The basis of faith; a critical survey of the grounds of Christian theism

Front matter

PRINCETON, N. J.

The basis of faith

Shelf.

Contents

LECTURE I.

Religion.

Its power. Its nature and elements. Natural Religion and Natural Theology. Four classes of possible religious belief. Comte’s law. Modern atheistic ‘ Religions ’ .

Preface

HEOLOGY, wont to be called of yore the Queen

X of the Sciences, finds her right fiercely challenged not merely to reign, but to exist. Science is proclaimed Empress of Human Thought. We are told that she will not only bow to no superior, but will tolerate no partner¬ ship of empire. It is supposed to be by her authority that her heralds and ministers not only seek to dethrone Theology as a pretender, but denounce Theism, the mother of all theologies, as an illusory phantom, merit¬ ing speedy banishment to the realm of obsolete spectres and sentimental unrealities.

The object of the following pages is to aid the reader in testing the real value of these portentous assumptions by the twofold method of (i) an examination into the foundations and limits of Human Knowledge, and (2) a review of the evidence for the Belief in the Existence of God.

To profess myself satisfied with my execution of this arduous task, would be to pronounce myself incompetent even to estimate it. Thoroughly to discuss the founda¬ tions and limits of human knowledge, would be to re¬ write Metaphysics ; and exhaustively to epitomise the evidence of Theism, would be to compose an encyclo¬ paedia of Physics, Biology, and Ethics, and a compend of

Xll

Preface.

History. In order to a complete controversial discussion of these two fields of inquiry, it would be necessary to master a large library and to write a small one. Even if life were not too short and too crowded with other work to attempt this heroic scale of labour, the world is far too busy to attend to such elaborate disquisitions? and the pace of modern thought too rapid to be thus led or arrested. Every hour, for good or for evil, its course receives a new impulse and fresh impetus. It is useless to set the points an hour after the express train has passed. No question more imperiously demands an answer from our reason, or weaves itself more deeply into our daily life, than the inquiry — Is THERE A God ? Is there an Infinite, All-wise, All-powerful Spirit, the Type of goodness, who has made all, rules all, loves all his creatures, but men as his children ? And if there be, does He require and enable men to know, love, trust, and obey Him as their Father ? No question of abstract science for truth’s sake, or of applied science for the sake of utility and happiness, can compare with this. If therefore I should be deemed presumptuous in attempt¬ ing a work the adequate performance of which I ac¬ knowledge to be beyond my power (as it is perhaps beyond any one’s power), my defence is that the condi¬ tion of a very large proportion of human work is the necessity for doing imperfectly at the moment what will not wait to be perfectly done at leisure. This work presses to be done, and I have done my best.

The kernel and general outline of the present work including a considerable part of the substance of the first four Lectures, was committed to writing some twentyfive years ago. The opinion expressed of that immature fragment, faulty though it was, by my late tutor and

Preface.

xm

friend, Henry Rogers, was one strong encouragement to keep this task in view, and to entertain the hope, when invited to the high honour and heavy responsibility of delivering one course in the series of lectures which Mr. Rogers so nobly opened, that in this direction, if in any, I might render some useful service to the Christian Church and to my generation. A shade of deep and solemn pathos is cast over my finished work, from the fact that he whose favouring criticism was my first encourage¬ ment to undertake it, is no longer among us, to bestow upon its completion that generous and kindly welcome which I know he would have warmly rendered.

The spirit proper to this great inquiry seems to me; not that of so-called philosophic impartiality, which when the main interests of human life are in question must denote either insensibility or insincerity ; but the severe earnestness of a mind too deeply concerned to allow itself to be imposed upon by fallacious evidence or in¬ conclusive reasoning. In moral and religious questions? a cold-hearted absence of vivid personal interest, far from being a requisite, is a fatal disqualification for judging justly. Even the crooked vision of narrow prejudice and heated imagination is not more disabling than the snow-blindness of moral insensibility. Such minds are not able truly to see moral truth when presented to them, because, as a perfect vibrating medium is indispensable for the ear to judge correctly of harmony and discord, so for the intellect to judge correctly of moral truth, a perfect medium is requisite through which that truth can be apprehended — a moral nature that vibrates promptly and strongly to every tone of duty, admiration, praise, blame, or love. To reason about matters of which emo¬ tion is the very essence, in the absence or deliberate

XIV

Preface.

suppression of emotion, is like trying to study the phenomena of life in a dead body.

