Man and the universe, by Sir Oliver Lodge.

Front matter

MAN AND THE UNIVERSE

Books by SIR OLIVER LODGE

Raymond: or Life and Death

Prefatory Note To American

EDITION

This book appeared originally under the title " Science and Immortality," but this represents only a portion of its theme, and is inadequate. Its true title, by which it is known in England, is now restored to it — "Man and the Universe." For it is a comprehensive survey of many things of high importance, and constitutes the author's most important work on any religious theme. The other two of his religious books are "Reason and Belief" and "The Substance of Faith" ; the last being thrown into the form of a catechism for the use of Parents and Teachers, and both books being intended to help those who find a difficulty in answering questions propounded by eager children.

The present work is more ambitious, and tries to deal with the interaction of Science and Theology generally. It begins with a statement of the Conflict — a conflict which raged fiercely in the latter half of the Nineteenth Century — and it formulates the antagonistic views uncompromisingly in the first chapter. The second chapter indicates a Reconciliation of the opposing views; while the third chapter justifies a reasonable scientific attitude toward the Miraculous element in religion, an element which has often involved thoughtful people in needless difficulties.

A section on Ecclesiastical matters follows, urging

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greater freedom, less intolerance, and a heartier spirit of united effort among all those who profess and call themselves Christians. In particular it is argued that many good men are kept out of Clerical Office — at least in the Anglican Church — by the tests and vows which have come down to us from less enlightened times, and which might be so much more effective and acceptable if dead formularies were made simple, real and living.

A section on the Immortality of the Soul and the Permanence of Personality follows.

And then comes a careful treatment of the relations between Science and Christianity. The ambitious and difficult subjects of Sin and the Atonement are dealt with humbly and seriously; and the concluding chapters emphasize both the Material element and the Divine element in Christianity. In particular the author would draw the attention of all who read the book to the concluding portion entitled "Ecce Deus."

In the hope that this book may be received in America as it has been received in England, and may be found helpful by serious and thoughtful people, — perturbed as many are by the period of scientific discovery through which they have lived, — the author commends this as his most solid contribution to a reformulation and confirmation of religious belief, and to that reinterpretation of ancient formula? which in every age of progress is essential to vitality and to the reception of fresh developments of revealed truth.

Oliver J. Lodge.

New York, February, 1920.

Chapter I The Outstanding Controversy

IT is widely recognised at the present day that the modern spirit of scientific inquiry has in the main exerted a wholesome influence upon Theology, clearing it of much encumbrance of doubtful doctrine, freeing it from slavery to the literal accuracy of historical records, and reducing the region of the miraculous or the incredible, with which it used to be almost conterminous, to a comparatively small area.

This influence is likely to continue as true science advances, but it by no means follows that the nature of the benefit will always be that of a clearing and unloading process. There must come a time when such a process has gone far enough, and when some positive contribution may be expected. Whether such a time has now arrived or not is clearly open to question, but I think it will be admitted that orthodox science at present, though it shows some sign of abstaining from virulent criticism of religious creeds, is still a long way from contributing in any degree to their support; nor are its followers ready to admit that they have as yet gone too far, if even far enough, in the negative direction. No doubt both sides would allow that the highest Science and the truest Theology must ultimately be mutually consistent, and harmonious; but they are far from presenting that appearance at present. The term "Theology," as ordinarily used, necessarily signifies nothing ultimate or divine; it signifies only the present state of human knowledge on theological subjects. And similarly the term "Science," if correspondingly employed, represents no fetish to be worshipped blindly as absolute truth, but merely the present state of human knowledge on subjects within its grasp, together with the practical consequences deducible from such knowledge in the opinion of the average scientific man: it usually connotes what may be called orthodox science, — the orthodox science of the present day, as set forth by its professed exponents, and as indicated by the general atmosphere or setting in which figures in every branch of knowledge are now regarded by cultivated men.

It may be objected that there is no definite body of doctrine which can be classed as orthodox science ; and it is true that there is no formulated creed ; but I suggest that there is more nearly an orthodox science than there is an orthodox theology. Professors of theology difTer among themselves in a rather conspicuous manner; and even in that branch of it with which alone most Englishmen are familiar, viz. Christian Theology, there are differences of opinion on apparently important issues, as is evidenced by the existence of Sects, ranging from Unitarians on the one side, to Greek and Roman Catholics on the other.

In science, sectarianism is less marked, controversies rage chiefly round matters of detail, and on all important issues its professors are agreed. This general consensus of opinion on the part of experts, a general consensus which the public are willing enough to acquiesce in, and adopt as far as they can understand it, is what I mean by the term "science as now understood," or, for brevity, "modern science."

