Is There A God? For all you free thinkers out there.

CORRESPONDENCE WEEK 12

2010-08-15T23:08:00.000-07:00

CORRESPONDENCE WEEK 12

The Fool’s Opinion

(R) “The fool has said in his heart, there is no God.” You are acquainted with the utterance of David’s on the subject?

(J) Yes; I should think everyone must have heard of it.

(R) What do you think of it?

(J) It would be very disrespectful to David were I to suggest there is any weakness in it.

(R) Do you think there is?

(J) It has never seemed so strong to me as it has to other people

(R) Where is the lack of strength?

(J) It begs the question: it is a dogmatic assertion, and I never find anything satisfactory in mere assertion.

(R) It depends on the assertor, doesn’t it? If your father or friend asserts that he has made up his mind to settle a handsome income on you forthwith, you would not think the assertion unsatisfactory?

(J) That is a different thing.

(R) Not if David had as much personal knowledge of the matter he asserts as your father or friend might have as to his own ability or intention.

(J) Ah, but you see, he had not, and could not have.

(R) Don’t be so sure about that.

(J) Where is the room for doubt?

(R)“The Spirit of the Lord came upon David from that day and forward,” that is, from his youth upwards. If the Spirit of the Lord was upon David, he would have knowledge of the things of the Spirit. Accordingly, we read concerning the Divine temple built by Solomon, that it was built to a pattern or plan that “David had by the Spirit.” “All this,” said David, “the Lord made me understand in writing by His hand upon me” (1 Samuel 16 v13; 1 Chronicles 28 v12-19). At the close of his days, he said, “The Spirit of the Lord spoke by me, and His word was on my tongue” (2 Samuel 23 v2). Now, suppose this was true, David would have the same personal knowledge of God that he would have of the earth or sky, would he not?

(J) I don’t know that.

(R) Why, certainly. “The things of God no man knows but the Spirit of God. Now we have received the Spirit,” says Paul, “… that we might know the things that are freely given to us of God.” “God has revealed them unto us by His Spirit: for the Spirit searches all things, yes, the deep things of God” (1 Corinthians 2 12 v10). If David had the Spirit of God abiding with him from the day of his anointing to the day of his death, the verities of Divine existence must have been as obvious to his consciousness as anything is to any of us.

(J) But how do we know that David had the Spirit of God?

(R) Because the Bible asserts it, as I have read.

(J) Yes but a loose historical statement like that, does not amount to much.

(R) Peter says, “David was a prophet” (Acts 2 29 v30), and that “The Spirit of Christ was in the prophets” (1 Peter 1 v10-11).

(J)Yes that is Peter.

(R) Jesus says David spoke “in Spirit” (Matthew 22 v43). You see it does not rest on what you call “a loose historical statement.” You will have to reject the New Testament: you will have to part company with Christ and Peter before you can get rid of the evidence that the Spirit of God was a presence with David. Are you prepared to say that all these were a work of error and imposture?

(J) You press me hard.

(R) Legitimately. The question justifies it, and the state of facts surrounding it. If David was the subject of a Divine illumination, which made him in actual touch with God, I submit that there is something very weighty in his declaration that “the fool has said in his heart there is no God.” He was speaking with personal knowledge and, therefore, with all the assurance that you would feel in rebutting the assumptions of ignorant people who might call in question the wonderful applications of science in our day.

(J) I see where you are. There is something in it put in that way.

(R) Besides, David does not rest his dictum on his mere authority. There is an implication in a direction of evidence in his use of the term “fool.” He seems to say that a man, with all the facts before him that any man has, must be a fool who says or thinks “There is no God.” This is, in fact, his very argument in one of the psalms. “Be not,” says he, “as the horse or the mule, which have no understanding.” “Understand you brutish among the people: and you fools, when will you be wise? He that has planted the ear, shall He not hear? He that formed the eye, shall He not see?” (Psalm 94 v8-9). This is the argument that Paul uses in another shape: “That which may be known of God is manifest … for the invisible things of Him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse” (Romans 1 v19-20). This is in fact, the argument I have been pressing upon your attention for some time past.

(J) I have to thank you for your pertinacity.

(R) The matter is of the utmost moment. Let me put it again. It is really based upon a scientific maxim. Science lays down that, in the realm of physical nature, it is not possible that anything can occur without an adequate cause. If this is true (and its truth cannot be questioned), consider how God is forced upon us (under whatever name you please), by the spectacle of the mighty universe so replete with the works of wisdom and power. Must it not have had a Cause equal to its production? Is not David’s proposition scientifically unassailable, that the man who says there is no such Cause is a fool?

CORRESPONDENCE WEEK 11

2010-08-08T22:59:00.000-07:00

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.

CORRESPONDENCE WEEK 10

2010-08-01T23:02:00.001-07:00

CORRESPONDENCE WEEK 10

Human Intelligence itself a proof of God

(R) It seems to me that the very putting of the question is proof of the existence of that which is questioned.

(J) How do you make that out? It strikes me as a very extraordinary suggestion.

(R) Well, the question indicates considerable astuteness on the part of the questioner.
Here is a looking, thinking, prying creature called man, quick glancing east, west, north, south: noting this, noting that, putting this and that together: observing, reflecting, arguing, making experiments, studying, reasoning: constructing instruments, digging, boring, melting, dissolving: weighing, calculating, sailing on the sea, running over the land, exploring not only unknown parts of the earth which he inhabits, but even the vast regions of space are probed by man and even explored by man in a limited way physically and even more extensively mechanically. (This section has been revised due to the incursions of man’s endeavours into space. Ed.) If this audacious restless, prying creature had always been on the earth, we might have supposed him the root and source, in some inexplicable way, of the wonderful intellectual power he exhibits; but as we consider him, we note he had no existence a short way back, and that in each individual case, he shortly lies down and dies. The question, therefore, propounds itself in loud imperative tones, Where got man this wonderful faculty? Must it not have existed before him independently of him? Was there no wisdom before he was born?

(J) Is it possible that he is the highest intelligence in the universe?

(R) Is it conceivable that there was no contriving power anywhere till he himself wisely contrived to put in an appearance, seeing all things small and great in heaven and earth are wisely made? If man has a little wisdom where did he get his wisdom from? He is wisely constructed: must not the power that constructed him be wiser than he? “He that hath formed the eye, shall He not see? He that hath formed the ear, shall He not hear.” The propounding of the question, “Is there a God?” proves the existence of a power equal to the production of the intelligence that puts the question, and necessitates that that power shall be as much superior to that intelligence as all cause must be superior to all effects.

(J) Man’s intelligence is a mere effect: where is the cause?

(R) That is the question.

(J) Scientific men seem to find it in the molecular combination of atoms?

(R) But who or what combined the atoms? Granting the existence of atoms, they could not combine themselves. If there were nothing but atoms they must have remained as atoms, and filled the universe with eternal dust. Instead of that, it is a universe of order and glory and beauty; and it is all in one system under one control, as shown by the co-relation of the stars.

(J) Where is the seat of this control?

(R) Ah, who can tell? There must be such, must there not? If there were not, things would get into a whirl and a chaos. They do not. They are held together, and held apart, as with an iron rein.

(J) I should say that is the law of things.

(R) What do you mean by that?

