of religion. Numbers have
reached the stage at which they can perceive the unreasonable nature of
religious beliefs, but they have not yet managed to achieve liberation
from the traditional emotional attitude towards these beliefs. In other
words, the development of the emotional and the intellectual sides of
their nature have been unequal, and for these the "Unknowable" has
simply served as a peg on which to hang religious feelings that have
been robbed of all intellectual support. The semi-religious Agnostic
thus represents a transition form, interesting enough to all who observe
how curiously decaying types strive to perpetuate themselves, but which
is bound to disappear in the process of intellectual evolution.
Finally, one would like from the Agnostic some authoritative
announcement as to his position in relation to what is known concerning
the origin of the god-idea. So far as professed theists are concerned
one expects this to be ignored. On the part of non-theists one expects a
more logical attitude. In this case it is common ground with the Atheist
and the Agnostic that the idea of god owes its beginnings to the
ignorance of primitive man. We know the facts on which this idea was
based, and we know that all these are now differently explained. The
belief that there is a god governing nature is just one of those
blunders made by primitive man, and is on all fours with the numerous
other blunders he makes concerning himself and the world around him.
Knowing this, and accepting this, believing that "god" springs from the
same set of conditions that gave rise to fairies and spirits of various
kinds, one would like to know on what ground the Agnostic definitely
rejects the grounds on which the idea of god is based, while professing
a state of suspended judgment about the existence of the object created
by this primitive blunder. It is certainly surprising to find those who
accept the natural origin of the god-idea, when they come to deal with
current religion talk as though it were merely a question of the
inconclusiveness of religious arguments. It is nothing of the kind. The
final reply to the arguments set forth on behalf of Theism is, not that
they are inconclusive, but that they are absolutely irrelevant to the
question at issue. We cannot remain undecided because there is nothing
to remain undecided about. We know that the idea of god is pure myth,
and was never anything but myth. A belief that began in error, and which
has no other basis than error, cannot by any possible argument be
converted into a truth. The old question was, "Can man by searching find
out God?" The modern answer is an emphatic affirmative. Substantially we
have by searching found out God. We know the origin and history of one
of the greatest delusions that ever possessed the human mind. God has
been found out. Analytically and synthetically we understand the
god-idea as previous generations could not understand it. It has been
explained; and the logical consequence of the explanation is--Atheism.
Ultimately, then, we come to this: (1) The Agnosticism that concerns
itself with a confession of ignorance concerning the nature of
"existence," has no necessary connection with religion, and is only made
to have such by a confusion of two distinct things. (2) The plea of a
suspended judgment is invalid, since there is nothing about which one
can suspend a decision. (3) The Agnosticism that professes a
semi-religious feeling of reverence towards the "Unknowable" is
fundamentally upon all fours with the religious feelings of the ordinary
believer. Worshipping the Unknowable is more ridiculous than worshipping
Huxley's "wilderness of apes." The apes _might_ take some intelligent
interest in the antics of their devotees; but to print our hypostatised
ignorance in capital letters and then profess a feeling of veneration
for it is as ridiculous a proceeding as the world has seen. After all,
an absurdity is never quite so grotesque as when it is tricked out in
scientific phrases and paraded as the outcome of profound philosophic
thinking. (4) The only Agnosticism that seems capable of justifying
itself is an Agnosticism that is indistinguishable from Atheism. To
again cite Professor Flint, Atheist "means one who does not believe in
God, and it means neither more nor less." The Agnostic is also one who
is without belief in a god, every argument he uses to justify his
position is and has been used as a justification of Atheism. Atheist is
really "a thoroughly honest, unambiguous term," it admits of no
paltering and of no evasion, and the need of the world, now as ever, is
for clear-cut issues and unambiguous speech.
CHAPTER XIV.
ATHEISM AND MORALS.
Looking at the world as it is one cannot forbear a mild wonder at the
fears expressed at the probable consequences to morals of a general
acceptance of Atheism. One would have thought that the world would not
run a very great danger of becoming worse on that account, and that,
seeing the way in which all forms of rascality have flourished, and
still maintain themselves, without in the least disturbing people's
religious convictions, one might even feel inclined to risk a change in
the hopes of improvement. Mainly, indeed, one might say that those who
are affected by religious belief are such as can very well do without
it, while those who stand in urgent need of moral improvement seldom
show that their religious belief has any very beneficial effect on their
conduct.
Yet nothing is more common than to find the theist, when driven off all
other grounds of defence, protesting against a deliberate propaganda of
Atheism on the ground of its probable harmful consequences to morals.
