Religious certainty

Contents

Page I. Life and Certainty 5

II. The Objections of Common Sense 22

III. The Objections of the Scientist 31

II The Objections Of Common Sense

The first objection comes from the practical man and is urged in the name of common sense. He tells us that our plan means nothing more or less than that a man should shut his eyes and believe what he pleases. The practical man insists that our view is nothing but selfsophistication — if a belief is good for us we are to hold it fast. This is to do in the realm of thinking what many people are trying to do in the realm of practice — blink at the tough inevitableness of the actual system and look only at what is pleasant. Such thought is sooner or later doomed to a fearful smash in a head-on collision with reality. The plain man of common sense maintains that the important question in religion, as everywhere else, is : What are the facts?

In reply we urge that we are looking for the

facts just as truly as is the common-sense

objector; and we insist, in turn, that the

objector shall not overlook the facts. Espe-

OBJECTIONS OF COMMON SENSE

cially must he not overlook the fact whose importance we have been emphasizing — the presence of belief in the world, the tenacity of belief, and the beneficial consequences which follow belief. Of course, it is open to the common-sense objector to maintain that many troublesome consequences follow belief, and he may refer to swarms of aberrations. We are talking, however, about the great catholic convictions of Christianity — the proneness of men to believe in the God revealed in Christ, the dignity of man and the worth of life as taught by Christianity. There could seem to be in the main but little doubt as to the consequences of such beliefs. The man of common sense can hardly have lot or part in this matter until he is willing to think of the significance of belief as fact.

We might urge, further, that even the most ordinary seeing depends not only upon the eye, but upon the mind back of the eye, and upon the demands of that mind. To an extent greater than we ordinarily think we see what we are looking for. We do not insist upon this point, however, but rather protest against the charge that we shut our eyes upon the facts. We have said that we wish to satisfy the demands of our total nature — including our power to see the facts. If we blinded ourselves we should hardly be satisfying the demands of our total nature. We call for the most open-eyed and steady gaze upon the facts. Still, in interpreting and arranging our facts we insist upon some sort of perspective. Not every fact is to be put on the same plane as every other fact. Among the facts of our lives is this tendency to make the largest and best assumptions we can ; and we maintain that this is the important fact. A man stands beside the dead body of his child. Here are the facts — the dead body and the open grave. But are these all? Hardly; within the man is an inner protest against these facts as being final. That protest is also a fact. If the father goes forth on the assumption that his child still lives and is in the keeping of a good God we look upon the resulting satisfaction and the resulting enlargement of the father's life as a witness to the truth of his belief.

OBJECTIONS OF COMMON SENSE

We declare that our method is just the method of any common sense that even half understands itself. It is the method by which we get on. We trust our friends, assuming the best concerning them till reason for doubt appears — that is to say, till life on that assumption is no longer satisfactory. Every practical experiment proceeds on assumption. We maintain that we must bring out into the light this essential procedure and recognize it as authoritative in religious thinking. We cannot subscribe to a method which blinks at even one fact. We do insist, however, that the life back of the interpretation of the fact shall be made as deep and full as possible, for with the resulting depth and fullness come demands which are authoritative prophets of the truth. Beliefs are outcomes and results. They are caused in us by life processes and are, in turn, the cause of further life. They stand finally in their own right not merely because bodies of facts compel us to hold them, but they stand in their own right in the same way that life itself stands. They come as the mark of the instinct of intellectual and moral self-preservation. The enlarging of the life means the enlarging of the belief. The mind must have more and more room. Some beliefs fail not because there are not facts to support them, but just because the beliefs themselves are not big enough. The soul is bound to make a place for itself. Of course, it is easy to sneer at this conception and say that it is rather flabby intellectual procedure which tells us to believe what is good for us, but if we make "what is good for us" wide enough we have the only worthy method. We live in a day which lays great stress on the survival of the fittest, and we believe that the principle holds in the realm of belief as elsewhere. In fact, our very belief in the survival of the fittest rests finally on a belief that the fittest ought to survive. We cannot tolerate a universe in which the unfit are to monopolize the success in living. The impulse to seize the view which our principle of eminent domain calls for is for us the allessential fact. It is for us the sign of spiritual life, as truly as the impulse to national expansion is a sign of national life.