(J) Well, the quality or tendency of things in general to keep in a certain relation. Fire burns; water finds its level; gravitation shapes the course of planets. It is the nature of things. I do not see that we require going outside of things themselves for an explanation of their behaviour.

(R) No doubt the law of their behaviour is in them (or rather, let us say, they in it): but that does not account for their being there to behave. How came they to be there at all, and to have that law? They must have had a cause equal to their production in the first instance.

(J) That is not to be denied.

(R) Must not that cause have combined power and wisdom? Without power, without wisdom, how could it have been equal to the production of works of power and wisdom?

(J) As a matter of terms, I cannot evade your argument. Yet I have a feeling as if it were not conclusive.

(R) A feeling is not a safe steersman in such a matter.

(J) Though I say feeling, of course I mean a reservation of reason.

(R) Can you define it?

(J) It is a little difficult.

(R) Try.

(J) Well, I have a difficulty in reconciling what I might call the mechanical relations of everything we see in the universe with the intelligent initiative and superintendence usually associated with the idea of God. Everything is interlocked in an endless chain of mechanical causes. The sun shines, the rain forms, the winds blow: vegetation springs: animals are born, and feed, and propagate, and die. The stars move in their courses by mutual influence and attraction; and there is nothing occurs anywhere, so far as we can see, but what springs naturally from some antecedent cause on mechanical principles.

(R) Therefore, what?

(J) Therefore, the intelligent causation of everything that you argue for is not so obvious to me.

(R) Perhaps you may not have apprehended my argument quite clearly?

(J) Perhaps.

(R) I am not contending for a moment to moment operation of Divine intelligence in detail. If I cut my finger, it does not require a Divine volition to make the blood flow. If a man gets no food, I do not say it requires a Divine volition to make him die. If a dry thicket catches fire on a hot summer’s day, I do not say it requires the action of Divine intelligence and power to cause the conflagration that follows. So in larger matters: the moon’s motion round the earth; the earths motion round the sun; the movements of the whole stellar universe are the result of the relations things sustain to one another.

(J) Then you seem to me to shut out God.

(R) By no means. Taking His existence as proved by “the things that are made” (to use Paul’s expression), and especially by the revelation of Himself He has made during the course of the world’s history, we have to realize that the universal fabric of things is put together in a way to give Him the least trouble of management as we might express it. His works are “in Him,” as the Scriptures declare, but He is separate from His works. That is, He holds them all in effluence of His eternal energy which the Bible denominates Spirit, but is Himself a distinct and separable entity, whose nucleus, as we might express it, is in eternal light, yet whose presence is as co-extensive with the Spirit as the sun is co-extensive with its light. Out of His omnipotent and eternal energy He has, by will and wisdom, concreted the tangible system of things which we call the universe. But He has so made this universe that, while in Him and subject to His power, it works by automatic action. This action which He started is what we call nature. His interference at any time when called for is what we call miracle.

(J) There are some strange things in your remarks. It is a new idea to me about God saving Himself the trouble. I always understood He was omnipotent and infinite, and did not require saving Himself trouble.

(R) You are thinking of the popular traditions on those subjects. We must take the Bible and Nature. They do not contradict each other. The modern demonstration of the conservation of energy proves that everything that is done involves the expenditure of energy, and that energy is measurable. It follows that when God works, He can spend much or little, as the case may require. When little does He does not spend much. He has spent much energy in the creation of heaven and earth; but the result of His work is a self working machine (self working as a motor car is self working when set a-going), which leaves Him little to do beyond the pleasure of superintendence in the evolution of His purpose.

(J) It is an extraordinary view, I must say.

(R) It is an inevitable view, when the various elements of truth in the case are combined. You cannot dispense with God as the explanation of things: but neither can you dispense with the automatic operation of Nature in its ordinary bearings. Therefore we must put two and two together with this grand result, that with the most exact study of Nature’s laws, we can combine the recognition and worship of God, and the exhilarating hope of that future glory which he has promised: the prospect of which supplies an interest and a principle to present mortal life otherwise entirely lacking.

CORRESPONDENCE WEEK 9

2010-07-25T23:12:00.000-07:00

CORRESPONDENCE WEEK 9

The Seed of Plant and Animal

(R) Well, what have you to say to the contrivance that concentrates in a seed the power from which the future plant or animal will spring?

(J) It is very wonderful.

(R) Can you account for it apart from the operation of intelligence?

(J) My difficulty would be to account for it on any principal.

(R) It would not be so difficult to understand on the assumption of creative intelligence, would it?

(J) I don’t know about that.

(R) If there were no intelligence, there would be no accounting for it at all, would there?

(J) Of course, I grant that the supposition of creative intelligence would simplify the problem, but I find it exceedingly difficult to apply the idea of an extraneous operative intelligence to such a work, with the conception we have formed of intelligence. We have derived that conception of intelligence from our own experiences as human beings, which is necessarily a totally different thing from the kind of operations we are invited to recognize in nature. Man is ignorant of everything apart from experience; in a sense he is outside of everything. His constructive or inventive achievements are the result of experimenting upon the things and conditions around him, and of his need for the things he constructs. It is not possible to apply such an idea to the operations of the power of the universe. He needs not, like man, to make and adapt to get over a difficulty. Therefore, I cannot reason from one to the other.

(R) Well, no, you cannot. No man can. I am not asking you to do so. Your remark draws reasonable distinctions; but if you think it out thoroughly enough, you will find that it relates to modes of operation, and not to the fact of operation. It is upon the fact of operation that I wish to fix your attention. I grant there is no parallel between the works of man and the works of God; but there are two classes of works, are there not?

(J) That is the question.

(R) There are works of man?

(J) Yes there are works of man.

(R) And there are works not of man?

(J) Are you right in calling them works?
(R) Call them what you like: they are facts, operations, things done.

(J) I wish to fence off assumption.

(R) Well, it is not an assumption that the seed of plant and animal contains the potentiality (as scientists say) of the future plant and animal. Consider what a complexity of concentrated power this almost always means. Consider the light and airy fabric of a bird for example, its bones light and hollow for easy carriage in the atmosphere; its wing feathers formed with mathematical exactness, of various sizes and curves, to give the right blows on the air for flying, and having just the right muscles to supply the needed action. Think of all this, automatically organized or built up in an egg, which to the human eye presents nothing but a mass of albumen. Here is a work a thing done. It is not done by man. It is not done by itself. Each nature comes from its own seed only. You never find sea-gulls come from the eggs of the sparrow, or any creature come without derivation. If the works were self done, everything would spring up everywhere. No seed would be necessary for anything; whereas you know the seed or propagation in some other way is essential. If the individuals and the seed of any species perish, the species becomes extinct. Consequently, I am justified in asking you to admit that the implantation of seed power must have been an operation performed in the beginning.

(J) What beginning?

(R)The beginning of the creatures.

(J) If they had a beginning!

(R) Ho ho! You are not going to say the creatures are eternal are you?

(J) Well, no.

(R) You recognize the doctrine of science, I presume; that there was a time in the history of the earth when there was no living creature upon it?

(J) Yes, but that is inconceivable ages back.

(R) It matters not how far back. When you get there, there were no creatures, and then you had the beginning I spoke of the introduction of creatures, with this wonderful capacity, bearing the stamp of supreme wisdom, and requiring the utmost power to perform.

