Kitabı oku: «Theism», sayfa 6

To these considerations it has to be added that some of our ablest physicists believe that in the present age a strictly scientific proof has been found of the position that the universe had a beginning in time. "According to Sir W. Thomson's deductions from Fourier's Theory of Heat, we can trace down the dissipation of heat by conduction and radiation to an infinitely distant time when all things will be uniformly cold. But we cannot similarly trace the heat-history of the universe to an infinite distance in the past. For a certain negative value of the time the formulæ give impossible values, indicating that there was some initial distribution of heat which could not have resulted, according to known laws of nature, from any previous distribution. There are other cases in which a consideration of the dissipation of energy leads to the conception of a limit to the antiquity of the present order of things."¹⁸ If this theory be true, physical science, instead of giving any countenance to the notion of matter having existed from eternity, distinctly teaches that creation took place, that the present system of nature and its laws originated at an approximately assignable date in the past. The theory is supported by the most eminent physical philosophers of this country, and if there be any oversight or error in the principles or calculations on which it is founded, it would appear not to have been as yet detected. It is a theory on which, however, only specialists are entitled to pronounce judgment; and therefore, although those who assume that matter was not created are bound to refute it, I do not wish myself to lay any stress upon it – the more especially as I believe that apart from it there is amply sufficient evidence for holding that "Nature is but the name for an effect whose cause is God."¹⁹

II

It seems to me, then, that the universe when examined must be concluded to be throughout – from centre to circumference – alike in what is most permanent and what is most changeable in it, – an event or effect, and that its only adequate cause is a Supreme Intelligence. It is only such a cause which is sufficient to explain the universe as we know it, and that universe is what has to be explained. The assertion of Kant that the principle of causality cannot take us beyond the limits of the sensible world is only true if causality be confined to strictly material events which display no signs of law and order, and the progress of science is one long uninterrupted proof that no such events are to be discovered; that it is hopeless to look for them; that matter and its changes are ordained, arranged, adjusted phenomena. The assertion of Kant is clearly false, if we are not to exclude from the event anything which demands explanation; if we are to reason from the universe itself and not from its name; if we are to infer a particular cause from a knowledge of the nature of a given particular event. This, the so-called concrete use of the principle of causality, is the only use of it which is legitimate, the only use of it which is not extremely childish.

The opposite – the absurd – notion that the principle of causality is abstractly applied, has led some to argue that it leads legitimately to nothing else than an infinite regress – an eternal succession of causes and effects. But whatever it may lead to, it certainly does not lead to that conclusion, and has never led any human being, either legitimately or illegitimately, to that conclusion. Those even who have maintained that the principle of causality cannot lead to a first cause, to an eternal self-existent cause, but only to an eternal succession of causes and effects, have all, without a single exception, allowed themselves to be led by it to a first cause and not to an eternal succession of causes. They have all believed what they say they ought to have disbelieved; they have all disbelieved what they say they ought to have believed. They have all accepted as true that there is a first and self-existent cause, although some have supposed it to be matter, some mind, some within the world, some without the world. They have differed as to what it is, but not as to that it is. None of them have adopted the conclusion to which they have said the argument founded on causation logically leads. No man has ever adopted that conclusion. The human mind universally and instantaneously rejects it as inconceivable, unthinkable, self-contradictory, absurd. We may believe either in a self-existent God or in a self-existent world, and must believe in one or the other; we cannot believe in an infinite regress of causes. The alternatives of a self-existent cause and an infinite regress of causes are not, as some would represent, equally credible alternatives. The one is an indubitable truth, the other is a manifest absurdity. The one all men believe, the other no man believes.