This, not because those who have publicly professed Atheism are open to
the charge of loose living, but on account of those who at present
believe in religion, and whose loss of belief would possibly upset their
moral equilibrium. It is a curious position for a theist to take up,
since it implies that while the Atheist as we know him shows no
deterioration of character in consequence of his loss of belief, we
cannot be so certain of the present believers in deity. They are formed
of poorer clay, and once convinced that there is no God with whom they
have to reckon, there is no telling what will happen. So we are urged to
let well alone, and leave believers with their illusions lest their loss
should present us with a very unpleasant reality.
This fear is expressed in various ways, but in one way or another it is
tolerably common. The following which reached me from a well known man
of letters probably puts the argument as fairly and as temperately as it
can be put, and therefore in dealing with that I cannot be accused of
taking the theist at an unfair advantage. His conclusions are summarised
in the following paragraphs. (The summary is the author's, not mine.)
(1) The decentish code of morals which prevails in this twentieth
century is the outcome of all the human ages. From the very first,
everywhere and all the time, it has, and continues to be, inextricably
intertwined and influenced by Theistic beliefs, even when and where such
beliefs have been the crudest and most debased form of polytheism.
(2) The ethical atmosphere in which we now live, after having had such
an origin and history, remains strongly and frankly pervaded by religion
of a Theistic type. Atheist, Agnostic, and Theist alike have to live in
this atmosphere, and consciously or unconsciously, are subject to its
influence.
(3) Even if we could set up a wholly secular code of morals, derived
entirely from the exigencies of, tribal, communal, and national life, I
take it that such a code would be inadequate to form the type of
individual character we most admire, and which acts under a sense of
"ought" rather than of "must." The latter is often the mere demand of
gregarious or individual comfort and convenience; the former may be
quite opposed to the inclinations of the individual, and yet bring into
play irksome but ennobling springs of action which a purely secular code
cannot touch.
Now these statements put the case for the theist as moderately and as
well as it can be put, and I think that they are worthy of a little
careful examination. It may be observed that there is no insinuation
that Atheists are actually worse than other people, only the fear that
in the absence of some form of theism the higher ethical motive cannot
be roused, and that therefore character will suffer. Well, we are none
of us free from the contagion of our environment, and the most powerful
influences are often enough those that it would be difficult to specify
in any given instance. It is not only that the influence of the higher
members of society affect the lower. The lower is not without its
influence on the higher. But the question here is not really whether we
are all exposed to the general influence of the group to which we
belong, that, I think, is undeniable, the real question at issue is
whether the determining influence on conduct is theistic or not. And I
think it will be found that while the one thing is asserted it is the
other that is proven.
So far as the first proposition is concerned it may be taken for granted
that our present state is the product of all past evolution, and that in
the course of that evolution theistic beliefs have been closely--not
inextricably--connected with morals. But this is not alone true of
morality, it is true of every branch of human thought and of every
aspect of human life. Art, science, literature, have all been closely
connected with religious beliefs. Necessarily so. Early human history is
spent under the shadow of superstition, and its dominating influence
affects the form of every aspect of life. But as the course of
development has been to separate the essential from the non-essential
and to place most of each department of life on a self-supporting basis,
it would not seem an unreasonable conclusion that ethics will follow the
same lines. In fact, it is following the same lines. There are few
educated people nowadays who would claim that morality cannot exist
apart from religion, they are content to say, as my correspondent does,
that in the absence of religion belief the higher aspects of morality
will suffer.
Our morality, we are told, is the outcome of all the human ages. I go
further than that and assert that it is the outcome of all the human and
of all the animal ages. There is no break in nature, and to the
evolutionist the development of the human from the animal is plain. And
it should scarcely need pointing out nowadays that nearly every one of
the fundamental qualities of man can be seen in germ in the animal
world. I only emphasise the point here because it is so often forgotten
that morality is fundamentally the expression of those conditions under
which associated life is found possible and profitable, and that so far
as any quality is declared to be moral its justification and meaning
must be found in that direction. The question of incentive we will come
to later; for the moment it is enough to insist upon the fact that
morality is fashioned, in its fundamentals, with reference to facts, not
with reference to speculative beliefs. Beliefs may influence morality
for awhile, but the persistent operation of social selection secures a
general conformity between conduct and the conditions upon which life
depends. That is the fundamental fact to be remembered in all
discussions of morality, although it is the fact that is most often
ignored. Ultimately life determines moral teaching, it is not moral
teaching that determines life.
Life not alone determines morality, but it determines religion as well.