The man of common sense keeps insisting,

OBJECTIONS OF COMMON SENSE

however, that he must know if there is really anything "out there." We reply that this is I the very question we are trying to answer. There seems to be no way of going directly "out there" to see if there is objective reality corresponding to our religious beliefs; the only way is to see what is "in here," in the way of vitality as a consequence of religious beliefs. No doubt there is a difference between the object of religious belief in itself and that object as held in our thought, but if we find that enlarging religious belief is followed by enlarging life we shall hold that our minds are in the path to truth. We will not have it that a belief which lifts us out of ourselves and beyond ourselves comes merely from ourselves. We must have some deeper cause.

We insist that our argument is merely common sense. We account for faith in the unseen by assuming that the unseen world somehow gets in contact with minds and makes itself believed in. We believe that the unseen is at work in causing men to believe because we do not find anything among the things seen to account for faith. Strong as the material forces are, they are not strong enough to make us think that they cause our belief in God. And we do not make faith ourselves, for it comes upon us in spite of ourselves. We cannot completely shake ourselves loose from it. If we give up believing in one kind of unseen we end in believing in another. Believing is as unescapable as breathing. Faith, then, is a fact — an actual exercise of the whole life in response to some stimulus that comes upon us from somewhere. We do not prove that the stimulus comes from the God of the unseen, but we assume that it does and see how the assumption works in life, and the assumption works well.

To use another figure of speech, and this time an old, old one, the response of the soul to the unseen forces is like the response of the needle to the pole. The pole throws the needle into a state of immense activity. If the needle could come to consciousness and go to reasoning it might reflect upon the fact that it felt this irresistible impulse, and upon the farther fact that when the impulse was allowed to have full sway it made the force of the needle

OBJECTIONS OF COMMON SENSE

stretch in one direction. A circle of needles around the earth all pointing toward one spot would indicate the presence of something at that spot to give the needles their direction and draw forth their magnetic activities. Such reasoning needles might not be able to travel toward the magnetic pole, but they could locate pretty exactly the whereabouts of the pole from the set of their own experiences. A circle of souls around the earth or across the ages, all pointing in one direction when the spiritual impulse which results in the attitude which we call faith is allowed to have full sway, is an indication of the reality of the Unseen Spirit. We have sensibleness enough to believe that the good impulses of lives of highest and most intense activity, even the activity of faith, are not lining themselves up around nothing. We do not believe that the needles of the compasses on land and sea are arranging themselves with dress-parade precision around a powerless empty space in the north. Faith is the pointing of a life. Its pointing out toward an unseen is an indication that there is something out there which draws out its power. Faith is the evidence of things not seen. We believe in the reality of the unseen because we believe. Not much of an argument from the standpoint of formal reasoning, but a part of the good sense by which we make ourselves at home in the universe.

Ill

THE OBJECTIONS OF THE SCIENTIST

If a scientist could have heard this discussion thus far he would no doubt have been vastly amused at the desperately unscientific character of our procedure. He would have been very speedily convinced that the moment a man begins a theological discussion he forthwith parts company with all those whose mental steps are taken with any degree of scientific circumspection. A word with the scientist, then, may not be out of place.

Why should there be any science? To answer this question with a reference to the great practical benefits which have come with scientific discovery will hardly suffice in view of the fact that the greatest scientists have very often not thought of practical results at all. The scientists have been driven and consumed by an enormous scientific curiosity. By the very make of their minds they have been determined to ask why until they found out why. The assumption that we must have even a scientific explanation of the universe is a good deal of an assumption. As a matter of fact, the scientist is one of the most passionate assumers we know. He is simply bound to make a place in life for orderly knowing, and will go to any length to seize and master facts.

The great scientific principles have been won by the exercise of a right of intellectual eminent domain. We will not discuss such abstruse matters as the atomic theory, for example, with its agreement upon atoms as convenient theoretical creations which the mind holds as resting places in spite of the contradictions which make their nests in them. Take rather the principle which we call the uniformity of nature. Without attempting a formal definition, we may say that the essential meaning of this principle seems to be that there are no breaks in the operation of natural law. Is this a principle with which a mind passive in the presence of the facts would inevitably be impressed? Is there so little chaos in the observed order of nature that the observer finds the thought of uniformity irresistible? The sun rises every day, to be sure; the seasons advance in a more or less orderly procession, and organic changes seem to take place according to a somewhat rhythmic ebb and flow ; but this is not all the story, by any means. Many events seem shot at us from a gun, the gun in the hands of a rather irresponsible sportsman at that. In the realm both of the organic and the inorganic the most unlooked-for events, apparently the most freakish occurrences, are continually happening. To go no further than the weather for illustration, do the changes all suggest inevitably the uniformity of nature? The scientist might respond that a break in the connection as we see it does not mean a break in the continuity of the underlying law. He might point out to us that the earth might at any moment collide with a comet and be dissipated into gas in a fraction of a second. Here we would have the greatest imaginable break in the chain of events and no break at all in the underlying laws which govern cometary and planetary movements and the destructions through shock and heat. We reply, however, that we are not dealing with underlying principles evidently reached by an involved process of scientific reasonings, but with the facts as they report themselves to the so-called passive observer; and we say that in these there is not enough to warrant a claim that the principle of the uniformity of nature is reached by presuppositionless observation.