(J) The whole process of reproduction is so automatic, as you expressed it, that I cannot clearly deduce your conclusion from it.

(R) My friend, was the start automatic?

(J) I am not clear about the start.

(R) There must have been a start. There must have been a first animal, a first fish, a first blade of grass. You would not say there was such a departure from Nature then that they came into being spontaneously.

(J) That would be a greater miracle than creation.

(R) If not spontaneously, it must have been from an Operative Cause, and as that operative cause could not have been a powerless animal, fish, or blade of grass, we are bound to ask what it was, and to demand that it was equal to the production of such wonderful organisms.

(J) Organisms without intelligence produce them now: why not assume they were produced in some such way then?

(R) Because the way is barred. There were none such to produce them. That is the argument. The power of unintelligent organisms to produce them now is only part of the mechanism which it required Wisdom and Power to set a-going in the first case.
You have heard of Edison’s phonograph. A man speaks into this instrument, and his voice causes indentations, which, when afterwards passed over a vibrator, give back the sounds that produced them in the first instance, and therefore speak back the words spoken, even after the original speaker may be long dead. Now, suppose the words spoken back by the phonograph were distinct enough to make the needful indentations on another instrument, and that again on another, you would have an instrument that could be mechanically multiplied with speaking power. What would you say to the man who, in after generations, should say that because a phonograph of Mr. Gladstone’s speech could multiply phonograph ad lib. Therefore it was not necessary that there should have been an original speech of Mr. Gladstone’s to start the thing? This is virtually the position of those who say that, because they see the most exquisite contrivances of intelligence propagated from age to age on mechanical principles, therefore no intelligence was needed to start the process in the beginning.

(J) There is some force in your illustration. I will consider it. I am anxious to believe, and shall only be too glad if you can make my judgment captive.

CORRESPONDENCE WEEK 8

2010-07-18T22:59:00.000-07:00

CORRRESPONDENCE WEEK 8

The Construction of the Eye

(J) It was the eye last week: what is it now?

(R) I have not done with the eye yet. I must be content with amateur indications: but sometimes these are more useful than technical morass.

(J) I agree with you. The subject is often lost in the details, like a landscape when you apply your magnifying glass to the blades of grass. What more is there about the eye?

(Note: Dr. Michael J Behe wrote a book “Darwin’s Black Box” About irreducible complexity, see here http://www.truthinscience.org.uk/site/content/view/137/57/ However, we as Christadelphians do not hold to the vague scientific accounts of “Intelligent Design.” And that we believe that the Bible is the only source of divine revelation concerning the earth and its nations through God’s plan concerning them, not the fallible books and words of men however helpful they may be in helping us.

(R) Well, there is the system of muscles by which we turn it about at will in the socket. These are so placed with regard to thickness and thinness, and so attached to the ball of the eye as to enable the possessor of the eye to use it to the very utmost advantage, and with the rapidity of lightning. He can turn it this way and that, up or down, to the right side or the left side, just as he wishes. Who contrived this perfect apparatus, which excels the most exquisite machine ever invented by man, as much as the sunlight exceeds candle light? Man did not contrive it. It could not contrive itself.
It could not be there without being contrived. Give us God, and we are at rest. Take him from us, and you must give us something more baffling: for the wise workmanship you cannot deny. But you cannot take Him from us. Only “The fool has said in his heart there is no God.”

(J) I do not wish to take him from you.

(R) Pardon me. I am speaking to the impersonal mass of unbelief.
The force of the argument about the muscles of the eye becomes very great in connection with that one of them which enables us to turn the eye upwards. This differs from all the rest in a peculiar way. The others are all laid alongside the eye inside the socket, and work easily by contraction; but, on account of the jutting of the eyebrow over the eye, there is no room for the working of an ordinary muscle to give the upward motion. It is the way this difficulty has been got over that shows the participation of intelligence in the organizing of the human structure. An American professor recently explaining it to his students, said, “And here, gentlemen, I will show you what a clever thing God Almighty has done.” He called their attention to a little hole in the bone of the eyebrow (which anyone may see on inspecting a skull). He stated that the muscle for giving the upward motion, on getting to this hole, shrunk into a tendon and on getting through the hole, again turning into muscle, spread out upon and attached to the eye, so that when the muscle behind contracted, it pulled this tendon through the bone-hole, like a rope through a pulley, and so produced the motion otherwise impossible. What are we to say about such a thing as that? If we were to discover a contrivance to get round a difficulty in the clumsiest machine used by man, we should never think of attributing it to anything but the action of a human intelligence. In this case, we cannot attribute it to human intelligence. What are we to attribute it to?

(J) (Pauses)

(R) What have you to say?

(J) Well, I have a difficulty which I know not how to express.

(R) What is it?

(J) There is such a difference between the products of Nature and the contrivances of man, that I find myself unable to reason from one to the other. If I find an adaptation of machinery to accomplish some human end, I know man must have designed it and worked it out, because mechanical contrivances do not adjust themselves. But, in the matters you are speaking of, I cannot help feeling there is a great difference.

(R) Doubtless, there is a great difference, but the difference is not of a kind that affects the principal.

(J) I am not sure about that.

(R) Do you think natural adaptations are self adaptations?

(J) There is a good deal of self adaptation in Nature. If I cut my finger, the cut parts, if placed together, instantly begin to weave themselves together again.

(R) That is but the operation of an already existing machinery, is it not? It is not a self performance. It is the nature of the ruptured organism to re-unite its ruptured parts by the very law which maintains and perpetuates it from it from moment to moment, out of the blood. The oozing blood and the cut flesh have in them, by their properties, the power of coalescing with sundered parts. The power is already in the organism. It is part of it. It is not a self-evolved power. You would have to seek its origin in the origin of the organism as a whole.

(J) I am not quite clear about it.

(R) You would not say that the finger, being cut, says to itself: “Now I must stop this bleeding: I must heal this wound,” and goes to work, and does it by intelligent contrivance? The healing is done not by intelligent volition, but by a law already in the finger.

(J) No doubt, that is how it is; and it seems to me that that works against your argument.

(R) How so? I say that an intelligent arrangement of any kind argues the action of intelligence in arranging it.

(J) And yet the finger heals itself without intelligence.

(R) But the finger itself is the product of intelligence, and its power to heal is only a part of the constitution imparted to it in the original operation of that intelligence.

(J) You must go back to the origin of the finger to discuss the matter properly.

(R) Do you say the finger made itself?

(J) I am by no means lucid on these questions as I would like to be.

(R) Surely you cannot hesitate about so simple a matter.

(J) Of course the finger didn’t make itself; but it does not follow that it had a maker in the sense you are contending for.

(R) I am not contending for any sense inconsistent with the facts of the case. I do not say the finger was made as the watchmaker makes a watch, for that is a human performance, and God’s ways and methods are altogether different from man’s, as He Himself says. What I do say, that at some stage or other, Operative Wisdom must have contrived so wisely-constituted a thing as the finger.

(J) If it grows, it would not require to be “made.”

(R) Grows? What is that? Do you know what growth is?

(J) It looks pretty much like a self-development.