Similarly, by "religious doctrine" we shall mean the general consensus of theologians so far as they are in agreement, especially perhaps the general consensus of Christian theologians; ignoring as far as possible the presumably minor points on which they differ, and eliminating everything manifestly below the moral level of dogma generally acceptable at the present day.

Now it must, I thinly be admitted that the modern scientific atmosphere, in spite of much that is wholesome and nutritious, exercises a sort of blighting influence upon religious ardour. At any rate the great saints or seers have as a rule not been eminent for their acquaintance with exact scientific knowledge, but on the contrary, have felt a distrust and a dislike of that uncompromising quest for cold hard truth in which the leaders of science are engaged; while on the other hand, the leaders of science have shown an aloofness from, if not a hostility towards, the theoretical aspects of religion. In fact, it may be held that the general drift or atmosphere of modern science is adverse to the highest religious emotion, because unconvinced of the reality of many of the occurrences upon which such an exalted state of feeling* must be based, if it is to be anything more than a wave of transient enthusiasm.

Nevertheless, we must admit that among men of science, there must be many now living, who accept fully the facts and implications of science, who accept also the creeds of the Church, and who do not keep the two sets of ideas in watertight compartments of their minds, but do distinctly perceive a reconciling and fusing element.

If we proceed to ask what is this reconciling element, wre find that it is neither science nor theology, but that it is either philosophy or poetry. By aid of philosophy, or by aid of poetry, a great deal can be accomplished. Mind and matter may be then no longer two, but one; this material universe may then become the living garment of God; gross matter may be regarded as a mere appearance, a mode of apprehending an idealistic cosmic reality, in which we really live and move and have our being; the whole of existence can become infused and suffused with immanent Deity.

No reconciliation would then be necessary between the spiritual and the material, between the laws of Nature and the will of God, because the two would be but aspects of one all-comprehensive pantheistic entity.

All this may possibly be in some sort time, but it is not science as now understood. It is no more science than are the creeds of the Churches. It is a guess, an intuition, — an inspiration perhaps, — but it is not a link in a chain of assured and reasoned knowledge ; it can no more be clearly formulated in words, or clearly apprehended in thought, than can any of the high and lofty conceptions of religion. It is, in fact, far more akin to religion than to science. It is no solution of the knotty entanglement, but a soaring above it; it is a reconciliation in excelsis.

Minds which can habitually rise to it are, ipso facto, essentially religious, and are exercising their religious functions ; they have flown off the dull earth of exact knowledge into an atmosphere of faith.

But if this flight be possible, especially if it be ever possible to minds engaged in a daily round of scientific teaching and investigation, how can it be said that the atmosphere of modern science and the atmosphere of religious faith are incompatible? Wherein lies the incompatibility?

My reply briefly is — and this is the kernel of what I have to say — that orthodox modern science shows us a self-contained and self-sufficient universe, not in touch with anything beyond or above itself, — the general trend and outline of it known; — nothing supernatural or miraculous, no intervention of beings other than ourselves, being conceived possible.

While religion, on the other hand, requires us constantly and consciously to be in touch, — even affectionately in touch, — with a power, a mind, a being or beings, entirely out of our sphere, entirely beyond our scientific ken; the universe contemplated by religion is by no means self-contained or self-sufficient, it is dependent for its origin and maintenance, as we are for our daily bread and future hopes, upon the power and the goodwill of a being or beings of which science has no knowledge. Science does not indeed always or consistently deny the existence of such transcendent beings, nor does it make any effectual attempt to limit their potential powers, but it definitely disbelieves in their exerting any actual influence on the progress of events, or in their producing or modifying the simplest physical phenomenon.

For instance, it is now considered unscientific to pray for rain, and Professor Tyndall went so far as to say:

"The principle [of the conservation of energy] teaches us that the Italian wind gliding over the crest of the Matterhorn is as firmly ruled as the earth in its orbital revolution round the sun; and that the fall of its vapour into clouds is exactly as much a matter of necessity as the return of the seasons. The dispersion, therefore, of the slightest mist by the special volition of the Eternal, would be as much a miracle as the rolling of the Rhone over the Grimsel precipices, down the valley of Hasli to Meyringen and Brientz. . . .

"Without the disturbance of a natural law, quite as serious as the stoppage of an eclipse, or the rolling of the river Niagara up the Falls no act of humiliation individual or national, could call one shower from heaven, or deflect towards us a single beam of the sun." l

i From Fragments of Science, " Prayer and Natural Law."