So much the more, not the less, necessary is it that our reasonings on this foundation-truth of life be regu¬ lated and tested by the severest logic. If in any part of the argument I have substituted rhetoric for logic — the robes and weapons of Truth for Truth herself — it is a fault which I should be eager to correct, if fairly con¬ victed of it. Next to truth, the great aims I have kept before me in these Lectures are clearness and fairness.

The title of the original fragment has been retained — The Basis of Faith — although in the interim two very able works have been published with similar titles : Mr Mi all’s Bases of Belief \ and Mr. Murphy’s Scientific Bases of Faith. The first of these, admirable in its own line, occupies a totally distinct field of thought. The second traverses to a great extent the same ground with the present volume. In some cases, Mr. Murphy’s line of thought and my own are remarkably and closely parallel ; in others, widely discrepant. In the former case, the agreement between the views of so vigorous and original a thinker and those advanced in the follow¬ ing pages is a strong confirmation of their truth. In

*

the latter, it is possible that Mr. Murphy’s views may commend themselves to minds which my own will fail to convince, and lead them — though by what seems to me a slippery and devious path — to the same ultimate resting-place of faith.

Another work of eminent ability, from which I have derived during the preparation of these Lectures the indirect help of intellectual stimulus, is Mr. JACKSON’S Philosophy of Natural Theology , a work in which the reader is almost bewildered by the redundance of learned

Preface.

xv or quaint illustration, and the perpetual divarication of the track of thought ; but whose main idea is the central idea likewise of my own work, viz., that the evidence on which religious faith is solidly based is cumulative, com¬ bining in one result the totally independent testimony of the World Without and the World Within. But my argument takes a more comprehensive range, including the consideration of Revelation, or the direct manifesta¬ tion of God to man. For reasons set forth in the first, seventh, and eighth Lectures, I hold it impossible to draw any sharp line of scientific definition, fencing off the pro¬ vince of Natural from that of Revealed Theology. As matter of fact, the faith of the majority of believers in God does largely rest upon the Bible, and especially on the teaching of Christ and his Apostles. In a compre¬ hensive estimate of the evidence, therefore, the testimony of Scripture claims to be as carefully examined as that of the Physical Universe, or that of Man’s conscience and moral nature.

It is a question open to debate whether the religious temper of an age most determines or is determined by its prevalent metaphysics. They act and react on one another. But no competent thinker can ignore their close connection ; nor is it easy to overrate the import¬ ance of dealing with the metaphysical root of scep¬ ticism. Nothing is further from my ambition than to frame a metaphysical system, for I believe the love of system to be the snare of philosophers and the ruin of Metaphysics. But I confess that I attach great import¬ ance to the views which I have endeavoured (with the utmost attainable brevity) to establish in Lecture IV., and which appear to me, if just, to furnish a new depar¬ ture in Metaphysics. I had hoped to have included in

XVI

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the Appendix, as a supplement to Lecture IV., a brief Essay on the Classification of Ideas — one of the chief desiderata , as it seems to me, for the reform and advance¬ ment of metaphysical science — but time and space (which, whatever they may be to the transcendental phi¬ losopher, are very real barriers to the printer and the publisher) have forbidden me to carry out this intention. The argument in Lecture IV., though capable of being greatly enlarged and supplemented, is, I hope, for its present purposes, complete as it stands.

Such as my work is, I am thankful to have been per¬ mitted to undertake, and enabled to complete it. I humbly commend it to God, with the prayer that through the illumination of His Spirit it may serve to strengthen the things that remain which are ready to die, and to lead some thoughtful honest seekers after truth out of the bewildering mists of doubt or unbelief into the clear daylight and calm certainty of a mind which has tested the foundations of its faith, and knows it to rest on eternal truth.

Leeds,

December , 1 877.