(R) Reconsider. Is not growth but the development of an already existing organism, by the power it has of assimilating suitable materials to its own nature?

(J) Suppose I say “Yes.” You say “it has” the power. This must be self power.

(R) A self power in the sense of possession: but how was it acquired?

(J) Ah, that is the question.

(R) Does not that take us away to the beginning of things?

(J) Well.

(R)Take the case of a man, a cow, or a rose. They all grow by assimilation of extraneous material; but is not the growth-power a helpless power, and in no sense a self power? Will food taken by a cow grow into man nature? Will a rose turn into a cabbage? What makes a rose a rose? What makes a cow a cow?

(J) Is it not growth, for they are rose and cow from the first moment of growth?

(R) The question can only be considered at the starting point. What is the origin of cow nature? What is the origin of rose nature? There is not a creature upon earth, in the actual experience of things, but what has come from a previous creature of like nature.

(J) But it is by growth.

(R) You seem to think that weakens the argument. In my judgement it strengthens it. It is a greater feat of power and wisdom to endow seed with the power of developing the full nature of a thing in all its forms and attributes, than to make it direct in each individual case. Is there anything like it in human works? Take into your hand the seed of a rose, or tomato, or a tree. Realise if you can, by what process of involution the nature of the previous plants from which these seeds have come, is condensed into the minute substance, so perfectly that, when subject to the right conditions, it will unfold a rose or other organism, as complete and identical in form, and nature and fragrance, as the original flower, plant, or animal. The parallel in human work of any kind would be, if a man, having made a sewing machine (say), was able to so contrive it that a speck of iron from the machine could be grown into another sewing machine by simply blowing it into a red heat. That would be an invention for you. You would say that such an inventor must be a superhumanly clever inventor. Yet, because God shows this wise power, you think it is no wise power at all, but…..what?

CORRESPONDENCE WEEK 7

2010-07-11T22:57:00.001-07:00

CORRESPONDENCE WEEK 7

Mechanism of the Human Frame

(J) You were very severe last time.

(R) You must allow for the immense consequence of the truth involved.

(J) It has been well said that there are two subjects in which human fervour is liable to be more strongly engaged than any other- family and religion: sex and God.

(R) It is true. Pardon my vehemence. The argument is strong. It is not at an end yet.

(J) Do you mean the argument of last week?

(R) Yes.

(J) I should have thought you had pretty well exhausted it.

(R) Not quite yet. You have not only to think of the absurdity of chance producing a human pair, essential to each other, but of producing either of them with their varied and exquisite powers. If chance were at work, its operation would necessarily work in every variety of caprice. Its results must certainly be marked as often by foolishness as wisdom. But, in fact, chance does not work in any region of nature that man is acquainted with. Whatever happens has a cause, and that cause has a cause, and so back and back. When a new plant or animal is discovered, no one imagines it has come into existence spontaneously, or that there has never been the like before. The discoverer sets to work to find its history its origin its habitat if he can. If this is the case with the simplest form of life, vegetable or animal, how much more in a case like man, whose organization shows such a complex adaptation of means to ends, and such an exquisite result from the whole?

(J) Man is no more remarkable in that respect than the animals is he?

(R) Well, yes; his powers are higher: but even if it were not so-even if the animals are on a par with him as regards the wisdom of their organization, the argument would only be all the stronger. I select the case of man because he is the most signal illustration.

(J) Well, what do you have to say about him?

(R) There is more to be said than I can say, but I will try and give a rough idea or two. First of all, look at him in his entirety. He is a perfectly extraordinary phenomenon. He is a working machine that not only does the work it was made for, but repairs itself as it performs its work: a self working, self repairing machine.

(J) I am not sure I catch your idea there. The working and the repairing are both one thing aren’t they?

(R) No: No doubt the repairing is a class of work, but it is not the kind of work I mean. By work, I mean the exercises and functions of intelligent life. For example, a man attends to business, or serves his friends, or engages in study, or devotes himself to politics or travel. In all this, he uses the mechanism of his being, but it is outside and extra to that mechanism. It is what the mechanism was designed for, speaking generally. The heart was not made to pump blood merely that blood might be pumped, but that blood so pumped might contribute to intelligent life as a result. The lungs were not made to breathe, and the stomach to digest, merely that breath might be inhaled and food converted into new forms, but that these functions might sustain life, and admit of the objects involved in life. Now, what I wished to say was, that here you have a wonderful machine, that not only does the work it was made for, but that repairs itself at the same time it goes along.

(J) Repairs itself?

(R) Yes. You know that there is continual waste going on with all that we do, and that if there were not continual renewal or repair, we should not be able to carry on a single day. Now, this renewal is going on every moment in every part of every organ of the body, and yet we don’t have to stop to let it be done, but go on working and repairing at the same time. Take the eye for example: you go on using it all day, and yet with every throb of the heart its substance is being renewed, without interference of your use of it. My contention is, that on this general view, we cannot contemplate the human organization without having reason to feel that extraordinary wisdom must have been at work to produce such an organization, and that the idea of chance doing it is an outrage upon reason.

(J) As I said before, the argument would apply to everything: because there is just as much wisdom, as you call it, in the organization of a snail.

(R) No doubt it is so; and as I said before, that only makes the argument all the stronger. Only it is more clearly seen, perhaps, in the case of man, because of his superior parts the case is very powerful when you come to the details.

(J) Such as?

(R) Well, such as the eye, taking the eye again in another way. You will admit the great importance and the great delicacy of the function of eye-sight?

(J) Certainly.

(R) Consider, then, how the eye is placed: in a bony socket which protects it absolutely from injury or interference on all sides. Even in front, where exposure is essential for its work, it is protected by the jutting eyebrow, and the socket sides come so nearly level with the organs as to make it difficult to hurt the eye. Does not such a placing of the eye argue the highest wisdom?

(J) That, of course, is not to be denied.

(R) Then consider the curtain of the eye-lid, by which, without interference with the eye-sight, the action of the eye is eased and guarded by an adjustment that works completely over it as quick as lightening subject to the control of will, and yet working most of the time automatically. See, too, the arrangement of tubes and vessels by which just the requisite amount of moisture is kept in constant supply, so that we are saved from the serious inconvenience that would result from the drying of so delicate a membrane. When men say that chance, or the operation of blind force has evolved such skilful combinations, we can but look in astonishment and wonder what they mean! In such talk “chance,” and “blindness,” and “wisdom” have lost their meanings. Not only so, but such talk goes against the most elementary postulate of science that for every phenomenon of Nature there must be an adequate cause.

(J) You have said nothing about the eye itself.

