Natural religion

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Chapter I. God In Nature

When we listen to the newest school of the expounders of science we sometimes hear with surprise phrases which remind us of the peculiar dialect of Christianity. This happens when the subject is learning and learned men. Who does not remember St. Paul's contempt for " the wisdom of the world," for the Greeks to whom the Gospel was foolishness, and how the Apostle's contempt for learning has been echoed wherever Christian feeling has been vigorous, so that even learned Christians have despised their own learning and have taken a pleasure in placing themselves on a level with the ignorant? Who does not know how at the same time Christianity has contrasted the learning which it contemns with another kind of knowledge which it prizes infinitely ? Wealth, power, everything that is counted desirable, Christians despise in comparison with a certain kind of knowledge. It is among these things comparatively despicable that they class what is commonly called learning. They despise it not as learning, but as learning comparatively worthless in quality, a counterfeit of the true learning which it is happiness and salvation to possess.

Now in this respect scientific men now hold the very same language. They resemble Christians in treating with great contempt what goes by the name of learning and philosophy, in comparison with another sort of wisdom which they believe themselves to possess. In praise of knowledge they grow eloquent, and use language of scriptural elevation. It is their unceasing cry that all good is to be expected from the increase of true knowledge ; that the happiness both of the race and individuals depends upon the advance of real science, and the application of it to human life. Yet they have a contempt for learning, which is just as Christian in its tone as their love for knowledge. ^'Erudition" and "philosophy" are terms of contempt in their mouths. They denounce the former as a busy idleness, and the latter as a sham wisdom, consisting mainly of empty words, and offering solutions either imaginary or unintelligible of problems which are either imaginary or unintelligible themselves. All members of the modern school are, it is true, not equally plain-spoken ; some will profess to admire scholarship and erudition, speaking of it as a graceful accomplishment; and it is only in unguarded moments that they betray their conviction that it is nothing more ; but others proclaim it loudly, and a few even wish to bring public opinion to bear upon the matter, so as to suppress as an immorality the acquiring of useless knowledge.

Thus, the old religious school, and that new school whose convictions we see now gradually acquiring the character of a religion, agree in combining a passionate love for what they believe true knowledge with a contempt for so-called learning and philosophy. The common enemy of both is what the one school calls, and the other might well call, "the wisdom of the world." But though agreeing so far, these two schools hate their common enemy much less than they hate each other. For each regards the "true wisdom " of the other as worse and more mischievous than the wisdom of the world which each rejects. To the scientific school the Christian *^ hidden wisdom " is a mystical superstition, compared with which " learning and philosophy " are science itself. To the Christian, modern science is a darkness compared with which the science that St. Paul rejected might almost be called Christianity.

Nothing is so terrible as this clashing of opposite religions. Differences on subjects of the first importance are always painful, but the direct shock of contrary enthusiasms has something appalling about it. That one man's highest truth should be another man's deadliest falsehood ; that one man should be ready to die in disinterested self-devotion for a cause which another man is equally ready to oppose at the sacrifice of his life ; this is a horror which is none the less horrible because it has often been witnessed on our perplexed planet. But often it has been perceived, long after the conflict was over, that there had been misapprehension, that the difference of opinion was not really anything like so complete as it seemed. Nay, it has often happened that a later generation has seen the difference to be very small indeed, and has wondered that so much could have been made of it. In such cases the mind is reheved of that fancy of a radical discord in human nature. We see that self-devotions have not really clashed in such fell antagonism. We recognize that self-devotion may be alloyed with less noble feelings, with some that are blamable and some that are even ludicrous, with mere pugnacity, with the passion of gratifying self-importance, with the half noble pleasure that there is in fighting, and the ignoble pleasure that there is in giving pain.

It would certainly be hard enough to show that the present strife between Christianity and Science is one in which insignificant differences are magnified by the imagination of the combatants. The question is nothing less than this, whether we are to regard the grave with assured hope, and the ties between human beings as indissoluble by death ; or, on the other hand, to dismiss the hope of a future life as too doubtful to be worth considering, even if not absolutely chimerical. No reasoning can make such a difference into a small one. But even where the differences are so great, it may still be worth while to call attention to the points of agreement. If there is some truth, however small, upon which all can agree, then there is some action upon which all can unite ; and who can tell how much may be done by anything so rare as absolute unanimity? Moreover, if we look below the surface of controversy, we shall commonly find more agreement and less disagreement than we had expected. Agreement is slow of speech and attracts little notice, disagreement has always plenty to say for itself Agreement utters chiefly platitudes and truisms. And yet, though platitudes and truisms do not work up into interesting books, if our object is to accomplish something for human life, we shall scarcely find any truth serviceable that has not been rubbed into a truism, and scarcely any maxim that has not been worn . into a platitude. Let the attempt then be made for once to apply this principle in the greatest and most radical of all controversies. Let us put religion by the side of

GOD IN NATURE.

science in its latest most aggressive form, with the view not of trying the question between them, but simply of measuring how mucH ground is common to both. In their tone, in their attitude towards philosophy and learning there seems some resemblance. Let us examine this resemblance more closely.