What else is the meaning of all those discarded forms of religious
belief, those bodies of dead gods, that meet the student of history as
the remains of extinct animals meet the geologist in his unravelment of
the story of the earth's vicissitudes? They are the result of a lack of
adaptation to new conditions to which they could not accommodate
themselves. Once the gods lorded it over man as the gigantic dinosaur
lorded it in his day over lesser animals. And in the one case, as in the
other, a change in the environment brought about their doom. Natural
selection determines the survival of religions as of animal forms, and a
religion to survive must become increasingly utilitarian in character,
certainly there is a point beyond which the opposite tendency cannot be
carried.
Assume, for example, that a religion existed of a grossly anti-social
character, one that teaches doctrines that are subversive of the general
social well-being. One of two things must result. If the religion is
strong enough to enforce its teaching the society it dominates will
disappear, and the religion will die out with it. If, on the other hand,
it cannot enforce its teaching, or can get it accepted only in a
modified form, then either the religion disappears in its original form,
or it is modified to get itself established. To live, religion must
establish some sort of harmony between its teachings and the conditions
of life. It may retard the development of life, but it must not retard
to the point of destruction. This is all that is really involved in what
is called the purification of religious teaching. In reality there is no
such thing. The purification is a modification, and it is modified in
order that it may become acceptable to the society in which it is
existing. The ascetic epidemic, the various disgusting sects that have
sprung into existence from time to time during the course of Christian
history, have all died out from this cause. As with the individual, so
with society, the forces of which we are conscious generally move upon
the surface. Of the underlying ones we are mostly unaware.
The truth is, then, that behind all our consciously elaborated theories
of life there are operative the unconscious or sub-conscious forces of
evolution. There is, of course, a certain area of conduct in which
speculative opinions play their part, and where actions may be
arbitrarily classed as good or bad. But this area is, of necessity,
limited, and for the reasons that have been given above. Properly
understood morality is not something very abstract, but something that
is very concrete. The underlying reason for morality is always the same,
and we are compelled to hark back to it for justification. And no
rejection of religion can alter the basis upon which morality rests.
The proposition that Atheist, Agnostic, and Theist breathe the same
atmosphere and are affected by the same influences is, therefore, one
that is two-edged. If our intellectual atmosphere is saturated with
religious influences, it is also saturated with social influences of a
much more fundamental character, and which have been perpetually
correcting religious extravagances. And it is at least open to the
Atheist to retort that we have to thank this circumstance that religious
beliefs have not been more injurious than has been actually the case.
If, for example, the ascetic epidemic of the early Christian centuries
had increased in force and had continued operative, European society
would have disappeared. That this was not the case was due to the
strength of the sexual and social instincts, against which religion was
unable to maintain its hold. In the change of opinion over the better
way to spend Sunday, or in the decay of the doctrine of eternal
damnation, we have the same point illustrated. Right through history it
has been the social instincts that have acted as a corrective to
religious extravagance. And it is worth noting that with the exception
of a little gain from the practice of casuistry, religions have
contributed nothing towards the building up of a science of ethics. On
the contrary it has been a very potent cause of confusion and
obstruction. Fictitious vices and virtues have been created and the real
moral problem lost sight of. It gave the world the morality of the
prison cell, instead of the tonic of the rational life. And it was
indeed fortunate for the race that conduct was not ultimately dependent
upon a mass of teachings that had their origin in the brains of savages,
and were brought to maturity during the darkest period of European
civilisation.
In dealing with the two first propositions I have, by implication,
answered the third--namely, that a wholly secular authentic code of
morals would be inadequate to form the highest type of character; it
might supply a "must," but it could not supply an "ought."
The first and obvious reply to an objection of this kind is that our
working code of morals is secular already. In life, if we observe
without prejudice, it is not difficult to see that one's neighbours,
friends, social class, etc., have far more force in shaping conduct than
speculative theories. In its widest sense natural selection determines
what actions shall be declared to be moral. Of this we may take the
universal feeling against homicide. This is but an expression of the
truth that social life would be impossible were it otherwise. And when
we pass from the general to the special we meet with much the same
principle operating in society. The average burglar pursues his calling
with no special sense of its wrongness, although he may have a keen
sense of its dangers. But while burgling with a fairly easy conscience,
he does flinch at breaking the code of honour set up by his
fellow-burglars. And at the other extreme we have the "gentleman" with
his code of honour which forbids him not to pay a gambling debt, but
takes no count of keeping a poor tradesman out of his money. In each of
these cases the determining factor is not theory but fact, and the fact
here is association with our fellow countrymen or with a special social
class. Morality, in short, is social or nothing. Moral laws are
meaningless apart from social life. Every moral command implies the
existence of a social medium, and it is no more than a study in history
to see how this social medium has been continuously shaping and
reshaping human nature. The determination here is not conscious, but it
is real, however much disguised it may be by various forms or theories.