If the uniformity of nature is not always clearly discernible in the succession of events is it one of those self-evident axioms whose obviousness makes it folly to speak of them as assumptions? Hardly. For anything which we can see to the contrary, a cause might be followed now by one effect and now by another, and that with the circumstances precisely similar in the two cases. This might be true if the world-cause be thought of as either material or spiritual. If materialism is accepted we can hardly bind matter to act always in the same way under the same circumstances unless we have some indubitable assurance to that effect, which under the circumstances could hardly be expected. If spirit is accepted as the world-cause our own inner experience would suggest to us that a spiritual cause might under similar circumstances in two cases follow now one course and now another. For all we know a priori, the universe may be the disconnected, incoherent ejaculations of a mind staggering along under the law of association.

What, then, is the truth about the uniformity of nature? Just this : there is a measure of observable regularity in nature. With the awakening of the intellectual spirit the regularity rather than the chaos is seized upon as expressing the deepest truth, and this just to satisfy an imperious intellectual need. Then uniformity is assumed even in the situations most lawless in appearance, and the clue to the law sought for with a grim persistency. The mind will not have a lawless universe. The scientist proceeds with the principle of the uniformity of nature simply because he is bound to have it. He holds it because it satisfies him.

Assumptions, then, come out of the scientific temper. Assumption underlies not only the general procedure of the scientific thinker, but marks very definitely his dealing with many classes of specific facts. Suppose we have before us a body of facts about whose objective reality there can be no question and the only point at issue is as to the interpretation of the facts. Here are two scientific physicians contemplating precisely the same set of facts about a patient. Let us suppose that the examination of the patient has been complete. The doctors have all the facts obtainable. One doctor interprets the fact in one way and the other in another way, with correspondingly different recommendations as to treatment. One may pronounce the patient at the point of death, and the other may find nothing in his condition but what may be easily set right. So two scientists look upon nature. One pronounces nature to be acting in a way which calls for no improvement, while the other pronounces nature sick unto death. The difference here is between the backlying assumptions, assumptions which are all the more potent through the fact that they are hardly suspected by their holders.

The above illustration has to do with interpretation of patent facts which cannot be doubted. If there is any chance for emphasis on the facts which support his thought we may find one of the doctors putting such stress upon the aspects favorable to him that the other facts are altogether ignored. If there is the slightest opportunity we shall find one doctor or the other going on to "pick and sort" from the facts. Then there is no limit to the conclusions that may be reached. The truth is that the scientific investigators in all spheres carry with them sets of intellectual tastes and appetites which are responsible for unconscious assumptions. The investigator may never have formulated his thought of the values of different kinds of truth, but he has a scale of relative values, nevertheless, whose subtle and unconscious force is incalculable. Take the one thought as to the significance of human life. If the specialist in any branch looks upon the higher spiritual interests of the true human life as of no consequence, or as of so little consequence, for example, that the system of material things is not to be looked upon as in any way secondary or subsidiary, we shall know about what to expect. We shall at least have a different result from that of the believer in the inherent value and dignity of the human soul.

The force of this something which we call the spirit of the investigator is indeed marvelous. We are all inevitably under its influence. Who of us could be brought to believe in witchcraft as an explanation of any facts? Evidence enough might be produced. Evidence enough was produced in another day to convince impartial and learned judges that witches had been at work. We have discovered no facts which make the existence of witches an impossibility. Still, we do not believe in them and we will not believe in them. The intellectual life has so enlarged — we are so under the sway of a new set of intellectual demands — since the day of witchcraft that we will not reopen that case; and this is about all we can say. Or take the matter of spiritistic communication with the dead through "mediums" as it is put before us to-day. We must all admit that the great difficulty before the believer in spiritualism is to get us to listen to him. Our atmosphere is against him. It may be an arid atmosphere begotten by scientific hostility to the belief in the realm of the unseen, or it may be the foggy atmosphere of doubt as to the persistence of soul beyond death, or it may be the cloudy atmosphere which prefers to have some things left in mystery, or it may be the storm-laden atmosphere of wrath against previous impostors. Whatever the cause, the task before the member of the Society for Psychical Kesearch is to create a friendly intellectual atmosphere.