We are all familiar with the language used by Christians in disparagement of learning. God, they say, has revealed to men all that is essential for them to know. By the side of revealed knowledge what the human intellect can discover for itself is of little importance. If it seem to clash with revelation it is mischievous ; if not, it may be useful in a subordinate degree. But at the best it is contemptible by the side of the '^one thing needful; " and the greatest discoverer that ever lived is a trifler compared with the most simple-minded Christian who has studied to fulfil the requirements of the Gospel.

There is indeed a true erudition and a true philosophy, the subject of which is God's revelation itself Scholars, profoundly read in the sources of theology, whether they be supposed to be the Bible or Christian Antiquity, philosophers who have made the Christian revelation their basis, or have collected and elucidated the evidences of it — these are truly wise, and escape the censure of frivolity under which secular learning lies ; but even these, illustrious and venerable as they may be, will acknowledge that there is a wisdom beyond their own, which the humblest Christian may possess, the wisdom of simple belief and love.

We are less familiar as yet with the invectives of scientific men against what has long passed for learning and philosophy in the world. Different sections of the sWentific school bring the accusation in different language. Yet the same feeling, the same strong and contemptuous conviction, pervades the whole school. What they assail seems to be, in two words, knowledge based on authority, and knowledge wanting an inductive basis.

That the utterances of great and famous philosophers are to be taken as truth, that in philosophy as in the civil law, the responsa prudentiim have a binding force, has been accepted in some departments of knowledge up to the present day. Long after the authority of Aristotle had been shaken new thinkers were allowed to occupy a similar place in some branches, and from Descartes to Hegel a sort of monarchical rule has prevailed in metaphysics. Science as distinguished from philosophy has always been more republican. Not that it refuses to reverence superior minds, not perhaps that it is altogether incapable of yielding to the temptation of trusting a particular authority for a while too much, or following a temporary fashion. But as a general rule it rejects as a superstition the notion that the most superior mind is at all infallible ; it dissents without scruple from those whom it reverences most; and on the other hand the most eminent members of it encourage this freedom, are well pleased to be contradicted, and avoid assuming an oracular style as a mark of charlatanry. We see now the regime of science established in philosophy also ; the autocracy of Hegel comes to an end, not by the accession of a new monarch, but rather by the proclamation of a republic in German philosophy.

It is a change of system in the intellectual world, by which much established doctrine is branded with the mark of spuriousness. In theology, metaphysics, moral and political philosophy, history, the principle of authority has reigned hitherto with more or less exclusiveness, and the repudiation of it makes a revolution in those departments of knowledge. Authoritative treatises are consigned to oblivion, ancient controversies cease, the whole store of learning hived up in many capacious memories becomes worthless. The change throw^s discredit at the same time upon the very name of erudition ; not as such, for there is a kind of erudition much appreciated by the scientific school; but because erudition, as hitherto understood, has commonly gone along with, has in a great degree grown out of, an excessive reverence for the opinions of famous men. All that part of erudition, in particular, which may be called in a word " commentatorship," begins to seem superstitious and childish, when the general estimate of human wisdom so decidedly sinks.

But the more important change is in the extension of the methods of physical science to the whole domain of knowledge. While one part of the ^Svisdom of the world" has been discredited as resting solely on authority, another large division of it is now rejected as resting on insufficient induction, and another as resting on groundless assumptions, disguised under the name of necessary truths, truths of the reason, truths given in consciousness, &c. No one needs to be told what havoc this physical method is making with received systems, and it produces a sceptical disposition of mind towards primary principles which have been thought to lie deeper than all systems. Those current abstractions, which make up all the morality and all the philosophy of most people, have been brought under suspicion. Mind and matter, duties and rights, morality and expediency, honor and interest, virtue and vice, — all these words, which seemed once to express elementary and certain realities, now strike us as just the words which, thrown into the scientific crucible, might dissolve at once. It is thus not merely philosophy which is discredited, but just that homely and popular wisdom by which common life is guided. This too, it appears, instead of being the sterhng product of plain experience, is the overflow of an immature philosophy, the redundance of the uncontrolled speculations of thinkers who were unacquainted with scientific method.