And when we realise this, it is no more than a truism to say that a
change in religious belief can no more destroy morality than a change in
government can destroy society.
But in saying that the essence of morality is unreasoning I do not mean
that it is unreasonable. All I mean is that it can receive a reasonable
justification, and that no matter how lofty the development it has its
basis in the fundamental conditions of associated animal and human life.
We may surround the subject with a vague and attractive idealistic
verbalism, but we come back to this as a starting point. The love of
family, with all its attendant values, rests upon the fact of crude
sexual desire, refined, of course, during the passing of many
generations, but dependent upon it all the same. Remove the sexual
desire and the family feelings are inexplicable. Thus, the _reason_ for
the existence of the sexual instinct is race preservation, but the end
has been achieved in a quite unreasoning manner. In the animal world at
large there is certainly no conscious desire for the production of
offspring, nor is there with the mass of human beings. There is the
desire to gratify an impulse, and very little more. And for the
strengthening of an instinct there need not be, nor is there, any
consciousness of its social value. All that is necessary is that it
shall be useful. Natural selection attends to the rest.
This will, I think, supply an answer to the contention that secular
ethics can supply a "must," but not an "ought"; that is, it may show
that an individual should act in accordance with his inclinations, but
in cases where these clash with the social well being, it can supply no
reason why the former should give way to the latter.
The argument rests upon a dual confusion. First, the moral "ought" is no
more than an organised and conscious form of "must," and not something
distinct from it. One may test the matter by taking a case. A man says,
I ought so to work as to promote the general welfare of society. If we
seek to find the source of this feeling we come ultimately upon the
feeling of tribal solidarity in virtue of which certain tribes survive
in the struggle for existence. It is gregariousness struggling into
consciousness. The moral "ought" is an idealised form of the primitive
tribal "must." And the "must" of primitive life is encouraged and
developed because it is one of the conditions of survival.
The second point of confusion is based upon a supposed opposition
between individual inclinations and an ideal conception of duty. That
the two are often, as a matter of fact, in conflict, must be admitted.
And the cause is that while our inclinations represent a heritage from
the past, our ideals are a projection into the future. But the
contention is based upon their supposed permanent hostility, and that
need not be taken for granted. For the whole course of social evolution
tends to bring about a substantial identification of personal and social
well-being. More and more as the race develops it is being recognised
that there is no real individual life apart from social life, of which
it is the creation and the expression. Such antagonism as exists is the
inevitable result of a conflict between an organism and its adaptation
to a changing environment. And from this point of view the whole growth
of man is in the nature of an expansion of his sympathies and sense of
duty over an ever-widening area. The primitive egoism of the tribal
individual is extended to the nation, that of the nation to the empire,
and thence to the whole of humanity. There is no destruction or denial
of self in such cases, it is a development of the sense of self over an
enlarging area.
Finally, if a secular code of morals will not suffice, it is sheer
rhetoric to say that religion is powerful enough to operate where
naturalism fails. On the contrary, in a civilised community religious
appeals tend to become secular appeals in disguise. On the admission of
Christian advocates the two most powerful appeals that can be made are
on the one hand, in the name of the fatherhood of god, and on the other,
the conception of the Mother and the Child. And what are these but
appeals to the secular and social feelings of man in the name of
religion? It may be granted that Atheism in its appeals to mankind often
fails, but in this respect is it any worse off than religion? Why, one
of the standing complaints of religious preachers in all ages is that
their message falls so frequently on deaf ears. There is no more
certainty that the religious appeal will meet with success, than there
is that any other appeal will be successful. And there is the
unquestionable fact that morality has become stronger as the power of
religion has weakened. The higher qualities have asserted themselves
during a period of religious disintegration, and the student of morals
sees in this a promise of a further development in the future.
And to all prophecies as to the effects of Atheism on the morality of
the future there is the apt reply that they are prophecies and nothing
else. And in this respect it is dangerous for the Christian theist to
appeal to history. For while the consequences of Atheism can be no more
than a forecast, which may or may not be justified, the record of
Christianity is before the world. And we know that the period during
which the influence of Christian theism was strongest, was the period
when the intellectual life of civilised man was at its lowest, morality
at its weakest, and the general outlook most hopeless. Religious control
gave us heresy hunts, and Jew hunts, burnings for witchcraft, and magic
in the place of medicine. It gave us the Inquisition and the _auto da
fé_, the fires of Smithfield and the night of St. Bartholomew. It gave
us the war of sects and it helped powerfully to establish the sect of
war. It gave us life without happiness, and death cloaked with terror.