(R) Thank you. I was about to refer to the structure of the eye itself, as the most wonderful lesson of all. Whether we regard the result secured, or the means employed to secure the result, it is nothing less than an astounding marvel. Those are best able to appreciate the masterly result who has tried their hand at any time at the construction of optical glasses. By the due adjustment of convex or concave lenses, you can get a near or distant enlargement as you desire: but the adjustment involves much trouble, and when you have got it, it remains just what you have made it. If you want a different adjustment, you must work your ratchet backwards or forwards, who could invent a lens that would be self adjusting, and become convex or concave, according to the degree of light or the distance of the object to be operated on? This is the extraordinary character of the eye as an optical instrument. It requires an exquisiteness of construction, and a sensitiveness of action, that baffles the imagination.
Then we have to consider that besides an internal structure so perfectly adapted to the uses of sight, the whole apparatus is set in a gearing of muscles that enables the will to turn it into any position in a moment. We are so accustomed to the use and grace of this arrangement that we fail to be struck with it as the case warrants. There it is: a physiological miracle which we carry daily with us. How different would human expression and human deportment have been, if the eye, instead of being the flexible self-acting instrument it is, had been a mechanical fixture in the head? Lenses of unchangeable form would have unfitted the eye to see anything clearly under or over certain fixed distance; and, without muscles for turning the eye, we should have been compelled to turn the head with every new requirement of sight. Think of the awkward deportment: think of the expressionless countenance: think of the defectiveness of vision and the tiresomeness of the use of the eye in that case. If the eye had been had been the work of chance, there was much more likelihood of such a clumsiness, than of perfect skilfulness and beauty of the present arrangement. “Chance!” Away, away! It is an outrage upon reason; an insult to common sense; the denial of experience; the confounding of true science, and philosophy. Not chance, but contrivance: not blind force, but powerful wisdom: is called for as the only solution of the beautiful marvel.

CORRESPONDENCE WEEK 6

2010-07-04T22:53:00.001-07:00

CORRESPONDENCE WEEK 6

The Existence of Sex a Proof of God.

(R) You remember our conversation last week?

(J) Yes, it was defective, I think, on one point.

(R) What was that?

(J) It disposed fairly of the idea of man being the evolution of a gradually ascending chain of development, but it did not allow for the possibility of man spontaneously coming into being under some chance combination of laws and forces, that produced a superior creature, not seen on earth before.

(R) Oh dear! You will excuse me, I am sure, if I say that strikes me as the most absurd of all wild suggestions to which atheistic pre-disposition has driven the cleverest of men.

(J) Why should it strike you so?

(R) Because of its inconsistency with the fundamental axiom of this very class of men everywhere, an axiom on which they base all their objections to the evidences of Divine revelation having taken place, however strong.
They lay down as their first principle, in their mode of thought, that Nature is immutable in her ways, and therefore miracle is impossible; and yet they ask us to believe that Nature has changed her mode of producing men.

(J) Not that exactly, is it?

(R) That is what it amounts to. She now produces them by generation, and the suggestion is that she first produced them by what shall we call it? By freak?

(J) No, not by freak, but by special conjunction of forces.

(R) An accident?

(J) Well, it would be accidental, of course.

(R) What evidence is there of such an accident ever having occurred?

(J) None that I know of: there is only the fact that man is here, and that once he was not here. And if there is no God, he must have come by accident.

(R) But if there was no God at the beginning, there is no God now; and Nature being immutable in her operations, the accident ought to happen now.

(J) Not necessarily.

(R) What? Think. Has nature lost her power then, to produce a man by spontaneous generation?

(J) No, no; Nature has lost nothing. What she has done, she can do.

(R) If she produced man at the beginning in the way suggested, it is no extravagance to insist that she ought to do so now. Did you ever hear of a case?

(J) Of course I never have.

(R) A man, whose mother should be the rock or the peat bog, and his father the suns rays, or some other blind energy?

(J) You put the thing too extremely.

(R) No, no. That is just what it would be, wouldn’t it, if it happened. What other mode do you conceive in the case?

(J) Oh, I do not make myself responsible for the suggestion at all. I place it before you as a hypothesis to be dealt with.

(R) Yes, but a hypothesis must have some shape and features before you can deal with it. It is not a hypothesis. It is a wild venture. Would not such a thing be a miracle if it happened, which the very men suggesting it declare themselves incapable of receiving?

(J) Ah, but a miracle is what God is supposed to do.

(R) Oh, and this is would be a thing that did itself! Why that would be a greater miracle still?

(J) The difficulty is about God you see.

(R) But you have the difficulty if you put away God. You have more difficulty without him than with him: is it not so?

(J) Well I am not championizing the atheistic view.

(R) It is a senseless view altogether, the more and more you think of it. Look at this element in the case: men are multiplied by the natural process of generation; but it takes two: man and woman. Now, if human population began with an accident it must have been a double accident. There must have been a woman as well as a man. Do you really think it is possible that blind nature, happening to brew a man in some vapour or pond, or rocky depth, should brew a woman at the same time? Is it a conceivable hypothesis that force without mind, impulse without plan, germinating energy without purpose should produce two instead of one, and each one different from the other, and both, between them, possessing power to re-produce their kind, a power which they did not require for themselves, and the possession of which was indicative of purpose with regard to the future?

(J) The difficulties are very great, I confess.

(R) Are they not insuperable?

(J) They look that way.

(R And we are to receive this incredible imagination without evidence, in order to dispense with God, whose existence is a mathematically involved necessity, and of which actual and irrefragable evidence has transpired in the history of mankind?

(J) Well, you see, they don’t now say there is no God. They say they don’t know.

(R) Well, well, well! They say they don’t know, and yet they reject the evidence, because they cannot imagine Him! They cannot imagine God doing wonders, but they can imagine nothing doing wonders! Extraordinary! It comes to this, by their own confession; they don’t know there is no God. Therefore there may be, and they have no reason at all for rejecting the evidence of His existence, except an invincible intellectual prejudice, which the Bible well describes as “an evil heart of unbelief,” which says God, “Depart from us; we desire not the knowledge of thy ways.”

CORESPONDENCE WEEK 5

2010-06-27T22:12:00.000-07:00

CORRESPONDENCE WEEK 5

The Inconsistencies of the Evolutionist View.

(R) Our larger arguments have certainly proved the existence of God. So really has the smaller one as to man’s appearance on the scene.

(J) You did not go into that.

(R) Not minutely, but it was sufficiently indicated. Man now exists: once he had no existence. Nothing but exquisite power and wisdom could have brought such a being upon the scene. Briefly, that is the argument.

(J) The doctrine of evolution has taken a good deal of the force out of that argument.

(R) No doubt: with those who have received it. But that doctrine is far from being established.

(J) It is generally received.

(R) By a certain class, no doubt.

(J) A large class!

(R) Yes, a large class; nevertheless, it is a mere hypotheses with which many facts are entirely inconsistent: and as a matter of fact, a reaction has commenced against it.

(J) What facts do you think of when you say they are inconsistent with Evolution?

(R) Well, they are really numerous, but they may be grouped under two or three heads. First, if man is a development of lower forms of life, there ought to be no lower forms of life now.

(J) Why so?

(R) Because if the force of the universe “evolves” by mechanical tendency, without discernment, discrimination or design, its evolution should march abreast. There ought to be no monkeys, no dogs, “no primordial germs,”-only men.

(J) I don’t see that. Surrounding circumstances have to do with the form and the extent of development. These circumstances, doubtless, exercise a natural selection. Grass under a stone for example does not grow like grass in the open. Circumstances may have so checked and favoured certain developments as to leave the lower forms behind while pushing on the higher till they ended in man?

(R) Well, suppose we allow that for the sake of argument, how do you account for there being only one sort of man?

(J) There are all sorts-black, brown, red, yellow, as well as white.