Certain objections may be made to this statement of Professor Tyndall's, even from the strictly scientific point of view: the law of the conservation of energy is needlessly dragged in when it has nothing really to do with it. We ourselves, for instance, though we have no power, nor hint of any power, to override the conservation of energy, are yet readily able, by a simple physical experiment, or by an engineering operation, to deflect a ray of light or to dissipate a mist, or divert a wind, or pump water uphill; and further objections may be made to the form of the statement notably to the word "therefore" as used to connect propositions entirely different in their terms. But the meaning is quite plain nevertheless. The assertion is that any act, however simple, if achieved by special volition of the Eternal, would be a miracle; and the implied dogma is that the special volition of the Eternal cannot, or at any rate does not, accomplish anything whatever in the physical world. And this dogma, although not really a deduction from any of the known principles of physical science, and possibly open to objection as a petitio principii, may nevertheless be taken as a somewhat exuberant statement of the generally accepted inductive teaching of orthodox science on the subject.

It ought, however, to be admitted at once by Natural Philosophers that the unscientific character of prayer for rain depends really not upon its conflict with any known physical law, since it need involve no greater interference with the order of nature than is implied in a request to a gardener to water the garden — it does not really depend upon the impossibility of causing rain to fall when otherwise it might not — but upon the disbelief of science in any power who can and will attend and act. To prove this, let us bethink ourselves that it is not an inconceivable possibility that at some future date mankind may acquire some control over the weather, and be able to influence it; not merely in an indirect manner, as at present they can affect climate, by felling forests or flooding deserts, but in some more direct fashion; in that case prayers for rain would begin again, only the petitions would be addressed, not to heaven, but to the Meteorological Office. We do not at present ask the secretary of that government department to improve our seasons, simply because we do not think that he knows how ; if we thought he did, we should not be debarred from approaching him by a suspicion of his possible non-existence, or a fear that our request would not be delivered. Professor Tyndall's dogma will, if pressed, be found to necessitate one of these last alternatives; although superficially it pretends to make the somewhat grotesque suggestion that the alteration requested is so complicated and involved, that really, with the best intentions in the world, the Deity does not know how to do it.

An attitude of pious resignation might be taken, that the central Office knew best what it was about, and that petitions were only worrying ; but that would be rather a supine and fatalistic attitude if we were in real distress, and certainly, on a higher level, it would be a very unfllial one. Religious people have been told, on what they generally take to be good authority, that prayer might be a miraculously powerful engine for achievement, even in the physical world, if they would only believe with sufficient vigour; but (I am not here questioning the soundness of their position) they have dramatised or spiritualised away the statement, and act upon it no more. Influenced it is to be presumed by science, they have come definitely to disbelieve in physical interference of any kind whatever on the part of another order of beings, whether more exalted or more depraved than ourselves, although such beings are frequently mentioned in their sacred books.

Whatever they might be able to do if they chose, for all practical purposes such beings are to the average scientific man purely imaginary, and he feels sure that we can never have experiential knowledge of them or their powers. In his view the universe lies before us for investigation, and, so far as he can see, it is complete without them; it is subject to our own partial control if we are willing patiently to learn how to exercise it, but of any other control, we would say, there is no perceptible trace. Even in the most vital concerns of life, it is the doctor, not the priest, who is summoned: a pestilence is no longer attributed to Divine jealousy, nor would the threshing-floor of Araunah be used to stay it.

The two subjects, moreover, adopt very different modes of expression. The death of an archbishop can be stated scientifically in terms not very different from those appropriate to the stoppage of a clock, or the extinction of a fire; but the religious formula for the same event is that it has pleased God in His infinite wisdom to take to Himself the soul of our dear brother, etc. The very words of such a statement are to modern science unmeaning. (In saying this, I trust to be understood as not now in the slightest degree attempting to prejudge the question, which form is the more appropriate.)

Religion may, in fact, be called supernatural or super scientific, if the term "natural" be limited to that region of which we now believe that we have any direct scientific knowledge.

In disposition also Religion and Science are opposite. Science cultivates a vigorous adult, intelligent, serpent-like wisdom, and active interference with the course of nature; religion fosters a meek, receptive, child-hearted attitude of dovelike resignation to the Divine will.

Take a scientific man who is a man of science, pure and simple with no element either of a poet, or a philosopher, or a saint, and place him in the atmosphere habitual to the churches, — and he must starve. He requires solid food, but his sole provision is air. He requires something to touch and define and know ; but all his surroundings are ethereal, indefinable, illimitable, incomprehensible, beautiful, and vague. He dies of inanition.