In all our actual reasoning very few questions are settled by strict evidence. Habits and expectations and prejudices play the decisive part. In his subjection to these influences the scientist himself must abandon all claim that his method is strictly without assumption. The scientist cannot shake himself loose from this essentially human characteristic of reasoning simply by passing beyond the laboratory door. It would be as impossible for him to carry on his investigations in an intellectual vacuum free from all passional influences as for him to live without air. He carries swarms of assumptions with him — assumptions, too, which he is at no pains to adjust with the conflicting assumptions of other specialists — and he is surrounded by an atmosphere which makes it necessary for him to rely upon unconscious assumptions at every step of his way.

We can go further and say that the scientist depends upon assumptions, conscious or unconscious, so completely that in many instances these determine what facts he is to discover. The scientist does not go into the laboratory with a mind passively waiting for the facts to unfold themselves. The inductive method does not by any means consist in a mere chronicling of observed phenomena. We may well believe William James when he says that the impartial passionless investigator is the veriest duffer. To be sure, the student may stumble now and then upon a fact laden with immense suggestiveness, or, sailing, like Columbus, across an unknown sea, he may by merest accident catch a glimpse of the moving light which reveals the nearness of land ; but, making all allowance for exceptions, we have to declare that science has its strength not in a colorless impartiality, but in a passionate prepossession and prejudice and demand. To borrow a hint from Walter Bagehot, we must find the forcefulness of the inductive method to lie in the suspicion that certain factors are "guilty" of certain results. The scientist shadows the suspected forces and hunts for evidence against them. Of course, there are many factors against which a particular accusation will not hold, but the failure to bring a case at one place will only lead to a livelier tracing of clues in another direction. The scientist is really nature's detective, and the whole mental coloring which grows out of his experience as an investigator comes in decisively to the interpretation of each detail.

He is looking for something in particular, and his whole course of action is based on the assumption that that something exists and that it can be run down and caught. Columbus did not expect to discover America, but he expected to discover something in particular, and he would never have sailed if he had not been driven by the force of unverified assumptions. When enough facts have been secured to transform the general and perhaps vague expectation into a carefully formulated theory, the theory itself enters the investigator's mind as part of the assumption with or from which he works. He then knows all the more definitely just the result at which he expects to arrive. There is abundant search to-day for facts confirmatory of the theory of evolution. The evolutionist knows pretty well what he is looking for. He suspects a realm of nature to be guilty of events which will lend aid and comfort to the current doctrine. He lays snares for these accomplices and decoys them into the desired revelation. If the missing links are ever all found, and the progress upward shown with no step left untraced, it will be because the scientist has known just what to look for. The scientist no more thinks of discovering facts in general than the inventor thinks of making machines in general. Each strives at something definite — the inventor at a submarine boat or a flying machine, and the scientist at a new planet or a new microbe. Scientific certainty is largely the satisfaction of an imperious demand. It is not merely a matter of the objective facts. Some facts are ignored, others given an emphasis out of all proportion to their apparent significance. The scientist of all men ought not to say that he never exercises the right of intellectual eminent domain. What is that "constructive imagination" of which the scientist makes so much but an inner discernment sharpened by insatiable scientific cravings?

IV The Objections Of The Evolutionist

At this point the evolutionist appears, professing to be in hearty accord with much that' we have been trying to say. He thinks, however, that he could say better what we have evidently been aiming at. His test of truth is survival, or utility, or adjustment of inner relations to outer relations. He demurs against our insistence upon the subjective ele-

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ment in scientific thinking, and declares that his results are reached by simply reading off the teachings which are upon the very face of the system of things.

We on our part express the most cordial good will toward the evolutionist. We do wish, though, that evolutionary terms had a more definite meaning than any we can find from the writings of their interpreters, so that we could really find out just how much agreement there is between their thought of sur-

OBJECTIONS OF THE EVOLUTIONIST

vival and utility and adjustment and our idea of life-giving power as a test of truth. The historic fact seems to be that Darwin and those of his day started a great thought movement which is yet moving and which has seen enormous changes since its first announcement. The catchwords and even the fundamental viewpoints of the early statements have long since met such modification that they can hardly be looked upon as the same now as in Darwin's time. The doctrine of evolution itself has experienced about as much evolution throughout its career as anything which it has attempted to describe.