This takes away, it seems to me, all force from the objection that the argument founded on the principle of causality when it infers God as the self-existent cause of the universe infers more than is strictly warranted, a self-existent cause being something which does not in itself fall under the principle of causality. That every event must have a cause will be valid, it is said, for an endless series of causes and effects; but if you stop, if you affirm the existence of what is uncaused, of what is at once, as it were, cause and effect, you may affirm what is true, but you affirm also what is independent of the principle of causation. You claim more than your argument entitles you to; you are not developing a logical conclusion, but concealing under a term which seems to express the same idea what is really the vaulting of the mind to a higher idea which cannot be expressed under the form efficient cause at all.

Now, of course, a self-existent cause does not in itself come completely under the law of causality. That law cannot inform us what self-existence is. A self-existent cause, however, may be known as well as any other cause by its effects. The mind may rise to it from its effects. The principle of causality may lead up to it, although it does not include within itself the proof of the self-existence of the cause. It may at the last stage be attached to some other principle which compels the affirmation of the self-existence of the cause reached; in other words, the affirmation that the first cause is a self-existent cause, may be a distinct mental act not necessitated by the principle of causality itself. It may either be held that this mental necessity is the reason why we cannot entertain the thought of an infinite regress of causes, or that the incapacity of the mind to regard the thought of an infinite regress of causes as other than self-contradictory, is the explanation of its felt necessitation to affirm a self-existent cause; in which latter case the principle of causality really necessitates a belief in the ungenerated and self-existent. Both of these views are plausible, and which of them is true is an interesting subject of metaphysical investigation, but it is one of no practical consequence in the inquiry on which we are engaged. The principle of causality can lead us up from all things which have on them the marks of having begun to be, and if we at length come to something which bears no such marks, be it matter or be it mind, no man can doubt, or does doubt, that something to be self-existent. This difficulty about a self-existent cause not being able to be arrived at by the principle of causality, will be worth attending to by the theist when it is attended to by any one else, – when any atheist or any anti-theist of any kind is prepared to deny that the last cause in the order of knowledge, and the first in the order of existence, must be a self-existent cause – but not until then; and it is mere sophistry to represent it as of practical importance. Whenever we come to an existence which we cannot regard as an effect or thing generated in time, we, either in consequence of the very nature of the causal judgment, or of some self-evident condition or conditions of knowledge necessarily attached thereto, attribute to it self-existence and eternity. We may dispute as to whether this is done in the one or the other of these two ways, but that is a merely theoretical question; that every one does, and must, as a reasonable being, do it, is what no man disputes, or can dispute, – and this alone is of practical consequence.

Another admission must be made by every man who reflects carefully on the nature of causation. To say that the idea of cause can never demand belief in an uncaused cause, sounds as self-evident; to say that the idea of cause can find no satisfaction save in the belief of an uncaused cause, sounds as a paradox; but let a man meditate for a little with real thoughtfulness on the meaning of these two statements, and he cannot fail to perceive that the former is an undeniable falsehood, and the latter an undeniable truth. An uncaused cause, a first cause, alone answers truly to the idea of a cause. A secondary cause, in so far as secondary, in so far as caused, is not a cause. I witness some event – some change. I am compelled as a rational being to seek its cause. I reach it only to find that this cause was due to a prior cause. What has happened? The cause from which I have had to go back has ceased to be a cause; the cause to which I have had to go back has become the cause of two effects, but it will remain so only if I am not reasonably bound to seek a cause for it. If I am, its causality must pass over to its explanatory antecedent. We may go back a hundred, a thousand, a million times, but if the last cause reached be not truly a first cause, an uncaused cause, the idea of cause in our mind will be as unsatisfied at the end of our search as at the beginning, and the whole process of investigation will be aimless and meaningless. A true cause is one to which the reason not only moves but in which it rests, and except in a first cause the mind cannot rest. A first cause, however, is certainly not one which has been itself caused.