This second change leads to self- distrust, as the first led to distrust of other men. As we learn not to take our truth at second-hand from other thinkers, so we learn that we must not take it, if the expression may be used, firom ourselves. Truth is not what we think, any more than it is what famous men have thought. That which irresistibly strikes us as true, that which seems self-evident, that which commends itself to us, may nevertheless, we learn, not be true at all. It is not enough to judge for ourselves, to examine the facts independently. We must examine the facts according to a rigorous method, which has been elaborated by a long series of investigators, and without which neither candor nor impartiality would save us either from seeing wrong, or from receiving unsound evidence, or from generalizing too fast, or from allowing some delusive name to come between us and the reality. Distrust of others, distrust of ourselves — if the first of these two factors of the scientific spirit were separated from the second, the result would be mere self-conceit, mere irreverence. As it is, the scientific spirit is simply a jealous watchfulness against that tendency of human

GOD IN NATURE. q

nature to read itself into the Universe, which is both natural to each individual and may mislead the very greatest investigators, and which can only be controlled by rigorously adhering to a fixed process, and rigidly verifying the work of others by the same.

Such untested knowledge might very fitly be called by the name which Christianity uses. It might be called ''human knowledge," or ''the wisdom of the world." For the difference between it and genuine knowledge is just this, that it is adulterated by a human element. It is not the result of a contact between the universe and the naked human intelligence. The perceiving mind has mixed itself up with the thing perceived, and not merely in the way in which it always must, in the way which constitutes cognition, but in quite other and arbitrary ways, by wishes, by prejudices, by crotchets, by dreams. Such humanized views of the Universe have a peculiar though cheap attractiveness. They naturally please the human mind, because, in fact, they were expressly contrived to do so. They adapt themselves readily to rhetoric and poetry, because, in fact, they are rhetoric and poetry in disguise. To reject them is to mortify human nature ; it is an act of vigorous asceticism. It is to renounce the world as truly as the Christian does when he protests against fashionable vices. It is to reject a pleasant thing on the ground that it is insincere ; that it is not in fact what it professes to be. The moral attitude of the man who does it is just such as Hebrew prophets assumed towards the flattering and lying court- prophets of their day ; just such as the earliest Christianity assumed towards Pharisaism ; just such as Luther and Knox assumed towards the secularized Church of the later lO NATURAL RELIGION.

Middle Age. It is an attitude of indignant sincerity, an attitude marking an inward determination to accept the trutli of the Universe, however disagreeable, and not to allow it to be adulterated and drugged, so as to suit our human feebleness. If we cannot produce from the Scriptures of our religion texts directly sanctioning it, this is because the particular problem was not presented in ancient times to the Jewish nation. Those Scriptures are full of passages expressing in poetic forms and in language suited to another age the spirit of modern science. Notably, the book of Job, not in occasional passages only, but as its main object and drift, contrasts the conventional, and, as it w^ere, orthodox view of the Universe, with the view which those obtain wdio are prepared to face its awfulness directly.

Thus the religious view and the scientific view of the Universe, which are thought to be so opposite, agree in this important point. Both protest earnestly against human wisdom. Both wait for a message which is to come to them from without. Religion says, '' Let man be silent, and Hsten when God speaks." Science says, " Let us interrogate Nature, and let us be sure that the answer we get is really Nature's, and not a mere echo of our own voice." Now w^hether or not religion and science agree in what they recommend, it is evident thart they agree in w^hat they denounce. They agree in denouncing that pride of the human intellect which supposes it knows everything, which is not passive enough in the presence of reality, but deceives itself with pompous words instead of things, and with flattering eloquence instead of sober truth.