EUSTACE R. CONDER.

LECTURE I.

RELIGION.

LECTURE I.

RELIGION.

A TRAVELLER who, in crossing some unexplored desert, should light upon the ruins of an ancient city, the populous abode of a forgotten race, would no sooner recognise the footprints of civilisation than he would look to find those of Religion. Among the mouldering walls of palaces, arsenals, theatres, ware¬ houses, dwellings, he would expect to find the remains of temples. If he discovered none, he would rather infer that the citizens believed in a deity, and practised a worship, requiring no sanctuary, than that they were wholly without creed or worship. He would feel not more sure that they possessed language, laws, and arts than that they possessed some form of Religion. The conviction would be reasonable, for it would be based on universal experience. History proves that the elements of Religion — faith in the Unseen and reverence for the Divine — are inwoven in the very fabric of our nature. Wherever on this wide and wonderful globe man has fixed his dwelling, with the silent stars above his head and the silent graves under his feet, he has set up an altar beside his hearth and consecrated a temple among his sepulchres. Religion has been the sanction of his laws, the cement of his society, the inspiration of his art,

the mistress of his deepest emotions, the mainspring of

* his most heroic deeds, and even (though so often leagued with tyranny and prejudice) the backbone of his freedom and progress. No empire has widely and permanently ruled him, no civilisation has exalted and enriched him, without the aid of this potent ally. Religion has set its mark on the noblest monuments of his genius and in its highest form has developed in human nature itself a purity, tenderness, force, and majesty else inconceivable.

No philosophy can pretend to give an account of man’s nature which ignores this immense and varied evidence, and neglects to consider him as a creature capable of and prone to Religion.

Tribes have been discovered among whom scarce a vestige of religious sentiment could be detected, and all belief in the existence of God had perished. But the very fact that we speak of these unhappy and degraded beings as “ discovered ” indicates how worthless would be any argument drawn from such anomalies. These detached fragments of the human race, stagnating and putrefying in the isolation into which the tempest of invasion has driven them, or where the tide of receding commerce has left them, are no more to be cited as samples of man’s moral and intellectual nature than the tenants of the lazar-house are to be taken as models of his bodily nature. No bounds can be set to the degree in which our nature may become diseased — physically, intellectually, or morally ; but a tribe of atheists no more contradicts the assertion that man is essentially religious, than a tribe in which blindness had become hereditary, or in which all knowledge of musical sound had been lost (were such a race of unfortunates discovered), would prove that sight and song are not natural to man and essential to his noblest development.

i.] Religion.

I maybe reminded that I am here assuming the falsity of one of the most favourite of current scientific super¬ stitions, one of the most celebrated and popular of those philosophical romances with which men of science sweeten the severity of logic and bridge the gaps of solid evidence. Religion, according to a widely accepted hypothesis, is natural to man only as a development, not as an original element in his nature. Primitive man, if such a creature can be said to have existed, was destitute even of morality and of reason ; and we must allow that without these he was incapable of religion. Crawling by inconceivably slow degrees from beasthood towards the level of the Bushman or Australian savage ; destined to creep up in adequate millenniums to that of the Negro, the Caffre, the Malay, the Mongol, the Caucasian ; he acquired as he went, with the rudiments of reason and the glimmerings of morality, some germs of fetishistic religion. Through various grades of nature-worship he ascended to polytheism ; thence, by synthesis, abstraction, and imagination, he developed the sublime idea of monotheism, long supposed the culminating point of religious progress. A select company, however, of advanced minds, the philosophical forlorn hope of the race, have crossed the frontier of the new land of promise and worship in the temple of the future. They not only announce, but in their own persons realise, the next great stage of human development, intellectual and religious ; although some centuries or thousands of years must elapse before the bulk of mankind attain the same elevation. With them theism has discharged its function (as fetishism and polytheism in ruder ages and minds) and is obsolete. They are emancipated from the need of a theological morality. They have even discovered that the great fault of religion hitherto has been its irreligiousness ; and that this irreligious impiety con¬ sists in the tenacity with which it has clung to the belief in a Supreme Mind, an Infinite Will, ruled by perfect wisdom, love, and justice ; in other words, a personal and righteous God. Banish from men’s minds the idea of God and from their breasts the love of God, and you will at least have cleared the foundation for true Religion. What to build there is not as yet unanimously voted. According to one oracle, the Religion of the future is