We are warranted, then, in looking upon the universe as an event or effect, and we may be certain that it is not the last link of an infinite chain of causes and effects, or of any series of causes and effects, long or short, suspended upon nothing. No chain or series can be, properly speaking, infinite, or without a first link or term. The universe has a First Cause. And its First Cause, I must proceed to remark, reason and observation alike lead us to believe must be one – a single cause. When one First Cause is sufficient to explain all the facts, it is contrary to reason to suppose another or several. We must prove that no one First Cause could account for the universe before we can be entitled to ascribe it to more causes than one. The First Cause, we shall further see afterwards, must have attributes which no two or more beings can be supposed to possess, which one being alone can possess. Then the character of the effect itself refers us back to a single cause. A belief in more gods than one not only finds no support in the universe, but, as the very word universe indicates, is contradicted by it. For, numerous and diverse as are the objects in nature, they are so constituted and connected – so dependent on and related to one another – as to compose a whole which exhibits a marvellous unity in variety. Everything counteracts or balances or assists something else, and thus all things proclaim their common dependence on One Original. Co-ordinate things must all be derivative and secondary, and all things in nature are co-ordinate parts of a stupendous system. Each one of us knows, for example, that a few years ago he was not, and that in a few years hence the place which knows him now will know him no more; and each one of us has been often taught by the failure of his plans, and the disappointment of his hopes, and the vanity of his efforts, that there are stronger forces and more important interests in the world than his own, and that he is in the grasp of a Power which he cannot resist – which besets him behind and before, and hems him in on all sides. When we extend our view, we perceive that this is as true of others as of ourselves, and that it is true even, in a measure, of all finite things. No man lives or dies to himself; no object moves and acts absolutely from and for itself alone. This reveals a single all-originating, all-pervading, all-sustaining principle. These manifold mutually dependent existences imply one independent existence. The limitations assigned to all individual persons and things point to a Being which limits them all. Particular causes and secondary movements lead back to "a cause of causes," "a first mover, itself immovable, yet making all things else to move."

The first cause must be far more truly and properly a cause than any secondary cause. In fact, as we have already seen, a secondary cause is not strictly a cause; so far as secondary, it merely transmits to its consequent what it has received from its antecedent. There may be a succession of a thousand such causes in a process, yet the first cause is also the last, and there is, in fact, all through, but one cause; the others merely convey and communicate its force. A machine, however numerous its parts and movements, does not create the least amount of force; on the contrary, the most perfect machine wastes and absorbs some of the force which is imparted to it. The universe, so far as subject to mechanical laws, is merely a machine which transmits a given quantity of force, but which no more creates it than it creates itself. The author of that force is the one true cause of all physical phenomena. Life is probably, and mind is certainly, not entirely explicable on mechanical principles; but neither life nor mind can be maintained to do more than to determine the direction or application of the power implanted in them, or rendered accessible to them, through the working of the first cause. All things must, consequently, "live, move, and have their being" therein. It is at their end as well as at their origin; it encompasses them, all round; it penetrates them, all through. The least things are not merely linked on to it through intermediate agencies which go back an enormous distance, but are immediately present to it, and filled to the limit of their faculties with its power. It is in every ray of sunlight, every breath of wind, and blade of grass; it is the source and life of all human minds and hearts. The pantheist errs not so much in what he affirms of it, as in what he denies to it.