The Christian record is before us, and it is such that every Church
blames the others for its existence. Quite as certainly we cannot point
to a society that has been dominated by Freethinking ideas, but we can
point to their existence in all ages, and can show that all progress is
due to their presence. We can show that progressive ideas have
originated with the least, and have been opposed by the most religious
sections of society. What religion has done for the world we know; what
freethought will do we can only guess. But we are confident that as
honesty is possible without the falsity of religion, as duty may be done
with no other incentive than its visible consequences on the people
around us, so life may be lived in honour and closed in peace with no
other inspiration than comes from the contemplation of the human stream
from which we emerge and into which we finally go.
CHAPTER XV.
ATHEISM INEVITABLE.
Between Theism and Atheism the logical mind may halt, but it cannot rest
for long, and in the end the logic of fact works its way. Compromise,
while it may delay the end without preventing its inevitability, is
quite out of place in matters of the intellect. In the world of practice
compromise is often unavoidable, but in that of ideas the sole concern
should be for truth. When Whately said that the man who commenced by
loving Christianity more than truth would continue by loving his own
sect more than any other, and end by loving himself more than all, he
placed his finger on the great moral danger of compromise where opinion
is concerned. It begins, ostensibly, by considering the respect due to
an opponent's case, it continues by sacrificing the respect that is due
one's own, and it ends by giving a new sense of value to the very
opinion it aims at destroying. "No quarter" is the only sound rule in
intellectual warfare, where to take prisoners is only one degree less
dishonouring than to be taken captive oneself. And the value of an
opinion is never wholly in the opinion itself. No small part of its
worth is derived from the way in which it is held, and the importance
which is placed upon it.
When Professor Tylor said that the deepest of all divisions in the
history of human thought was that which divided Animism from
Materialism, he was saying what I have been endeavouring to say, in
another manner, in the foregoing pages. Atheism and supernaturalism are
fundamental divisions in human thought, and divisions that connote an
irreconcilable antagonism. The terms not only mark a division, they are
the badges of a movement, the indication of a pilgrimage. Dr. Tylor's
own work and the work of his fellow labourers tell the story in detail,
and although no one is in a position to write "finis" to it, there is no
doubt as to what its end will be. And the manner of the pilgrimage is
quite plain. The starting point is the creation by the befogged
ignorance of primitive man of that welter of ghosts and gods which make
so much of early existence a veritable nightmare. The journey commences
in a world in which the "supernatural" is omnipresent, in which man's
chief endeavours is given to win the good will or avert the anger of the
ghosts and gods to whom he has himself given being. And the end, the
last stage of the pilgrimage, is a world in which mechanical operations
take the place of disembodied intelligences, or of supernatural powers.
From a world in which the gods are everything and do everything to a
world in which the gods are nothing and do nothing. The story of that
transition is the record of one of the greatest revolutions that has
happened in the history of mankind. Its real greatness and far-reaching
significance is not always adequately recognised, even by those who
welcome it gladly. Indeed, the narrower interests that suffer from this
revolution are more keenly alive to its importance than are those who
benefit from its consummation. That is, perhaps, what one ought to
expect from the known course of human history. For history would not be
what it is, nor would reforms be so difficult of accomplishment were it
not possible to persuade the slave that his servitude guards him from
the very evils it perpetuates.
Incidentally the nature of that revolution has been indicated in the
preceding pages. But a more connected view will form a fitting close to
this work. Nothing more than the barest of outlines can be attempted,
but such as it is it may serve to illustrate the truth that Atheism is
more than the speculative philosophy of a few, that it is in sober truth
the logical outcome of mental growth. So far as any phase of human life
can be called inevitable Atheism may lay claim to being inescapable. All
mental growth can be seen leading to it, just as we can see one stage of
social development giving a logical starting point for another stage,
and which could have been foretold had our knowledge of all the forces
in operation been precise enough. Atheism is, so to speak, implicit in
the growth of knowledge; its complete expression is the consummation of
a process that began with the first questionings of religion. And the
completion of the process means the death of supernaturalism in all its
forms.