Here, however, it will be said, the agreement between

GOD IN NATURE. I I

religion and science ends, and even this agreement is only apparent. Science protests against the idols or delusions of the human intellect, in order that it may substitute for them the reality of Nature ; religion sacrifices all those idols to the greatest of them all, which is God. For what is God — so the argument runs — but a hypothesis, which religious men have mistaken for a demonstrated reality ? And is it not precisely against such premature hypotheses that science most strenuously protests ? That a Personal Will is the cause of the Universe — this might stand very well as a hypothesis to work with, until facts should either confirm it, or force it to give way to another either different or at least modified. That this Personal Will is benevolent, and is shown to be so by the facts of the Universe, which evince a providential care for man and other animals — this is just one of those plausibiHties, which passed muster before scientific method was understood — but modern science rejects it as unproved. Modern science holds that there may be design in the Universe, but that to penetrate the design is, and probably always will be, beyond the power of the human understanding. That this Personal Will has on particular occasions revealed itself by breaking through the customary order of the Universe, and performing what are called miracles — this — it is said — is one of those legends of which histories were full, until a stricter view of evidence was introduced, and the modern critical spirit sifted thoroughly the annals of the world. But if modern science be right in these opinions, the very notion of God seems to be removed altogether from the domain of practical life. So long as God appeared certainly to exist. He necessarily eclipsed and reduced to insignificance all other existences. So long as it was held possible to discover His will and mind, all other inquiries might reasonably be pronounced frivolous. But all is changed as soon as we begin to regard His existence as a mere hypothesis, and His will as inscrutable and beyond the reach of the human understanding. Not only is all changed, but all is reversed. Instead of being the one important question, God's will now becomes the one ///^important question because the one question which it is essentially impossible to answer. Whereas before we might charge men with frivolity who neglected this inquiry for inquiries the most important in themselves, now we may pronounce the shallowest dilettante, the most laboriously idle antiquary, a solid and sensible man compared to the theologian. They pursue, to be sure, very minute objects, but they do or may attain them ; the theologian attempts an impossibility — he is like the child who tries to reach the beginning of the rainbow.

It would appear, then, that that which I have called *^ human wisdom," and which is the butt at the same time of theology and science, is so because it is a kind of middle party between two mortally hostile factions. It is like the Girondins between the Royalists and the Jacobins ; both may oppose, and may even in a particular case combine to oppose it, and yet they may feel not the slightest sympathy with each other. And the middle party once crushed, there will follow no reconciliation, but a mortal contest between the extremes.

Is this so or is it otherwise ? The question is whether the statement given above of the theological view of the Universe is exhaustive or not ? Is it all summed up in the three propositions that a Personal Will is the cause

GOD IN NATURE. I 3

of the Universe, that that Will is perfectly benevolent, that that Will has sometimes interfered by miracles with the order of the Universe ? If these propositions exhaust it, and science throws discredit upon all of them, evidently theology and science are irreconcilable, and the contest between them must end in the destruction of one or the other.

It may be remarked, in the first place, that these propositions are not so much an abstract of theology as of the particular theology now current. That God is perfectly benevolent is a maxim of popular Christianity, and it may be supported by Biblical texts. But it is not necessary to theology or religion as such. Many nations have believed in gods of mixed or positively malignant character. Other nations have indeed ascribed to their deities all the admirable quahties they could conceive, but benevolence was not one of these. They have believed in gods that were beautiful, powerful, immortal, happy, but not benevolent. It may even be said that the Bible and Christianity itself have not uniformly represented God as perfectly benevolent. In the Old Testament He is described as just, but at the same time terrible and pitiless against the wicked and even the children of the wicked ; and at least one form of modern Christianity, Calvinism, takes a view of the Divine character which it is impossible to reconcile with infinite benevolence. Moreover, if almost all theologies have introduced what we should describe as miracle, yet it would be very incorrect to class many of them in this respect with that current view of Christianity which represents God as demonstrating His existence by occasional interruptions of the order, otherwise invariable, of Nature. Probably, in the majority of theologies, no other law of nature, except the will of God, is recognized ; miracle when it is introduced is not regarded as breaking through any order ; the very notion implied in the word "supernatural" is unacknowledged; miraculous occurrences are not distinguished from ordinary ones, except as being rarer, and are not distinguished from rare occurrences at all. To an ancient Jew probably an earthquake and the staying of the sun on Gibeon were occurrences of precisely the same character, and not distinguished as they are in our minds, the one as rare but natural, the other as supernatural and miraculous. All that was miraculous might have been removed from the creed of an ancient Jew without shaking his theology.