This cause – the cause of causes – must, it is further obvious, be in possession of a power far beyond the comprehension of our reasons or imaginations. All other power is derived from its power. All the power which is distributed and distinguished in secondary causes must be combined and united in the first cause. Now, think what an enormous power there is displayed even in this world. In every half-ounce of coal there is stored up power enough, if properly used, to draw two tons a mile. How vast, then, the power which God has deposited in the coal-beds of the world alone! The inhabitants of this little island, by availing themselves of the natural forces which Providence has placed at their disposal, annually accomplish more work than could by any possibility be effected by the inhabitants of the whole earth, if they exerted merely the power which is in their own bodies, the power of human bones and muscles. And yet there can be little doubt that, even in this country, we make no use at all of many natural agents, and only a wasteful use of any of them. "Weigh the earth on which we dwell," says an astronomer; "count the millions of its inhabitants that have come and gone for the last six thousand years; unite their strength into one arm; and test its power in an effort to move the earth. It could not stir it a single foot in a thousand years; and yet, under the omnipotent hand of God, not a minute passes that it does not fly far more than a thousand miles." The earth, however, is but a mere atom in the universe. Through the vast abysses of space there are scattered countless systems, at enormous distances, yet all related; glorious galaxies of suns, planets, satellites, comets, all sweeping onwards in their appointed courses. How mighty the arm which impels and guides the whole! God can do all that, for He continually does it. How much more He could do than He does, we cannot know. The power of no true cause, of no free cause, is to be measured by what it does. It must be adequate to produce its actual effects, but it may be able to produce countless merely possible effects. It has power over its powers, and is not necessitated to do all that it is capable of doing. It is difficult, perhaps, to show that the universe is not infinite. It is obviously unreasonable and presumptuous to deny that the power of its Author may be infinite. And yet we find men who do so. For example, the late Mr John Stuart Mill, for no better reasons than that nature sometimes drowns men, and burns them, and that childbirth is a painful process, maintained that God could not possibly be infinite. I shall not say what I think of the shallowness and self-conceit displayed in such an argument. What it proves is not the finiteness of God, but the littleness of a human intellect. The mind of man never shows itself so small as when it tries to measure the attributes and limit the greatness of its Creator.

A first cause, we have already seen, must be a free cause. It cannot have been itself caused. It is absurd to look for it among effects. But we never get out of the sphere of effects until we enter that of free agency; until we emerge from the natural into the spiritual; until we leave matter and reach mind. The first cause must, indeed, be in – all through – the universe; but it must also be out of the universe, anterior to, and above the universe. The idea of cause is a delusion – the search for causes an inexplicable folly – if there be no first cause, and if that first cause be not a free cause, a Will, a Spirit, a Person. Those who object to the causation argument, that it does not take us beyond the world – does not lead us up to a personal cause of the world – have failed to apprehend what causation signifies. Secondary causes may not be true causes, and yet reason be trustworthy, for there is that behind them on which it can fall back; but if there be no first cause, or if the first cause be not free, reason is throughout a lie. Reason, if honest and consistent, cannot in its pursuit of causes stop short of a rational will. That alone answers to and satisfies its idea of a cause.

The most rapid glance at the universe powerfully confirms the conclusion that its first cause can only be a Mind, a Reason. The universe is a universe; that is to say, it is a whole, a unity, a system. The first cause of it, therefore, in creating and sustaining it, must comprehend, act on, and guide it as a systematic whole; must have created all things with reference to each other; and must continually direct them towards a preconceived goal. The complex and harmonious constitution of the universe is the expression of a Divine Idea, of a Creative Reason. This thought brings me to my next argument and next lecture.²⁰

LECTURE V

THE ARGUMENT FROM ORDER

I

The prevalence of order in nature has already been referred to as contributing to prove that the universe is an event, a generated existence, a something which once began to be. It will now be brought forward as in itself a manifestation of, and consequently a ground for believing in, a Supreme Mind. Where order meets us, the natural and immediate inference is that there is the work of intelligence. And order meets us everywhere in the universe. It covers and pervades the universe. It is obvious to the ordinary naked eye, and spreads far beyond the range of disciplined vision when assisted by all the instruments and appliances which science and art have been able to invent. It is conspicuous alike in the architecture of the heavens and the structure of a feather or a leaf. It goes back through all the epochs of human history, and all the ages of geological and astronomical time. It is the common work of all the sciences to discover and explain the order in the universe. There is no true science which is not constantly making new and fuller discoveries of the order in nature, – the order within us and without us; not one which is not ever increasingly establishing that in order all things move and have their being. What is maintained by the theist is, that this order, the proof of which is the grand achievement of science, universally implies mind; that all relations of order – all laws and uniformities – are evidences of an intelligent cause.