Religion, it has already been said, is something that is acquired, and
although that sounds little better than a commonplace, yet reflection
proves it to contain an important truth. For it is in the nature of the
acquisition that its significance lies. Whatever be the earliest stages
of religion it is at all events clear that its earliest form is in the
nature of a hypothesis, even though only of the semi-conscious kind that
exists when man is brought into touch with some new and overpowering
experience. Religious ideas are put forth in explanation of something.
But all explanation whether by savage or civilised man, must be in terms
of existing knowledge. No other method is possible. We must explain the
unknown in terms of the known, and our explanation will be the more
elaborate and the nearer the truth as our knowledge of the nature of the
forces are the more exact and extensive. A knowledge of the laws of
condensation and evaporation enables a modern to give an explanation of
the meaning of a shower of rain that is simply impossible to man in an
earlier stage of culture. In every case the facts are the same, and in
each case the explanation given depends upon the knowledge acquired.
Now one radical distinction between an early and a modern explanation of
the world is that whereas the former moves from within outward, the
latter moves from without inward. Uncivilised man explains the world by
himself; civilised man explains himself by the world. The savage
describes the world in terms of his own feelings and passions, the
scientist regards human qualities as resulting from the relation which
man holds to the forces around him. The process, while presenting a
radical difference in form, is yet fundamentally one in essence.
Ignorant of all that we connote by such an expression as "natural
forces," whatever explanation is offered by the savage is necessarily in
terms of the only force with which he is acquainted. But it happens that
the only forces which he then fancies he understands are those
represented by his own organisation. What he is conscious of doing is
prompted by his own will and intelligence. He hurts when he is angry, he
rewards when he is pleased, and he makes the same assumption regarding
the things around him. So far as he explains nature he vitalises it.
Vital force becomes the symbol of all force. And this result expresses a
mental law that is universally operative. The civilised mind differs
from the savage mind not because the brain functions differently in the
two cases, but solely in consequence of the wider and truer knowledge of
the causes of natural phenomena which civilised man possesses. We arrive
at different conclusions because we start from different premises.
Inevitably, therefore, the first attempt of man to deal with nature
takes the form of assuming the operation of a number of personal
intelligences. Natural objects are alive, and everything that happens to
man, from the cradle to the grave, is thought of as being either alive
or controlled by living beings. The world is filled with a crowd of
ghostly beings exercising more or less discordant functions. Against
this riot of gods the conception of natural law developes but slowly.
Quite apart from the natural inertia of the human mind, the fact of
questioning the power of these assumed beings involves to the primitive
mind an element of grave danger. All sorts of things may happen if the
gods are offended, and in self-defence the tribe feels bound to suppress
the critic of religion and of religious ideas. But once the step is
taken, the area over which the gods rule is to that extent restricted,
and with that step Atheism may be said to be born.
What Lange said in the opening sentences of his classic "History of
Materialism," that "Materialism is as old as philosophy, but not older,"
may be said with equal truth of Atheism. That, too, is as old as
philosophy, since it begins with man's attempts to break away from that
primitive interpretation of nature which sees in all phenomena the
action of personal intelligences. It is of no importance in which branch
of knowledge the departure was made, whichever department one takes the
process can be seen at work. Astronomy appears to have been the branch
of knowledge in which the powers of the gods were earliest restricted,
although it was not until the discoveries of Copernicus, Galileo,
Newton, and Laplace were given to the world that "God" vanished
altogether from that region. Geology follows with the teaching that
chemical, thermal, and other known forces leave nothing for the gods to
accomplish. Biology and sociology, dealing with more complex forces, are
much later in the field, but they tread the same path. They provide a
refuge for "God" for awhile, but it is evident that their complete
dispossession is no more than a question of time. And even though the
very complex character of the forces working in these latter departments
should prevent us ever acquiring the same degree of prevision that
exists in other classes, no difference will be made to the general
result. The principle will be fairly established and our ignorance of
details will no longer be made the ground for assertions which, if made
at all, should rest upon the most exact knowledge. "God" will be left
with nothing to do, and man will not for ever go on worshipping a God
whose sole recommendation is that he exists, nor will the common sense
of civilised people hold on to a hypothesis when there is nothing left
for that hypothesis to explain.
The single and outstanding characteristic of the conception of god at
all times and under all conditions is that it is the equivalent of
ignorance. In primitive times it is ignorance of the character of
natural forces that leads to the assumption of the existence of gods,
and in this respect the god-idea has remained true to itself throughout.