A

the cultns of that Great Being ( Etre Supreme) of which every human being forms part and which each may aid in developing and improving. According to another autho¬ rity, God is the perfect ideal of which Nature is the imperfect realisation. According to a third, Religion has its essence in the recognition of the Unknowable, and is profaned by the admixture of knowledge, just as science is profaned by the admixture of religion. On two points, however, these varying sects are agreed, that theism, and more especially Christian theism, has come to the end of its reign and nearly played out its rSley and that the Religion of the future (whatever it may be) will be enormously superior both in character and in results. Altruistic brain-instincts, and the organisation of social statics and dynamics, will effect what Christianity has clumsily and vainly attempted by means of love to God, and love to man as the child and image of God.

Meantime it is conceded, and even maintained, that Religion, though so transformed that it is difficult to recognise any feature, is essential to man’s highest development.

So far as these views deal with the future it must be left to the future to deal with them. Prophecy admits

Religion.

no logic but time. So far as they are included in the vaster dream of evolution they will ask our attention further on. So far as they refer to an illimitable and unknowable past, in which prehistoric, or, rather, pre¬ human, man was ascending from beasthood to barbarism, it is enough for our present argument that Religion is as natural to him as reason and morals, since when incapable of that he was devoid of these also.

Returning from these high speculations to the sober level of fact, and regarding man as we actually know him, we cannot say less than that of all the great forces inspiring and controlling human history, none has been more potent than Religion. Further, it is evident that man possesses faculties or sensibilities which, when evoked by education, prompt him to religious belief, feel¬ ing, and conduct. Nor is it uninstructive to note that, while the finest and most powerful minds have found in Religion their inspiration and their repose, minds en¬ feebled by decay, insanity, or even idiotcy, often respond to religious impressions when incapable of distinctly retaining any other. As the door of the lowliest cottage and that of the proudest castle alike stand open to the sovereign, so Religion has proved herself equally able to dominate the grandest intellects and to elevate the humblest. It constitutes a centre of equality and sympathy for men of every rank and race, which no other known force can furnish. Gentlest of all influences — for it takes easy and strong hold of childhood — matched in turn with every other principle and passion, Religion has proved alike in action and suffering mightier than all.

Let us now seek to penetrate the secret of these varied and prodigious effects. Let us place ourselves face to face with this mighty and mysterious force. What account

[lect.

Religion.

can philosophic analysis give of the elements of Religion and the sources of its power ? Is its dominion as legiti¬ mate as it is ancient and universal ? Is it based on weakness and prejudice, or on nature and truth ? Is the awful form of Religion a phantom projected on the misty void by the beholder’s eye, or a shadow cast down¬ ward by an eternal, divine Reality ? Is religious faith a necessity of man’s infancy, which he will outgrow ; a pre¬ judice of education which science will dispel ; or is it a channel of veracious and indispensable knowledge, a condition of our highest development, a link uniting us to a glorious and eternal future ?

Religion, in the broad sense, I take to signify the sum total of man’s belief, emotion, and conduct with respect to God. If it be objected that this is not a philosophical definition, I am content that it be accepted as a provi¬ sional description, so that we may know what we are talking about. A philosophical definition must be the goal, not the starting-point, of our discussion. If, again, it be objected that this description includes not only theism, polytheism, and pantheism, but atheism, I reply that this is no real objection. The belief that there is no God is as definite a creed as the belief in one God or in many gods. It influences the religious emotions by repressing their exercise. It influences the conduct of life by withdrawing all those motives which depend on belief in a deity. Atheism may be termed negative religion.

The three elements included in this general description of Religion — intellectual, emotional, moral ; belief, senti¬ ment, practice — necessarily belong to it in its full develop¬ ment, because they belong to human nature, and together make up our experience. Thought, feeling, will, are the i.] Religion .

three strands of the triple cord of life. We have now to ask, — Are all these equally essential to Religion, or in equal proportions ? and if not, in which is its most vital and characteristic element to be found ?