(R) Ah, that is as regards colour or dissimilarities on the surface. But taking the thing fundamentally, all men have a head, two arms, a body, and two legs. None have horns: none have wings; none have tails.

(J) Well what of that?

(R) Why, just this: if man is but the modification of lower forms through the action of circumstances, as there are all sorts of circumstances, there ought to be all sorts of men at all sorts of stages of development. There ought to be men capable of living in the water, because there are animals that can: the hippopotamus to wit. There ought to have been men capable of flying in the air, for certainly they want to, and there are creatures that can. There ought to be men with six, or eight, or twenty arms, like many legged insects; for often, they could be very useful. There ought to have been men with eyes at the back of their heads, or in their heels, or at the end of their fingers: for there are creatures among the smaller insects with eyes so distributed: and man very much wants eyes in other parts of his body beside those in front. That is as regards man.
But see how the argument acts with regard to the animals. If man is but a development on the ascending scale of physiological activities, shaped and guided by the pressure of circumstances and necessities, of course the animals would have the full benefit of the same law. Why then have we no speaking animals?

(Note: Darwin's tree of life has since been uprooted see here.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/4312355/Charles-Darwins-tree-of-life-is-wrong-and-misleading-claim-scientists.html

(J) There are parrots.

(R) Ah, but I mean creatures with the gift of speech the power of expressing idea. It cannot be said that the animals have no necessity to speak. The necessity must often bear on them with all the force with which it is even supposed to have done in the case of man. Yet they are as destitute of this faculty as any tree of the forest. It ought not to be so on the Evolutionist hypothesis.
There being every variety of circumstance and “environment,” there ought to be every variety of development: every form of creature: every state and kind of faculty. Is it not so. There is an unbridgeable gap between the lowest human specimen and the highest animal. The facts are inconsistent with the theory.
They are in perfect harmony with the conclusion I have been trying to establish from the beginning, viz.: that the true “force” of the universe is the being of universal extension, revealed as the God of Israel, “who works all things after the counsel of His own will,” and who in His own wisdom, and by His own power, has fashioned heaven and earth and the countless creatures they contain, after the form and patterns in which we find them.

Correspondence Week 4

2010-06-20T08:30:00.001-07:00

CORRESPONDENCE WEEK 4
The Appearance of Man Upon the Scene.

(R) The appearance of man upon the earth is a sufficient proof of the existence of God, if you think it out.

(J) How do you make that out?

(R) How otherwise can you account for his appearance? He is here: go far enough back, and he was not here. Between these two points of time, a marvel must have occurred to cause his appearance. There must have been at work a cause adequate to the production of such a creature- so full of joy and sorrow- with all his weakness and baseness.

(J) Might he not have come spontaneously?

(R) If you say that, you throw us back on a still more difficult idea. The universe is full of power, but with all its stupendous and varied powers, you never meet with an effect without a cause- never. This has passed into one of the axioms of science, and justly so, for it cannot be contradicted. If man came spontaneously, then the most wonderful phenomenon in the wide universe, so far as accessible to human observation, is an exception to all the phenomena in being uncaused. Requiring most of all for its explanation some potent cause of wisdom and power, such an idea would give it the least. The idea is absolutely inadmissible. It is in opposition to logical necessity, and the teaching of experience. Have you ever heard of a man coming into existence uncaused?

(J) I don’t know that I have.

(R) Did you ever hear of anyone that did?

(J) I don’t know that I did.

(R) Where is there room then for the idea? There is absolutely none. It would contradict nature and reason. It would propound a miracle more stupendous than anything presented in revelation, for all the miracles of revelation are exhibited as the effects of a cause; but the “spontaneous” idea would ask us to entertain the possibility of a miracle without a cause- the coming into existence of previously non existent man, without a cause to bring him into existence.

(J) It looks a little absurd, putting it that way I must allow.

(R) But that is the way of the thing, isn’t it? The absurdity does not arise from any way of putting it.

(J) Well, there is the idea it came gradually.

(R) You mean “Evolution.” That would not soften the difficulty, as we have already seen. There must have been at the beginning of the evolution a Cause equal to what now exists. Here is a universe, bearing the stamp of matchless wisdom, both in its general form and in its minutest arrangements. It matters not whether it came quickly or slowly: it could not come wisely unless there was wisdom to help it along, and the seat of this wisdom must from its nature be inscrutable. The science of our century recognises this.

(J) In what way?

(R) They take refuge in the terms “force” and “unknowable” in their references to the initial power. If you consider this, it liberates the mind for the recognition of God. I mean that the recognition of God cannot be called unscientific, in view of the postulates of science. If “force” is to be recognised, though “unknowable”, there can be no obstacle to the recognition of God, though unknowable. If “force” is to be a sufficient explanation of what exists, obviously there can be no insufficiency in the idea of God. If the inscrutability of force is to be no objection, it cannot have any weight against God. So far as science is concerned, we are as at much liberty to accept God as to accept force.

(J) Could we not say the same of force? Are we not as much at liberty to accept force as to accept God?

(R) I think not. With God you have “force,” but with “force” you have not God. And God we must have. God is what you might call a mathematical necessity. Here is his work: wisdom and power are incorporate in the things we see, and they must have preceded these things.

(J) I have been inclined to think kindly of the scientific view. God is so beyond our understanding.

(R) My friend, my friend, consider. Is “force” within your understanding? Does science lessen the mystery of the universe?

(J) I have a feeling that it does.

(R) Ah! it is a mere feeling. Think deeply enough, and you will see it increases the mystery instead of decreasing it. It gives us wise work on every hand, without wisdom anywhere to account for it- achievements of power, without power to achieve the achievements. It presents us with the idea of passive, blind, mindless force, working out results that bespeak the potency of active, far seeing, intelligent power. By whatever name people please to designate the cause of the universe, that cause (necessarily combining wisdom and power) is God, and nothing else. Whatever we may call it; we are in the presence of power and wisdom that cannot be understood.

(J) In that case, it seems to me to matter little which view you adopt.

(R) There is this great difference: one gives you God, and the other takes him away. And there is also this difference: though both give us the inscrutable, one gives us what we might call an intelligible inscrutability, and the other an inscrutability not at all intelligible.

(J) I confess I don’t follow you there.

(R) Well, it is within the compass of our intelligence to understand how an intelligent Being, containing in Himself all power and wisdom, could evolve, fashion, or create a universe, replete with all the arrangements of beauty and wisdom that we see. But it does not come within the compass of our intelligence to conceive of force that had no intelligent volition, working wisely, or, indeed doing anything at all. Scientific agnosticism would give us in its so-called “force” a blind god that slept for ages, and then woke up without a cause, and worked wisely without knowing it and without wisdom: whereas the Bible gives us a God “who works all things after the counsel of his own will,” and who, possessing all power and all wisdom, is an all-sufficient explanation of the things that ere, however inscrutable His existence may be. The one inscrutability is intelligible: the other is unintelligible.

(J) Well there is force in what you say. It is a large subject, but I think you have gone away from your text somewhat. It was supposed to be man’s appearance on the earth.

(R) Yes; but the suggestion you made about spontaneous generation led to the larger argument. We may return to man the next time we meet.

