Theism

LECTURE V

THE ARGUMENT FROM ORDERI

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

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

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

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

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

A much more recent science than astronomy, the science of chemistry, undertakes to instruct us as to the composition of the universe, and it is marvellous how much it can tell us even of the composition of the stars. What, then, is its most general and certain result? Just this, that order of the strictest kind, the most definite proportions, are wrought into the very structure of every world, and of every compound object in the world, air and water, earth and mineral, plant and animal. The vast variety of visible substances are reducible to rather more than sixty constituent elements, each of which has not only its own peculiar properties but its own definite and unvarying combining proportions with other elements, so that amidst the prodigious number of combinations all is strictly ordered, numerically exact. There is no chemical union possible except when the elements bear to each other a numerically constant ratio. Different compounds are always the products of the combination of the elements in different yet strictly definite proportions, there being no intermediate combinations, no transitional compounds. If each element did not admit of union with many others, the world would be dead and poor, its contents few and unvaried; if their unions were not always regulated by law, disorder would everywhere prevail. How comes it that they are so made in relation to one another that their manifold unions are ever regulated by law, and generate an endless variety of admirable products? Who made them thus? Did they make themselves? or, did any blind force make them? Reason answers that they must have been made by an intelligence which wanted them for its purposes. When the proportions of the elementary constituents are altered, the same elements produce the most diverse substances with the most dissimilar and even opposite properties, charcoal and diamond, a deadly poison or the breath of life, theine or strychnine. These powers all work together for good; but if they worked even a very little differently – if the circumstances in which they work, not to speak of the laws by which they work, were altered – they would spread destruction and death through the universe. The atmosphere is rather a mixture than a combination of chemical elements, but it is a mixture in which the constituents are proportioned to each other in the only way which fits it to sustain the lives of plants and animals, and to accomplish its many other important services; and wonderful in the extreme is the provision made for the constant restoration of the due proportions amidst perpetual oscillations. One of the chiefs of modern chemistry, Baron Liebig, points to what takes place when rain falls on the soil of a field adapted for vegetable growth as to something which "effectually strikes all human wisdom dumb." "During the filtration of rain-water," he says, "through the soil, the earth does not surrender one particle of all the nutritive matter which it contains available for vegetable growth (such as potash, silicic acid, ammonia, &c.); the most unintermittent rain is unable to abstract from it (except by the mechanical action of floods) any of the chief requisites for its fertility. The particles of mould not only firmly retain all matter nutritive to vegetable growth, but also immediately absorb such as are contained in the rain-water (ammonia, potash, &c.). But only such substances are completely absorbed from the water as are indispensable requisites for vegetable growth; others remain either entirely or for the most part in a state of solution." The laws and uses of light and heat, electricity and magnetism, and the adjustments which they presuppose, all point not less clearly to the ordinances of a supremely profound and accurate mind. In a word, out of a few elements endowed with definite powers, this world with its air and its seas, its hills and valleys, its vegetable forms and animal frames, and other worlds innumerable, have been built up by long-sustained and endlessly-varied processes of chemical synthesis mostly conducted under conditions so delicately adjusted to the requirements of each case, that the ablest chemists, with all their instruments and artifices, cannot even reproduce them on any scale however small. Can these elements be reasonably thought of as having been unfashioned and unprepared, or these processes as having been uninstituted and unpresided over by intelligence?23

The sciences of geology and palæontology disclose to us the history of our earth and of its vegetable and animal organisms. They prove that for countless ages, that from the inconceivably remote period of the deposition of the Laurentian rocks, light and heat, air and moisture, land and sea, and all general physical forces have been so arranged and co-ordinated as to produce and maintain a state of things which secured during all these countless ages life and health and pleasure for the countless millions of individuals contained in the multitude of species of creatures which have contemporaneously or successively peopled the earth. The sea, with its winds and waves, its streams and currents, its salts, its flora and fauna, teems with adaptations no less than the land. Probably no one has studied it with more care or to more purpose than Lieutenant Maury, and his well-known work on its physical geography proceeds throughout on the principle that "he who would understand its phenomena must cease to regard it as a waste of waters, and view it as the expression of One Thought, a unity with harmonies which One Intelligence, and One Intelligence alone, could utter;" while many of its pages might appropriately be read as a commentary on these lines of Wordsworth, —

"Huge ocean shows, within his yellow strand,A habitation marvellously planned,For life to occupy in love and rest."