If, apart from preconceived theory, we seek the answer to this question by setting in array the incongruous and bewildering host of religions extant, or known to have prevailed in the world, we discern amid the confusion and conflict one prominent feature — that of which the Temple, the Altar, the Priest are the standing symbols : WORSHIP. Analyse worship, and detect, if there be one, its law, and you have the key to religion. The mass of contradictory forms seems at first sight to defy scientific generalisation or rational interpretation. Invisible ob¬ jects of worship range from the Supreme Creator — con¬ ceived as infinite in power and wisdom, and purely benevolent, — through innumerable ranks of intelligences, more or less good or evil, to the very Devil — conceived as purely malignant. Visible objects range, in nature, from the blue vault of heaven and the starry orbs to birds, beasts, creeping things, and stones ; in art, from the marbles of Phidias and Praxiteles, to the dusty bundles of rags and sticks lately given to the flames in Madagascar. Modes of worship vary from the silent rapture of spiritual adoration to the whirling and mut¬ tering of dancing dervishes ; from the Lord’s Prayer to the whirr of a Tartar prayer-mill ; from the low-mur¬ mured petition of weeping Hannah or the penitent pub¬ lican to the stately ritual of a thousand years ; from the music of one of Mozart’s masses or Luther’s chorales to the senseless chant and discordant jangle of cannibals dancing round some hideous fetish. Under the vener¬ able name of Religion we find included the whole range io Religion. [lect.

of human passions and motives, from the purest to the vilest, from adoring love to terror and hatred ; the raptures of saints, the tortures of fakirs, the orgies of bacchanals, the nameless abominations of Syrian and Babylonian idolatry, the all but incredible atrocities of Hindu Thuggism.

Is there a clue to this appalling labyrinth ? There is. One fact at least emerges amid the insane disorder ; one law prevails. This chaos of conflicting worships repre¬ sents a corresponding chaos of beliefs. The character of any particular worship, and of the sentiments which it expresses, pure or polluted, lofty or degraded, accurately corresponds with the belief entertained regarding the object of worship. CREED — not in the technical sense of a set form of words embodying (or embalming) re¬ ligious faith, but in its primary sense : what the wor¬ shipper believes concerning his deity — is the ruling element in Religion. Illustrations of this universal fact are too abundant to need citing. This is in truth but one sample of the fundamental law of our nature, that our feelings, saving those which spring immediately from sensation, are controlled by our beliefs. Our affections and emotions cannot live in a vacuum ; cannot put forth their strength without an object ; and if no real object presents itself, imagination steps in to fill the office of belief.

Worship, however, while it implies belief, apart from which it is but a theatric performance, directly expresses sentiment and emotion. It does not follow that creed is the primary, because the controlling, element in Religion. The keynote is one thing; the dominant which deter¬ mines the key is another. Which, then, of these two is primary ? Does religious belief give birth to religious feeling, or does religious feeling create its corresponding object of belief? The answer is that both processes go on together. Worship, the daughter of belief and senti¬ ment, is the most powerful nurse of both. By a like interchange of offices, those sentiments which logically rest on intellectual belief react on the beliefs from which they spring ; modify, transform, and even replace them with new forms of belief. A child’s instinctive dislike of darkness predisposes him to believe tales of spectres or monsters peopling the darkness. A child of strong fancy and sensitive nerves, however jealously guarded from such ideas, will invent horrors for himself ; and, having invented, come firmly to believe in them. The ardent lover, or fond mother, believes the object of en¬ thusiastic affection possessed of a thousand merits which colder eyes fail to discern. Sentiment and imagination combined amply account for any number of such crea¬ tions as the Oreads, Dryads, and Tritons of Grecian mythology ; or the Elves, Dwarfs, Goblins, and Kelpies religiously believed in by our Teutonic and Scandi¬ navian forefathers. The Bacchanal would not have con¬ founded intoxication with inspiration had he not found a base delight in drunken revels ; nor the Babylonian have consecrated lewdness if he had loved virtue.