The order which science finds in nature may be described as either general or special, although in strictness the difference between them is only a difference of degree, the former being the more and the latter the less general, or the former being the less and the latter the more special. In what may be called general order, that which strikes us chiefly is regularity; in what may be called special order, that which chiefly strikes us is adaptation or adjustment. In inorganic nature general order is the more conspicuous; in organic nature special order. Astronomy discloses to us relations of number and proportion so far-reaching that it almost seems as if nature were "a living arithmetic in its development, a realised geometry in its repose." Biology, on the other hand, impresses us by showing the delicacy and subtlety of the adjustment of part to part, of part to whole, and of whole to surroundings, in the organic world. There is, perhaps, sufficient difference between these two kinds of order to warrant their being viewed separately, and as each furnishing the basis of an argument for the existence of God. The argument from regularity has sometimes been kept apart from the argument from adjustment. The former infers the universe to be an effect of mind because it is characterised by proportion or harmony, which is held to be only explicable by the operation of mind. The latter draws the same inference because the universe contains countless complex wholes, of which the parts are so collocated and combined as to co-operate with one another in the attainment of certain results; and this, it is contended, implies an intelligent purpose in the primary cause of these things.

While we may readily admit the distinction to be so far valid, it is certainly not absolute. Regularity and adjustment are rather different aspects of order than different kinds of order, and, so far from excluding each other, they will be found implying each other. It is obvious that even the most specialised adjustments of organic structure and activity presuppose the most general and simple uniformities of purely physical nature. Such cases of adjustment comprehend in fact many cases of regularity. It is less obvious, but not less true, that wherever regularity can be traced adjustment will also be found, if the search be carried far enough. The regularity disclosed by astronomy depends on adjustment as regards magnitude, weight, distance, &c., in the celestial bodies, just as the adjustments brought to light by biology depend on the general regularity of the course of nature. There is no law of nature so simple as not to presuppose in every instance of its action at least two things related to one another in the manner which is meant when we speak of adjustment. It being thus impossible to separate regularity from adjustment as regards the phenomena of the universe, it seems unnecessary to attempt by abstraction to separate them in the theological argumentation, while giving a rapid general glance at the phenomena which display them.

The physical universe has, perhaps, no more general characteristic than this, – its laws are mathematical relations. The law of gravitation, which rules all masses of matter, great or small, heavy or light, at all distances, is a definite numerical law. The curves which the heavenly bodies describe under the influence of that law are the ellipse, circle, parabola, and hyperbola – or, in other words, they all belong to the class of curves called conic sections, the properties of which mathematicians had begun to investigate nearly twenty centuries before Newton established that whatever was true of them might be directly transferred to the heavens, since the planets revolve in ellipses, the satellites of Jupiter in circles, and the comets in elliptical, parabolic, and hyperbolic orbits. The law of chemical combination, through which the whole world of matter has been built up out of a few elements, always admits of precise numerical expression. So does the law of the correlation of heat and gravitation. Each colour in the rainbow is due to a certain number of vibrations in a given time; so is each note in the scale of harmony. Each crystal is a geometrical construction. The pistils of flowers, and the feathers in the wings and tails of birds, are all numbered. If nature had not thus been ruled by numerical laws, the mathematical sciences might have existed, but they would have had no other use than to exercise the intellect, whereas they have been the great instruments of physical investigation. They are the creations of a mental power which, while occupied in their origination and elaboration, requires to borrow little, if anything, from matter; and yet, it is only with their help that the constitution of the material universe has been displayed, and its laws have been discovered, with that high measure of success of which physicists are so proud. But they could not have been applied to the universe at all unless its order had been of the exact numerical and geometrical kind which has been indicated; unless masses had attracted each other, and elements combined with each other, in invariable proportions; unless "the waters had been measured as if in the hollow of a hand, the heaven meted out as with a span, the dust of the earth comprehended in a measure, and the mountains weighed in scales and the hills in a balance." Now it is possible to deny that things have been thus weighed, measured, and numbered by a Creative Intelligence, but not that they have been weighed, measured, and numbered. If we are to give any credit to science, there can be no doubt about the weights and measures and numbers. This question, then, is alone left, – Could anything else than intelligence thus weigh, measure, and number? Could mere matter know the abstrusest properties of space and time and number, so as to obey them in the wondrous way it does? Could what has taken so much mathematical knowledge and research to apprehend, have originated with what was wholly ignorant of all quantitative relations? Or must not the order of the universe be due to a mind whose thoughts as to these relations are high above even those of the profoundest mathematicians, as are the heavens above the earth? If the universe were created by an intelligence conversant with quantitative truth, it is easy to understand why it should be ruled by definitely quantitative laws; but that there should be such laws in a universe which did not originate in intelligence, is not only inexplicable but inconceivably improbable. There is not merely in that case no discoverable reason why there should be any numerically definite law in nature, but the probability of there being no law or numerical regularity of any kind is exceedingly great, and of there being no law-governed universe incalculably great. Apart from the supposition of a Supreme Intelligence, the chances in favour of disorder against order, of chaos against cosmos, of the numerically indefinite and inconstant against the definite and constant, must be pronounced all but infinite. The belief in a Divine Reason is alone capable of rendering rational the fact that mathematical truths are realised in the material world.²¹