Even to-day whenever the principle of "God" is invoked a very slight
examination is enough to show that the only reason for this being done
is our ignorance of the subject before us. Why does anyone assume that
we must believe in God in order to explain the beginnings of life? Why
is "God" assumed to be responsible for the order of nature? Why must we
assume "God" to explain mind? The answer to these and to all similar
questions is that we do not know, in the sense that we know the cause of
planetary motions, how these things came to be. It is not what we know
about them that leads to the assumption of god, but what we do not know.
And the converse of that is that so soon as knowledge replaces ignorance
"God" will be dispensed with. It is never a case of believing in God
because of the actual knowledge we possess, but always the appeal to
weakness and ignorance. From this point of view the colloquial "God only
knows!" expresses the appeal to ignorance even more clearly than the
elaborate argument of the sophisticated apologist.
This aspect of the matter was well put by Spinoza. Believers in the
argument from design, he says, have a method of argument that is a
reduction, not to the impossible, but to ignorance. Thus,
If a stone falls from a roof on to someone's head and kills him,
they will demonstrate by their new method that the stone fell to
kill the man; for if it had not by God's will fallen with that
object, how could so many circumstances (and there are often many
concurrent circumstances) have all happened together by chance.
Perhaps you will answer that the event is due to the facts that the
wind was blowing, and the man was walking that way. "But why," they
will insist, "was the wind blowing, and why was the wind at that
very time blowing that way?" If you again answer, that the wind had
then sprung up because the sea had begun to be agitated the day
before, the weather having been previously calm, and that the man
had been invited by a friend, they will again insist: "But why was
the sea agitated, and why was the man invited at that time?" So
they will pursue their question from cause to cause, till at last
you take refuge in the will of God--in other words, the sanctuary
of ignorance. (Appendix to _Ethics_; pt. 1)
The sanctuary of ignorance "God" has always been, and the sanctuary of
ignorance it will remain to the end. It has no other function in life. A
consciousness of this is shown by the upholders of Theism in the
eagerness with which they welcome every supposed demonstration of the
impotence of science, and of the resistance everywhere offered to the
development of scientific advance.
So far, then, as the progress of life makes for the growth of knowledge,
so far may we safely claim that the development of thought makes for
Atheism, as we have just said, and to do the religious world justice it
has always been quick to realise this, and every great scientific
generalisation--as well as many smaller ones, has been resisted on the
ground that they were atheistic in character and tended to take the
control of the world out of God's hands. Present-day theists are apt to
condemn this attitude of their predecessors, but it can hardly be denied
that the logic lies with the earlier representatives. A God who does
nothing might, for all practical purposes, as well be non-existent. And
a God who is merely in the background of things, who may be responsible
for their origin, but having originated them surrenders all control over
their operations, is hardly more serviceable. The modern theist saves
his God only by leaving him a negligible quantity in a universe he is
supposed to sustain and govern.
And it cannot be too often emphasised that the whole basis of exact or
positive science is atheistic--that is, it is compelled to ignore even
the possibility of the existence of God. Every scientific generalisation
rests upon the constancy of natural forces. On no other basis is it
possible to give a scientific interpretation to what has gone before or
to anticipate what is to happen in the future. Every scientific
calculation assumes that in the world with which it deals causation is
invariable and universal. But if we are to assume the operations of a
"God" at any time or point every scientific calculation would have to be
accompanied with the D.V. of a prayer meeting. To argue from the past to
the future would be futile. God might have operated then, no one could
be certain he will operate now. Or he might have operated in the far
past, but he might not in the future. In either case the assumption of a
God would be fatal to exact scientific calculations. Thus in sheer self
defence, in order to preserve its character as science, science is
compelled to discard even the possibility of the existence of a
controlling intelligence. As one eminent theistic advocate admits,
"Science has no need, and indeed, can make no use, in any particular
instance of the theistic hypothesis."[6] It is only when supernaturalism
is partly excluded from human thought that science can be said to really
commence its existence; and in proportion as our conception of the
universe becomes that of an aggregate of non-conscious forces--or of a
single force with many forms producing given results under given
conditions, only then does our view of the universe reach completion.
A study of the nature and tendency of human development does, therefore,
provide a very strong presumption in favour of atheism. All growth here
is in favour of atheism and away from theism. In the beginning we have
the gods everywhere and dominating everything. They do everything and
control everything. "God" is the one universal primitive hypothesis. And
all subsequent development is to its discrediting. There is no growth in
the idea of god, there is only an attenuation. The gods grow fewer as
the race approaches maturity. Their activities cease as man becomes
aware of the character of the forces around him. And it may be further
noted that this decline of the belief in deity is brought about as much
by sheer pressure of experience as by pure reason. The majority of
people do not reason themselves out of the belief in god, they outgrow
it. People cease to believe in the gods because they experience no
compulsion to believe in them. The logic of fact is ultimately more
powerful than the logic of theory, and as environmental forces brought
the gods into existence, so environmental forces carry them out again.