Two out of the three propositions then are not necessary to the theological view of the Universe. But surely the third is. Surely all theology implies that a Personal Will is the cause of the Universe. Well, but how? In the first place, it is a very shallow view of theologies which represents them as having in all cases sprung from speculation about causes. True that we can trace this speculation in our own religion. The phenomena of the world are accounted for very manifestly in the book of Genesis by the fiat of a Personal Will. But this is not at all an invariable character of theology. The Deity of a thing is often regarded in theologies not at all as the cause of it, but in quite another way, perhaps I might say as the unity of it. No one has ever supposed that the Greeks regarded Poseidon as the cause of the sea. Athena may have been suggested to them by the sky, but she is not the cause of the sky. And it would be easy to conceive a theology which did not occupy itself

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at all with causes, but which at the same time conceived the separate phenomena of the Universe, or the Universe itself altogether personally,

" Yes, personally ! Here, then, at any rate, we have the invariable characteristic of theology, namely, in the use it makes of personality. Not necessarily as a cause, but in some way as an explanation, or, at least, as a help to conception, theologies introduce personaHty where science sees only impersonal force." Even this statement is loose enough. Personality entire has never been attributed in any theology to deities. Personality, as we know it, involves mortality. Deities are usually supposed immortal. Personality involves a body. The highest theologies have declared God to be incorporeal. May we then fall back upon the will and say. Theologies attribute to deities a will Hke that of human beings ? But again the highest theologies assert that the Divine Will is high above the human ; that there is ^^ no searching " of it ; '' that as the heaven is high above the earth, so are His ways than our ways, and His thoughts than our thoughts."

If the possibility of miracles were entirely given up, and the order of nature decided to be as invariable as science inclines to consider it ; if all the appearances of benevolent design in the Universe were explained away, it might be true that the belief in God would cease to be consoling. Instead of being a spring of life and activity, it might — I am not now saying it would — become a depressing and overwhelming influence. And this, no doubt, is what people mean when they identify, as they commonly do, the belief in God with belief in an overruling Benevolence and in the supernatural.

They mean to say, not exactly that the belief in God is necessarily this, but that to be in any way useful or beneficial it must necessarily be this. But for my present purpose it is important to distinguish between the God in whom ordinary people at the present day beheve and a God of another character in whom they might conceivably beheve. I desire to insist upon the point that when science speaks of God as a myth or a hypothesis, and declares the existence of God to be doubtful and destined always to remain doubtful, it is speaking of a particular conception of God, of God conceived as benevolent, as outside of nature, as personal, as the cause of phenomena. Do these attributes of benevolence, personahty, &c., exhaust the idea of God? Are they — not merely the most important, the most consoling of His attributes, but — the only ones ? By denying them do we cease not merely to be orthodox Christians but to be theists ?

Science opposes to God Nature. When it denies God it denies the existence of any power beyond or superior to Nature ; and it may deny at the same time anything like a caicse of Nature. It believes in certain laws of co-existence and sequence in phenomena, and in denying God it means to deny that anything further can be known. God and Nature then express notions which are different in an important particular. But it is evident enough that these notions are not the opposites that controversy would represent them to be. On the contrary, they coincide up to a certain point. Those who beheve in Nature may deny God, but those who believe in God, beheve, as a matter of course, in Nature also, since God includes Nature, as the whole includes

GOD IN NATURE.

the part. It is no doubt fashionable to represent theology as disregarding Nature, as passing by the laws which govern the Universe, and occupying itself solely with occasional suspensions of them, or with ulterior, inscrutable causes. But this conception of theology is derived from a partial view of it. It answers well enough to a modern phase into which theology has passed since it was expelled from the domain of Nature by the rival and victorious method of physical science. To the older theologies it is wholly inapplicable. They occupied themselves quite as much with laws as with causes ; so far from being opposed to science, they were in fact themselves science in a rudimentary form ; so far from neglecting the natural for the supernatural, they scarcely recognized any distinction between them. The true object of theology at the beginning was to throw light upon natural laws ; it used no doubt a crude method, and in some cases it attempted problems which modern science calls insoluble. Then, when a new method was introduced, theology stuck obstinately to its old one, and when the new method proved itself successful, theology gradually withdrew into those domains where as yet the old method was not threatened, and might still reign without opposition. Thus it began to be supposed that law appertained to science, and suspension of law or miracle to theology ; that the one was concerned with Nature, and the other with that which was above Nature. Gradually the name of God began to be associated with the supernatural, until scientific men began to say they had nothing to do with God, and theologians to find something alien to them in the word Nature.

I 8 NATURAL RELIGION.

Yet theology can never go further than this in repudiating Nature. It can never deny that Nature is an ordinance of God ; it can never question that the laws of Nature are among the laws of God. It may indeed treat them as His less important laws, or as a revelation of Him which is not precisely the revelation we want. But it cannot and does not deny that Nature too is a revelation of God ; it ought not to deny that there is a theology which may be called natural, and which does not consist in a collection of the evidences of benevolent design in the Universe, but in a true deduction of the laws which govern the Universe, whatever those laws may be, and whatever they may seem to indicate concerning the character of God.