CORRESPONDENCE WEEK 11

CORRESPONDENCE WEEK 11

The Self-action of the Universe

(J) You surprised me last week by your suggestion about God saving Himself trouble.

(R) You need not be surprised. The conclusion will force itself on you after reflection. The universe has self evidently, been constructed by Eternal power and wisdom; but, as self-evidently, it has had imparted to it a certain power of self-action that relieves Eternal power from the necessity of perpetual volition in the evolution of details.

(J) That is what is not at first sight quite evident.

(R) Why, my friend, it is the thing that is most of all evident, and the thing that, perhaps, has more to do with suggesting to the superficial mind that there is no God than anything else.

(J) How so?

(R) Take the familiar instance of grain. So long as the farmer holds it in sacks, it is simply grain; but let him sow it in his field; it sprouts and brings a new crop. Here is an automatic action and not Divine volition. The constitution of the grain has been so adjusted to the chemical action of soil and moisture that the subjection of the grain to soil and moisture is all that is necessary to produce fructification. The Divine volition has not to intervene to produce the result. The Divine volition has already established the conditions that lead to the result, and these conditions are so automatic in their action that they only require to be brought into relation, one with another, for the result to ensue like a ball rolling down a hill when brought to the edge, or gunpowder going off with an explosion when fire is brought near. It is because of this that man can control the works of God to the extent to which he can manipulate the conditions, but this extent is very limited, and always subject to permission.

(J) Your argument seems to exclude God.

(R) By no means. He cannot be excluded. He is necessitated as the contriver of the conditions in the first instance, as we have seen; for the things did not make themselves. And he is required when anything extra has to be done: as when Aaron’s rod has to bud and yield almonds in one night, that the Divine foundations of the Aaronic priesthood may be demonstrated; or, as when a multitude has to be fed with loaves that did not come out of the field. These things could not happen without the express volition of Omnipotence. But we cannot shut our eyes to the evident truth that that creation has a passive aspect in which the power of God is not operative in the direct volitional sense. Creation is the power of God incorporate: but as an incorporation of that power, it has automatic properties with which He has invested it in the process of incorporation. All these properties are subject to His control. He has not made a machine that can ever get beyond His management. At the same time, it is a machine to which He has imparted a self-action within certain limits.

(J) If there is a self-action, what need for God?

(R) My friend, self-action is a different thing from self manufacture. You may make a self-acting machine: but a self-acting machine could not make itself. A railway train in motion is a self-acting machine for the time being: what should you think of a man who should say, what need for a maker?

(J) Perhaps I should have put the question the other way: If there is God, what room is there for self-action?

(R) There is just the room that God has provided. We must recognise facts. Here is a fireplace, and there is firewood and coal. If I leave them where they are, they remain as they are; but if I put the firewood in the grate, and the coals on the firewood, and apply a light, there is fire that consumes both wood and coal and gives out heat. You would not say that that consumption and that heat are due to the direct action of Divine volition. They are due to conditions established by Divine volition; but the action of those conditions itself is not a Divine volition. In fact, here lies the difference between God and His works: “miracle,” as we call it, and Nature. Nature, at first is a miracle, in being the product of Divine volition. Afterwards, we call its self-acting powers natural. And this is a real distinction, the omission to recognize which, is the cause of much of the confusion of thought that reigns among students of Nature on the subject of God.

(J) I must, of course, admit the cogency of your remarks. It was your description of it as a saving of trouble that grated on my understanding. And I cannot now say that you have reconciled me to it. It must take as much trouble” as you call it, to uphold a self-acting system in being, as to perform all its operation in detail.

(R) I do not insist on the term. There may be a better description of the doings of Him “who faints not, neither is weary;” “who slumbers not, nor sleeps.” At the same time, there is a tangible truth in the matter that supplies an important link in the harmonization of the truth of God’s existence with the operations of Nature. “A sparrow cannot fall” without His knowledge and permission: but He is not the direct Author of the fall of the thousands of sparrows that are killed by the cruel and hungry. “All things are naked and open to Him, neither is any creature that is not manifest in His sight.” Yet their actions are subject to their own unconstrained volitions. “None can hide himself” from the divine perception, . . none can elude the Divine power. Heaven and earth are embraced in His universal presence, as scripture so sublimely declare. Yet it remains as yet only as a matter of prayer that His will may be done on earth as it is done in heaven. “In Him we live, and move, and have our being,” and yet we stand related to an inflexible rule of mechanical law that will kill us if we do not conform: by drowning if we submerge ourselves in water; by burning if we go into fire; by starvation if we neglect to eat and drink.

(J) It is a subject that requires much thinking about.

(R) But which will repay the process.

(J) Perhaps.