Thoughts on Religion | Page 4

argument, seeing that, in

common with all previous writers, he failed to observe that it is utterly
impossible for us to know the relations in which the supposed Designer
stands to the Designed,--much less to argue from the fact that the
Supreme Mind, even supposing it to exist, caused 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