The celestial bodies were among the earliest objects of science, and before there was any science they stimulated religious thought and awakened religious feeling. The sun and moon have given rise to so extraordinary a number of myths that some authors have referred to them the whole of heathen mythology. There can be little doubt that the growth of astronomical knowledge contributed greatly to bring about the transition from polytheism to monotheism, and that so soon as the heavens were clearly understood to be subject to law, and the countless bodies which circle in them not to be independent agents but parts or members of a single mechanical or organic system, the triumph of the latter was for ever secured. No science, indeed, has hitherto had so much influence on man's religious beliefs as astronomy, although there may now appear to be indications that chemistry and biology will rival it in this respect in the future. And it has been thus influential chiefly because through its whole history it has been a continuous, conspicuous, and ever-advancing, ever-expanding demonstration of a reign of law on the most magnificent scale, – a demonstration begun when with unassisted vision men first attempted roughly to distribute the stars into groups or constellations, and far from yet ended when the same laws of gravitation, light, heat, and chemical combination which rule on earth have been proved to rule on orbs so distant that their rays do not reach us in a thousand years. The system of which our earth is a member is vast, varied, and orderly, the planets and satellites of which it is composed being so adjusted as regards magnitude and mass, distance, rate, and plane of direction, &c., that the whole is stable and secure, while part ministers to part as organ to organ in an animal body. Our own planet, for example, is so related to the sun and moon that seed-time and harvest never fail, and the ebb and flow of the tides never deceive us. And the solar system is but one of hundreds of millions of systems, some of which are incalculably larger than it, yet the countless millions of suns and stars thus "profusely scattered o'er the void immense" are so arranged and distributed in relation to one another and in accordance with the requirements of the profoundest mathematics as to secure the safety of one and all, and to produce everywhere harmony and beauty. Each orb is affecting the orbit of every other – each is doing what, if unchecked, would destroy itself and the entire system – but so wondrously is the whole constructed that these seemingly dangerous disturbances are the very means of preventing destruction and securing the universal welfare, being due to reciprocally compensating forces which in given times exactly balance one another. Is it, I ask, to be held as evidence of the power of the human mind that it should have been able after many centuries of combined and continuous exertion to compute with approximate accuracy the paths and perturbations of the planets which circle round our sun and the returns of a few comets, but as no evidence even of the existence of mind in the First Cause of things that the paths and perturbations of millions on millions of suns and planets and comets should have been determined with perfect precision for all the ages past and future of their existence, so that, multitudinous as they are, each proceeds safely on its destined way, and all united form a glorious harmony of structure and motion?²²