Take, again, a narrow religious man — one in whom religion is the sole aptitude — into the cold dry workings, the gropings and tunnellings of science, where everything must be scrutinised and proved, distinctly conceived and precisely formulated, — and he cannot breathe. He requires ample air and space; whereas he finds himself underground, among foundations and masonry, very solid and substantial, but completely cabined and confined. He dies of asphyxia. If a man be able to live in both regions, to be amphibious as it were, — able to take short flights occasionally, and able to burrow underground occasionally, accepting the solid work of science and believing its truth, realising the aerial structures of religion, and perceiving their beauty, — will such a man be as happily and powerfully at home in the air as if he had no earth adhering to his wings? Is the modern man as happily and as powerfully religious as he might have been with less information about the universe? Or, I would add parenthetically, as he will yet assuredly become, with more?

II

Leaving general considerations, and coming to details, let us look at a few of the simpler religious doctrines, such as are still, I suppose, popularly held in this country.

The creed of the ancient Israelites was well, or at least strikingly, summarised by Mr. Huxley in one of his Nineteenth Century articles (March 1886). He there says: "The chief articles of the theological creed of the old Israelites, which are made known to us by the direct evidence of the ancient records, . . . are as remarkable for that which they contain as for that which is absent from them. They reveal a firm conviction that, when death takes place, a something termed a soul, or spirit, leaves the body and continues to exist in Sheol for a period of indefinite duration, even though there is no proof of any belief in absolute immortality; that such spirits can return to earth to possess and inspire the living; that they are in appearance and in disposition likenesses of the men to whom they belonged, but that, as spirits, they have larger powers and are freer from physical limitations ; that they thus form one of a number of kinds of spiritual existence known as Elohim, of whom Jahveh, the national God of Israel, is one; that, consistently with this view, Jahveh was conceived as a sort of spirit, human in aspect and in sense, and with many human passions, but with immensely greater intelligence and power than any other Elohim, whether human or divine."

The mere calm statement of such a creed was plainly held by Mr. Huxley to be a sufficient refutation.

But we need not limit ourselves to the Old Testament, some of whose alleged facts may admittedly be abandoned without detriment, as belonging to the legendary or the obscure; we may be constrained by science to go further, and to maintain that even what some regard as fundamental Christian tenets, such as the Incarnation or non-natural birth, and the Resurrection or non-natural disappearance of the body from the tomb, have, from the scientific point of view, no reasonable likelihood or probability whatever. It may be, and often has been, asserted that they appear as childish fancies, appropriate to the infancy of civilisation and a prescientific credulous age ; readily intelligible to the historian and student of folk-lore, but not otherwise interesting. The same has been said of every variety of alleged miraculous occurrence, and not merely of such dogmas as the fall of man from an original state of perfection, of the subsequent extirpation of the human race down to a single family, and so on.

The whole historical record, wherever it exceeds the commonplace, every act attributed directly to the Deity, whether it be sending fire from heaven, or writing upon stone, or leadings by cloud and fire, or conversations, whether during trance or otherwise, is incompatible with the teachings of modern science (let it be clearly remembered how I have defined the phrase "modern science" above) ; and when considered prosaically, much of the record is summarily discredited, even by many theologians now. Nor is this acquiescence in negation confined to the leaders. The general religious world has agreed apparently to throw overboard Jonah and the whale, Joshua and the sun, the three Children and the fiery furnace; it does not seem to take anything in the book of Judges or the book of Daniel very seriously; and though it still clings pathetically to the book of Genesis, it is willing to relegate to poetry, i.e. to imagination or fiction, such legends as the creation of the world, Adam and his rib, Eve and the apple, Noah and his ark, language and the tower«of Babel, Elijah and the chariot of fire, and many others. The stock reconciling phrase, applied to the legend of the six-days' creation, or the Levitican mistakes in Natural History, after the strained "day-period" mode of interpretation had been exploded in "Essays and Reviews," used to be, that the Bible was never meant to teach science ; wherefore, whenever it touches upon any branch of natural knowledge, its statements are to be interpreted in a friendly spirit, i.e. it is to be glossed over, and in fact disbelieved. But a book which deals with so prodigious a subject as the origin of all things, and the history of the human race, cannot avoid a treatment of natural facts which is really a teaching of science, whether such teaching is meant or not; and indeed the whole idea involved in the word "meant" is repugnant to the conceptions of biological science, which claims to have ousted teleology from its arena.