We cannot allow the evolutionist's claim that his results have been reached simply by reading off a process. The evolutionist has had the advantage of great inner mental pressures. There could hardly be a more marked instance of the power of a subjective element in shaping theory than the spell which even the word "evolution," hazy as it is, has cast upon the mind of the past two generations. All sorts of sciences, from the study of rocks to the study of religious experience, have been subjected to all sorts of treatment to bring them into line with the supposed demands of evolution.

If we look closely for the secret of evolution's spell we can find it not only in the positive successes of the theory in various departments of objective science, but also in the satisfaction which it promises to forceful inner necessities. At the very outset the long stretches of time which the theory calls for are attractive. Just as the Copernican system brought a kind of intellectual gratification by furnishing more space beyond us, so evolution has served us by putting more time behind us. We are pleased to think that our pedigree reaches back so far, even if we cannot point with lofty pride to the earliest marchers in the evolutionary procession. Then, the passion for orderliness which is a part of our intellectual equipment is ministered to by the system which marshals so much into ascending series. If we fall to reflecting upon evolution as a satisfaction of the passion for orderliness we may well wonder how much of what we think given by the facts is really so given. Of course,

OBJECTIONS OF THE EVOLUTIONIST

similarities in the various forms of life around us make it possible for us to classify the forms into species, but a good deal of the making and unmaking of species plays around our own instinct for classification. In nature there is really no such thing-in-itself as species. There are individuals, more or less alike. We put the class term on the individuals so successfully that we often speak as if the class term stood for some actual reality in the outside world. Now, we would not minimize the differences which make it possible to put men and horses into different classes, but still we must insist on the largely subjective character in much of the evolutionists' manipulation of species.

Moreover, the evolutionist has on his side the insatiable craving for simplicity. He promises a formula which will be all-inclusive — and has not the world waited long for such a formula? We come here upon a curious feature of evolutionism. The evolutionist would have us believe that in the world outside of us the movement is from the simple to the complex. The charm of his theory, on

KELIGIOUS OEETAINTT

the contrary, is largely in the simplicity at which it arrives. His things move toward the complex but his thought moves toward the simple. When we look at the simplicity we find it to be a simplicity which the mind has forced into its objects, or which the mind has reached by ignoring the complexities. The primal slime may have looked simple, but if it was really simple nothing would have ever come out of it except simple slime. To get beyond slime we have to have something more than slime. The complexity which must have been introduced into simple slime to make it more than slime would have been the essential factor. How we progress by ignoring this factor for the sake of the simplicity is a little hard to see except by remembering that the simplicity comes from a mental demand.

We have no need to go further in this direction. All that we aim to show is that the doctrine of evolution is so dependent upon mental prepossessions and passions that the evolutionist thinker ought to be on his guard lest the theory play a trick on himself. It is especially easy for the evolutionist to come

OBJECTIONS OF THE EVOLUTIONIST

under the deceptive power of words. This is true also in his emphasis upon the various tests of truth which he finds in his theory. Utility as a test of truth sounds well, but does the evolutionist mean by it what we do, namely, largeness and fineness of life? Is the useful to include also that which gives satisfaction to life apart from the objective consequences involved? A word too about the survival of the fittest. Can we make much use of mere survival as a determining factor in our theorizings? The mere fact of survival is not always decisive, but the biological expression does help us to see the vital character of the process. Much nonsense survives, and it is a good deal like the vermiform appendix in its survival. That is to say, it is so deeply lodged in the social mind that only a perilous surgical operation can get it out. Sometimes the patient dies, not because of the loss of an important organ in the removal of an intellectual survival, but because vital processes had to be disturbed in order to get at a harmful survival. Nonsense survives and manages to complicate itself with good. Then the phrase about the correspondence of inner relations to outer relations. We like this phrase much, only we wish to see the evolutionists follow more closely the lead of those of their brethren who recognize the power of mind to do more than passively reflect the outside conditions. We should like to see the doctrine lay more stress on the deliberate and purposive adjustment of material situations to spiritual needs. The evolutionist, however, does good service in letting us see that the presumption is with the views which reach farthest into the past. We do not have to subscribe to this or that particular phase of evolutionism to see that in general the fact that a belief has lasted through the years is an indication that there is a truth at its center. Some evolutionists ha^ve hardly been consistent with their own doctrine in their ruthlessness against old views, especially old theological views. In spite of excrescences and atrophies here and there, these views survive often because there is something nourishing at their heart. The evolutionist should give more encouragement to the theologian who tries to