Thoughts on Religion | Page 4

the observable products by any particular intellectual process. In other words, all advocates of the Design argument have failed to perceive that, even if we grant nature to be due to a creating Mind, still we have no shadow of a right to conclude that this Mind can only have exerted its creative power by means of such and such cogitative operations. How absurd, therefore, must it be to raise the supposed evidence of such cogitative operations into evidences of the existence of a creating Mind! If a theist retorts that it is, after all, of very little importance whether or not we are able to divine the methods of creation, so long as the facts are there to attest that, in some way or other, the observable phenomena of nature must be due to Intelligence of some kind as their ultimate cause, then I am the first to endorse this remark. It has always appeared to me one of the most unaccountable things in the history of speculation that so many competent writers can have insisted upon Design as an argument for Theism, when they must all have known perfectly well that they have no means of ascertaining the subjective psychology of that Supreme Mind whose existence the argument is adduced to demonstrate. The truth is, that the argument from teleology must, and can only, rest upon the observable facts of nature, without reference to the intellectual processes by which these facts may be supposed to have been accomplished. But, looking to the "present state of our knowledge," this is merely to change the teleological argument in its gross Paleyian form, into the argument from the ubiquitous operation of general laws.'
'§ 4. This argument was thus[10] stated in contrast with the argument from design. 'The argument from design says, there must be a God, because such and such an organic structure must have been due to such and such an intellectual process. The argument from general laws says, There must be a God, because such and such an organic structure must in some way or other have been ultimately due to intelligence.' Every structure exhibits with more or less of complexity the principle of order; it is related to all other things in a universal order. This universality of order renders irrational the hypothesis of chance in accounting for the universe. 'Let us think of the supreme causality as we may, the fact remains that from it there emanates a directive influence of uninterrupted consistency, on a scale of stupendous magnitude and exact precision worthy of our highest conceptions of deity[11].' The argument was developed in the words of Professor Baden Powell. 'That which requires reason and thought to understand must be itself thought and reason. That which mind alone can investigate or express must be itself mind. And if the highest conception attained is but partial, then the mind and reason studied is greater than the mind and reason of the student. If the more it is studied the more vast and complex is the necessary connection in reason disclosed, then the more evident is the vast extent and compass of the reason thus partially manifested and its reality as existing in the immutably connected order of objects examined, independently of the mind of the investigator.' This argument from the universal Kosmos has the advantage of being wholly independent of the method by which things came to be what they are. It is unaffected by the acceptance of evolution. Till quite recently it seemed irrefutable[12].
'But nevertheless we are constrained to acknowledge that its apparent power dwindles to nothing in view of the indisputable fact that, if force and matter have been eternal, all and every natural law must have resulted by way of necessary consequence.... It does not admit of one moment's questioning that it is as certainly true that all the exquisite beauty and melodious harmony of nature follows necessarily as inevitably from the persistence of force and the primary qualities of matter as it is certainly true that force is persistent or that matter is extended or impenetrable[13].... It will be remembered that I dwelt at considerable length and with much earnestness upon this truth, not only because of its enormous importance in its bearing upon our subject, but also because no one has hitherto considered it in that relation.' It was also pointed out that the coherence and correspondence of the macrocosm of the universe with the microcosm of the human mind can be accounted for by the fact that the human mind is only one of the products of general evolution, its subjective relations necessarily reflecting those external relations of which they themselves are the product[14].
'§ 5. The next step, however, was to mitigate the severity of the conclusion that was liable to be