2010-06-14T22:20:00.001-07:00

CORRESPONDENCE WEEK 3

The origins of the Universe

(R) Have you found any flaw in the argument as to our mental constitution indicating God?
(J) Not exactly a flaw, but I thought you had skipped an argument that was weightier, and that was under your hand.
(R) What was that?
(J) You spoke of adaptation between our faculties and the various objects on which they act. It struck me that this adaptation is a powerful evidence of God, for how could such an adaptation exist if there were not a higher power to cause it? Yes, there is force in that: but the unbeliever could evade it by suggesting that our faculties are a natural development from the objects on which they operate.

(R) Such as the eye from the light, and its disappearance in creatures that live in the dark. But he could not maintain that, could he?

(J) No; except as a hypothesis, but, even then, it would leave last weeks argument for God untouched; because if the seeing faculty is due to the existence of light, the worshipping faculty must be due to the existence of God. I prefer to use arguments that cannot be taken in the rear, so to speak.

(R)That is the best sort of argument no doubt.

(J)Do you think of any other?

(R) There is another argument that is very powerful, but it deals with such a vast aspect of things that it is difficult to handle. It is one of those sorts of arguments that are almost too ponderous to be useful.

(J) What can it be? I should like to hear it.

(R) Well, it deals with the origin of the universe.

(J) Ah, that is a vast theme, indeed.

(R) Vast, unutterably vast: beyond us

(J) Infinite.

(R) Yet challenging our attention: for here the universe is, a thing of parts and measurements and order, although a thing infinite. It is impossible to dismiss the problem of its existence.
The fashionable way now is to refer it all to “Evolution”?

(J) Yes, that is the word, but what does it mean? It means the slow development or improvement of things from point to point, by exercise, does it not?

(R) That is something like the meaning, but it by no means excludes the argument for God, even if it were a true theory. Evolution would still need God for the explanation of itself.

(J) I should like to see that shown.

(R) The proof is very simple when you turn the subject over in your mind. Supposing Evolution (for the sake of argument) to be true, there must have been a time going back far enough, when nothing had been evolved when sun, moon, and stars were but an undeveloped potentiality. Now suppose we go back to such a time, and imagine ourselves onlookers. There would be nothing to see, of course; but the force of power now incorporate in the splendid frame of the universe must have existed. Without this, nothing could have ever come at all-manifestly.
There must have been a space filling ocean of invisible energy or force, out of which the universe afterwards came, even if it was by evolution. Now here is an inevitable conclusion: at whatever point of time the process of evolution began,, there must have come upon the scene a new impulse of some kind to start it.

(J) Why must we suppose that?

(R) Think of it, and you must see. At whatever point of time the process may be imagined to have commenced, there must have been time before then -time without beginning-necessarily: and the problem to be faced is this: Why did not the evoluting process begin in these previous ages of time, instead of just when it did? If a new condition came upon the scene, there is an answer otherwise, there seems no reason why the quiescence of antecedent eternity should not have continued. The problem is real and persistent. How came evolution to begin? How came potentiality to stir? Must not something have come upon the scene at the moment of the stirring which was not before at work? Must not an impulse have begun to move which was not moving before? Must not the previously sleeping “force” have begun to vibrate with a formulative stimulus not previously active? What could this be but the volition of intelligent power? Even evolution you see does not dispense with the necessity for a first cause. Something like the Mosaic start took place even on the evolutionist hypotheses. A creative impulse is a mathematical necessity, to account for things as they are. There is a deeper philosophy, than is commonly imagined in the words of Paul: “The invisible things of Him are clearly seen from the creation of the world, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead.”

(J) You speak as if Darwinism might be admissible after all?

(R) I do so only as a matter of argument. My aim is to show that, even if that system were accepted, it does not get rid of God. It only makes the process of his work slower.

(J) It is imagined that the Darwinian process is more conceivable to the human intellect.

(R) As to that, both Mosaic and Darwinian are inconceivable. The beginning of things, in either case, is equally out of the range of the human intellect. But there is a great difference between the two, in point of credibility and fitness. The Mosaic narrative comes to us with the authority of the Lord Jesus the Christ, and gives to us a cause adequate to the effects which we see in heaven and in the earth, an All wise, All powerful Intelligence, possessing, in Himself, all the power to exist, and all the capability of imparting that original formative initiative that the case requires; while Darwinism is a mere scientific guess, and asks us to believe that eternal force, without will or wisdom, has inexplicably evolved a system of things bearing marks of will and wisdom in their highest forms.

Correspondence Week 2

2010-06-01T01:18:00.001-07:00

CORRESPONDENCE WEEK 2

Every Faculty proves the existence of its object:
Therefore God

(R) Have you digested the argument I gave you last week?

(J) I have been chewing it: I cannot say I have digested it.

(R) You find it somewhat eatable, then; or at least not quite uneatable?

(J) There is force in it: great force I must confess.

(R) I feel certain you must find it conclusive. If purpose is proved, God is proved. The power of reproduction proves “purpose” as distinct from design.
Design, as usually conceived, is the present adaptation of a thing to a use, but the capacity of reproduction points to futurity, and therefore to purpose concerning it.

(J) You said there were many other proofs of God’s existence.

(R) Yes, many.

(J) Are they equal of force to the reproduction argument?

(R) I think so.
Here is one. Every faculty proves the existence of its object. The stomach proves the existence of food, even if food cannot be obtained. The ear proves the existence of sound, even though there may be dead silence. So the nose proves the existence of odour; the eye, the existence of light; the lungs, the existence of breath, and so on. These are what may be called gross illustrations of the argument, but they yield a principle having a powerful application to God.

(J) I do not see how you can apply it to God.

(R) The illustrations I have used have to do with bodily faculties and what you might call material things; but it applies to the desires and capacities of the mind, as well as to what we might call the appetites of the body. There is the power to observe, the power to reason, the power to calculate, the capacity to fear, to love, to hope: all these are innate in the human constitution, though their development is a question of exercise. Now, each of these proves the existence of its corresponding object, even if the person possessing these powers and capacities is cut off from access to all of those objects. Thus, the capacity to fear proves the existence of danger in the abstract; the capacity to love proves the other existence of other persons than ourselves; the capacity to calculate proves the existence of numbers; the power to observe and reason proves the existence of objects and events and laws exterior to the faculty of itself. We should reason correctly of the existence of these things from the possession of those powers, even if it were so cut off from the external world (perpetually immured in a dark dungeon, say) as to have no actual knowledge of their existence.

(J) How do you apply it to God?
(R) In this way. We have a group of faculties that all indicate Him as plainly as love indicates man. We have the capacity to venerate and adore the higher than ourselves; the tendency to place faith in that which is more able than ourselves; the power of infinite hope in a direction above and beyond ourselves; and the faculty to recognise obligation to higher authority than ourselves. Veneration, conscientiousness, faith, and hope are the highest and noblest features of the human mentality. Phrenologically, they are seated in the very centre and apex of the brain, highest in the being-looking away to heaven (as we might say), telling us of God, even if we had no evidence otherwise of his existence. They lead to devotion, prayer, worship, and moral heroism. They all point to God. They have no adequate object apart from Him. When applied to man, they wither and die. My argument, put into a sentence, would take this shape-That the higher faculties of the human brain prove the existence of God, as plainly as the human eye proves the existence of light.

(J) I do not think the facts are consistent with your argument.