Moreover, if religious people go as far as this, where are they to stop? What, then, do they propose to do with the turning of water into wine, the ejection of devils, the cursing of the fig-tree, the feeding of five thousand, the raising of Lazarus? Or, to go deeper still, what do they make of the scene at the Baptism, of the Transfiguration, of the Crucifixion, the appearances after Death, the Ascension into heaven ? On all these points I venture to suggest that neither religion nor science has said its last word.

But it may be urged that even these are but details compared with the one transcendent doctrine of the existence of an omnipotent and omniscient benevolent personal God; the fundamental tenet of nearlyall religions. But so far as science has anything to say on this subject, and it has not very much, its tendency is to throw mistrust, not upon the existence of Deity itself, but upon any adjectives applied to the Deity. "Infinite" and "eternal" may pass, and "omnipotent" and "omniscient" may reluctantly be permitted to enter with them, — these expansive epithets relieve the mind, without expressing more than is implicitly contained in the substantive God. But concerning "personal" and "benevolent" and other anthropomorphic adjectives, science is exceedingly dubious; nor is omnipotence itself very easily reconcilable with the actual condition of things as we now experience them. The present state of the world is very far short of perfection. Why are things still imperfect if controlled by a benevolent omnipotence? Why, indeed, does evil or pain at all exist? All very ancient puzzles these, but still alive; and the solution to them so far attempted by science lies in the word Evolution, a word whose applicability to the work of a perfect God may readily be the subject of controversy.

Taught by science, we learn that there has been no fall of man, there has been a rise. Through an apelike ancestry, back through a tadpole and fishlike ancestry, away to the early beginnings of life, the origin of man is being traced by science. There was no specific creation of the world such as was conceived appropriate to a geocentric conception of the universe ; the world is a condensation of primeval gas, a congeries of stones and meteors fallen together; still falling together, indeed, in a larger neighboring mass (the Sun). By the energy of that still persistent falling together, the ether near us is kept constantly agitated, and to the energy of this ethereal agitation all the manifold activity of our planet is due. The whole system has evolved itself from mere moving matter in accordance with the law of gravitation, and there is no certain sign of either beginning or end. Solar systems can by collision or otherwise resolve themselves into nebulae, and nebulae left to themselves can condense into solar systems, — everywhere in the spaces around us we see a part of the process going on; the formation of solar systems from whirling nebulae lies before our eyes, if not in the visible sky itself, yet in the magnified photographs taken of that sky. Even though the whole process of evolution is not completely understood as yet, does anyone doubt that it will become more thoroughly understood in time? and if they do doubt it, would they hope effectively to bolster up religion by such a doubt?

It is difficult to resist yielding to the bent and trend of "modern science," as well as to its proved conclusions. Its bent and trend may have been wrongly estimated by its present disciples: a large tract of knowledge may have been omitted from its ken, which when included will revolutionise some of their accepted opinions; but, however this may be, there can be no doubt about the tendency of orthodox science at the present time. It suggests to us that the Cosmos is self-explanatory, self-contained, and self -maintaining. From everlasting to everlasting the material universe rolls on, composing worlds and disintegrating them, producing vegetable beauty and destroying it, evolving intelligent animal life, developing that into a self-conscious human race, and then plunging it once more into annihilation.

"Thou makest thine appeal to me!

I bring to life, I bring to death, The spirit does but mean the breath, I know no more. . . ."

Eut at this point the theologian happily and eagerly interposes, with a crucial inquiry of science about this same bringing to life. Granted that the blaze of the sun accounts for winds and waves, and hail, and rain, and rivers, and all the myriad activities of the earth, does it account for life? Has it accounted for the life of the lowest animal, the tiniest plant, the simplest cell, hardly visible but yet selfmoving, in the field of a microscope?

And science, in chagrin, has to confess that hitherto in this direction it has failed. It has not yet witnessed the origin of the smallest trace of life from dead matter: all life, so far as has been watched, proceeds from antecedent life. Given the life of a single cell, science would esteem itself competent ultimately to trace its evolution into all the myriad existences of plant and animal and man; but the origin of protoplasmic activity itself as yet eludes it. But will the Theologian triumph in the admission? will he therein detect at last the dam which shall stem the torrent of scepticism? will he base an argument for the direct action of the Deity in mundane affairs on that failure, and entrench himself behind that present incompetence of labouring men? If so, he takes his stand on what may prove a yielding foundation. 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. In an early stage of civilisation it may have been supposed that flame only proceeded from antecedent flame, but the tinder-box and the lucifer-match were invented nevertheless. Theologians have probably learnt by this time that their central tenets should not be founded, even partially, upon nescience, or upon negations of any kind, lest the placid progress of positive knowledge should once more undermine their position, and another discovery have to be scouted with alarmed and violent anathemas.