Now Atheism does but make explicit in words what has long been implicit
in practice. It takes the god-idea, examines it, and explains it out of
existence. It admits the reality of gods as it admits the reality of
ghosts and fairies and witches. They are subjective, not objective,
realities. Atheism takes the god-idea, explains its origin, describes
its subsequent development, and in so doing indicates its ultimate fate.
In this sense Atheism is, as I have said, no more than the final stage
of a long historical process. The theistic phase of thought is an
inevitable one in human evolution, but it is no more a permanent one
than is the belief in hobgoblins. One might here paraphrase Bacon and
say, "A little philosophy inclineth a man to belief in the gods, but
depth in philosophy leads to their rejection as a false and useless
hypothesis." It is true that thinking brought the gods into the world;
it is also true that adequate thinking carries them out again.
The cardinal truth is, of course, that the hypothesis of mind in nature
does not owe its existence to an exact knowledge of things but to its
absence. Its origin must be sought in a pre-scientific age and its
persistence in a number of extraneous circumstances which have
perpetuated a belief that would otherwise have inevitably disappeared.
And it would indeed be a matter for surprise if this belief--said by
theists to be of all beliefs the most profound--should be the one
speculation on which savage thought has justified itself. On no other
question did the primitive mind reach truth. Universally its
speculations concerning the world were discovered to be wrong. On this
one topic we are asked to believe that the savage was absolutely right.
From the age of fetichism--rightly called by Comte the creative age in
theology--the history of the god-idea has been a history of a series of
modifications and rejections. Scarce an invention that has not slain a
god, scarce a discovery has not marked the burying-place of a discarded
deity. Criticism reduced the gods in number and limited them in power.
Advancing knowledge pushed them back till nature, "rid of her haughty
lords," is conceived as a huge mechanism, self-acting, self-adjusting,
and self-repairing. Even in the mouths of religionists "God" to-day
stands for little more than a force. We must not describe him as
personal, as intelligent, or as conscious, and between this and the
existence assumed by atheistic science it is impossible to detect any
vital difference. Atheism, then, takes its stand upon the observed trend
of human history, upon a scrutiny of the facts of nature, and upon an
examination of the origin and contents of the god-idea. And upon these
grounds it may fairly claim to be irrefutable and inevitable.
Circumstances may obstruct its universal acceptance as a reasoned mental
attitude, but that merely delays, it does not destroy the certainty of
its final triumph.
With the supposed direful consequences that would follow the triumph of
Atheism I have not dealt with at length. These are the bugbears which
the designing normally employ in order to frighten the timid and
credulous. Mental uprightness and moral integrity are certainly not the
property of one religion, nor can it be said with truth that they belong
to any. And examining the histories of religion it is a fair assumption
that in whatever direction the world may suffer from the disappearance
of religion there will be no moral catastrophe. Looking at the whole
course of human history, and noting how the vilest and most ruinous
practices have been ever associated with religion, and have ever relied
upon religion for support, the cause for speculation is, not what will
happen to the world when religion dies out, but how human society has
managed to flourish while the belief in the gods ruled.
Fortunately for human society nature has not left the operation of the
fundamental virtues dependent upon the acceptance of this or that theory
of the world. The social and family instincts, which are inseparable
from our nature as men and women, and which operate in ways of which we
are largely unconscious, are the grounds of all the higher and finer
virtues, and while a change in opinion may affect their operation here
and there, it can never alter their fundamental character. Conduct, in
short, comes from life, it is not the creation of a theory to be
dismissed by resolution or refashioned by a vote.
What Atheism would mean in practice would be an enormous concentration
of energy upon purely human affairs, and a judgment of conduct in terms
of human happiness and prosperity. And that certainly furnishes no cause
for alarm. It is, indeed, our greatest need. We need an awakening to the
untapped power and possibilities of human nature. If the gods die, man
their creator still lives; and the creative energy which once covered
the face of nature with innumerable gods, which spent itself in the
attempt to win their favour, and which called forth a heaven in the
endeavour to redress the wrongs of earth, may, if properly applied, yet
cover the earth with homes in which men and women, rendered purer by
love and stronger by knowledge, will rise superior to the fabled gods
before whom they once bowed in blind adoration.
FOOTNOTE:
[6] Prof. Ward "Naturalism and Agnosticism" Vol. I., p. 23.
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