(R) In what way are they inconsistent?

(J) Well, food, light, and other things of which you have spoken, are all accessible, and they are matters of experience with the common run of man. But God is not the experience of any.

(R) Wait a moment, my friend. Is light a matter of experience with the blind?

(J) No, I must admit it is not.

(R) Is food a matter of experience with the newborn babe thrown out to die of exposure? You must give the same answer. Yet the eye is there, proving the existence of light, though never seen; and the stomach is there, proving the existence of food, though never tasted. Now suppose all men were blind and starving, the fact would be no argument against the existence of light and food.

(J) But you see they are not all blind.

(R) No, but they might be. It is possible in the abstract; and you must admit the possibility, to see the bearing of the argument. Universal blindness would not disprove the light, which would be proved by the universal sightless eyeballs.
It has sadly to be granted that God is not a common experience with man; but we must not use this fact as a disproof of God, if it should appear that the cause lies in some special circumstance that is at war with the native constitution of things. My argument is, that mans latent capacity for God is a proof of God’s existence, even if we might not be able to explain why we are shut off from him, which the Bible enables us to do.

(J) My difficulty is about the “latent capacity.” I do not see much of this latent capacity in the bulk of people with whom I have any acquaintance. In 99 of cases out of 100 I see no capacity at all. The vast majority are content to be without God. Indeed it would be uncongenial to have God obtruded upon them in any way.

(R) No doubt what you say is true, but it does not affect the argument; because the argument does not require that every person has the superior faculties in an active state. If any, however few, have them in that state, it is enough to prove the existence of the object of those faculties. Disuse may sink a faculty almost out of being, as in the case of barbarians, who have no sense of right and wrong, no appreciation of the beautiful, no ear for music. The moral faculties have been in comparative disuse among all nations for ages, due to the revealed fact that God, having hid His face, has left them to themselves. As the result of disuse, the bulk of the population are in the state you describe, but there is “a remnant” with which it is different-in whom the moral faculties are in an active state. Consider their case fully, and you will find the argument fully sustained-that God’s existence is evident from the mental constitution of the human race when developed to the level of its normal type.

Correspondence week 1

2010-05-31T01:26:00.000-07:00

IS THERE A GOD?

The reproductive Faculty indicative of Purpose

(Robert) Man, there must be. You ask, Why?-Because creation shows purpose.
(John) Do you mean design?
(Robert) Not exactly. Design and purpose are no doubt the same thing in some connections; but I use "purpose" in a sense different from the meaning usually attached to "design" in arguments about God. I mean a purpose invested in creation itself.

(John) I don't understand you.

(Robert) Well, look here: when men say creation shows design, they mean that it is so wisely made that it must have had a maker: that as the hand is so exactly adapted for prehension, it must have had an adapter: that the eye is so exquisitely contrived for sight, it must have a contriver.

(John) Well, isn't that what you mean?

(Robert) No.

(John) What do you mean?

(Robert) I mean that creation shows a purpose that it should be carried on.

(John) You are no more lucid than before.

(Robert) Well, see; I am referring to the capacity for re-production attaching to every plant and animal under the sun. You know the contention of the evolutionist: that the various existing forms of life have been evolved and shaped through what might be called the stress of necessity blindly acting upon them through circumstances; thus, the birds were supposed to have gradually got their wings through wanting to fly: and the fishes their fins through wanting to swim and men their legs and arms through wanting to walk and handle things: and so on. Exercise is supposed to have developed them more and more through long ages.

There are tremendous difficulties in the way of those suppositions; e.g., how could a wing exercise itself in flying till it was a wing, and how did it become a wing in the first place? But, nevertheless, in a rough way, it is barely conceivable (at least as an hypotheses) that life has been developed by blind necessity, acting without purpose or intelligence in the stupendous laboratory of the universe, through the exigency of what is called "environment."
But how can the mechanism of re-production be brought into this conception?
Re-production has no relation to the creature itself. It has reference to successors. It is a thing of futurity. It cannot be the product of "environment." There is no necessity in the creature itself that it should be replaced by a similar form of life when it dies. There is no acting tendency, therefore, such as Evolutionists suppose have blindly produced fins, wings, arms, legs, etc. Yet here is the fact, that every form of life, animal and vegetable, is endowed with a mechanism of re-production which it does not require for it's own use.
Here is evidence of a purpose that living creation should be perpetuated.
On no principal recognized by Evolution can the existence of this re-productive apparatus be accounted for. It not only exists in all forms of organized life, but in every earliest forms, and in forms so simple that the supposed law of evolution has not had time to develop it, supposing such a thing could be developed by Evolution-that is, by the pressure of necessity. It is provision for futurity; it is the indication of purpose. The purpose is embodied in things as they are. This goes deeper than what is called "the design argument." Consider it well. The more you think of it, the more it will show you the truth of what I said at the start.
There must be a God.
Here is His manifest footprint.
Evolutionists exclude "purpose" from the action of "force"; and here is " purpose" - a purpose that the forms of life produced shall be re-produced.

(John) But what do you mean by God?

(Robert) It does not matter what specific view I may desire to express by that term. I believe in the God revealed in the Bible, but it is sufficient for my present argument if I say that by God I mean Intelligence somewhere operative through power. The study of nature cannot inform us of the seat or nature of this intelligence; but it is a great matter that it shews us its existence which it undoubtedly does in the particular which I press upon your attention. Revelation does the rest.

(John) There is force in what you say; but there is something I can never get over.

(R) What is that?

(J) This: if the existence of contrivance proves a contriver, then, call that contriver what you like; he also must have been contrived, because his power to contrive must be the highest contrivance of all.

(R) There, my good friend, you reason smartly, but not soundly.

(J) Where is the flaw?

(R) In the assumption that the eternal power of contrivance must have been contrived. That which has always been cannot have been contrived.

(J) But how do I know it has always been?

(R) Consider, my friend ; the initial power of all-what our modern scientific friends call "the primordial force," must have always been-MUST: there is no escape from this. Consider!

(J) Well, suppose I admit it?

(R) Then its capacities, whatever they are (and creation shows them stupendous in wisdom and power) cannot have been contrived.

(J) Very well then here are wisdom and power without contrivance

(R)Granted.

(J) Well , why may it not be so in the smaller things you speak of?

(R) because my friend, it self-evidently is not so. Take the smallest mollusc; will you affirm that power and wisdom are in it, to make itself; and that it has always been? You cannot do so. Therefore, there must be power and wisdom exterior to the mollusc to account for it. The proof of contrivance it contains must in its case involve a contriver, because it has come into existence and could not have contrived itself. But by what argument would you make eternal power and wisdom evidence of eternal power and wisdom before it? Besides look at the dilemma you are in. If it is to be an objection to believe in God that he could not make himself, why do you find it so easy to believe that the finite objects of creation have created themselves, by power by however slow a process? If you can believe that things that have had a beginning and that shew marks of an intelligence exterior to themselves, have been equal to the amazing feat of self-contrivance, you ought to be able to receive the simpler and more apparently inevitable conclusion that self existent power and wisdom (centralized in the father, revealed by Christ) is the efficient Cause of all things. Man, there must be a God: and man, by the Bible and history and many other things when fairly studied, we may see clearly there is.

More next week.