The same principle is seen at work in the influences which, in our day, are transforming Christian theology. Sentiments have come to prevail among the bulk of Christians which render some beliefs, esteemed the very essence of orthodoxy but three generations ago, no longer tenable. Oth^r beliefs are in process of solution, and though their essence may remain undestroyed, they will crystallise in new forms.

Since feeling, although governed by existing belief, possesses this remarkable power of modifying, transforming, and even originating belief, some minds will readily jump to the conclusion (it being the habit of some minds to jump to conclusions) that we need no other account of the origin either of Biblical theism or of any other religious creed than this, that it is the off¬ spring of religious feeling. The instinctive longing of human nature for some object of worship creates, it may be supposed, with the help of imagination, its own deity. Such a conclusion would be superficial and irrational, for, first, it does not follow that, because emotion and affec¬ tion can create for themselves, through the help of imagination, some unreal objects, therefore all objects of emotion and affection are imaginary. Imagination is amply competent to create, not only such prismatic shadows of human nature as giants, elves, sea-nymphs, spectres, and the like, but a whole pantheon of such deities as Pallas and Aphrodite, Mars and Mercury. But the idea of an Infinite, Eternal, Almighty Creator, per¬ fectly wise, just, and loving, immeasurably transcends the domain of fancy, and belongs to the province of reason and conscience. Imagination can represent such a Being only by symbols, such as those abundantly used in the Hebrew Scriptures, of the eye, ear, hand, mouth, sword, rod, footsteps of God, — never mistaken (except perhaps by modern critics) for anything but symbols.

Secondly, so far from the religious emotions, even in their highest exaltation and purity, being adequate to the task of originating this idea, no complaint is more common with the most devout persons than that their emotions and affections towards God fall immeasurably below what their reason demands. And the persons who have the strongest religious feelings and the most vivid sense of the presence of God, are by no means

!•] Religion.

always those whose intellect grasps the idea of God with the greatest clearness and sublimity.

Nothing that has been said implies that human nature possesses any specifically distinct religious emotion. Faith, love, fear, awe, penitence, humility, joy, peace, gratitude, may all in turn be intensely religious ; and the first three are often spoken of as equivalent to Religion. The passions of zeal, indignation, con¬ tempt, and even hatred, malice, and all uncharitable¬ ness, have been found in such close association with Religion as to be mistaken for its inspiration if not its essence. Religious feelings differ from other feelings not by their nature but by their object. Their nature varies according as the object of worship is mean or exalted, evil or good, hostile or propitious, impersonal or personal, finite or infinite. The Apostle John and Benedict Spinoza were both intensely religious persons, but it would be difficult to say what their religious feel¬ ings had in common. The sense of dependence by some, the sense of responsibility by others, has been deemed the central and distinctive religious sentiment. But each of these may be entertained towards a human being, as by a little child towards its parent, or by the servant of an absolute ruler towards his sovereign ; and there are forms of Religion in which they have no place. If we were to single out one emotion as most naturally religious, we might fix on Reverence, especially when joined with that mixture of wonder and fear we term Awe. But the natural expression of reverent awe is silence rather than utterance. Reverence must unite with love, trust, grati¬ tude, joy, and the moral admiration inspired by perfect goodness, to produce the highest ideal of worship, and therefore the most perfect type of religion.

A PRACTICAL element has been included in our defini¬ tion of Religion. Common usage regards the conduct flowing from religious sentiment and conviction as an inseparable part of Religion. A man is set down as religious or irreligious according to his daily course of life, whatever may be his sentiments. This agrees with the Apostle James’s practical description (not intended for a logical definition) of “ pure religion and undefiled.” If belief is sincere and feeling intense, they must rule conduct. It is, however, only a question of the use of the term, not of the nature of the thing, whether we consider Religion as including all three elements ; or, restricting it to the first and second, say that religious conduct is conduct inspired and ruled by Religion. A similar question might be asked and a similar distinction drawn regarding faith and love. In the New Testament, the spirit of which is not metaphysical or philosophical, but intensely practical, each of these is used in a wide sense as constituting the essence of Religion.