The sciences referred to certify further, that as regards the various forms of life there has been from the time when it can be first traced to the present day "advance and progress in the main," and that the history of the earth corresponds throughout with the history of life on the earth, while each age prepares for the coming of another better than itself. But advance and progress presuppose intelligence, because they cannot be rationally conceived of apart from an ideal goal foreseen and selected. Volumes might be written to show how subtly and accurately external nature is adjusted to the requirements of vegetable and animal life, and how vegetable and animal life are inter-related; nay, even on how well the earth is fitted for the development and happiness of man. Think of the innumerable points of contact and connection, for example, between physical geography and political economy, which all indicate so many harmonies between the earth and man's economical condition, capacities, and history.24

The vegetable and animal kingdoms viewed generally, are also striking instances of unity of plan, of progressive order, of elaborately adjusted system. There are general principles of structure and general laws of development common to all organisms, constituting a plan of organisation capable of almost infinite variation, which underlies all the genera and orders of living creatures, vegetable and animal. It comprehends a number of subordinate plans which involve very abstract conceptions, and which even the ablest naturalists still very imperfectly comprehend. These higher plans would probably never have been thought of but for the detection of the numerous phenomena which seemed on a superficial view irreconcilable with the idea of purpose in creation. Just as it was those so-called "disturbances" in the planetary orbits, which appeared at first to point to some disorder and error in the construction of the sidereal system, that prompted Lagrange to the investigations which resulted in establishing that the order of the heavens was of a sublimer and more remarkable character than had been imagined, essentially including these apparent disturbances, so it has been the seeming exceptions to plan which are witnessed in rudimentary and aborted organs (such as the wing-bones in wingless birds, the finger-bones in horses, the legs below the skin in serpents, the teeth which never cut the gums in whales, &c.), that have indicated to modern biologists a unity of organisation far more comprehensive and wonderful than had previously been suspected. The larger and more ideal order thus brought to light as ruling in the organic world is one which could only have originated in a mind of unspeakable power and perfection. And it not only thus testifies directly of itself in favour of a Divine Intelligence, but the recognition of it, while correcting in some respects earlier conceptions as to the place of utility in nature, far from proving that utility has been disregarded or sacrificed, shows that each organ has been formed, not only with reference to its actual use in a given individual or species, but to the capacity of being applied to use in countless other individuals and species.25

When we enter into the examination of organisation in itself, adjustment becomes still more obvious in the processes of growth, reproduction, fructification, &c., in plants and animals, and in the provisions for locomotion, for securing food and shelter, for sight, hearing, &c., in the latter. The great physician, Sir Charles Bell, devoted a whole treatise to point out those which are to be found in the hand alone. The arrangement of bones, muscles, joints, and other parts in the limb of a tiger or the wing of an eagle are not less admirable. The eye and ear are singularly exquisite structures, the former being far the most perfect of optical, and the latter far the most perfect of acoustic instruments. Instances of this sort are, indeed, so remarkable, and so irresistibly convincing to most minds, that some theists have consented to rest on them exclusively the inference of a designing intelligence. They would grant that the evidences of purpose are only to be traced in organisation. The limitation is inconsistent and untenable, but not inexplicable. The adjustment of parts to one another, and their co-ordination as means to an end, are not more certainly existent in fitting the eye to see and the ear to hear than in securing the stability of the solar system, but they are more obviously visible because compressed into a compass easily grasped and surveyed; because organ and function are the most specialised kinds of means and ends; because organisms are the most curiously and conspicuously elaborate examples of order. And as the telescope can show us no end of the simple and majestic order of the heavens, so the microscope can show us no end of the exquisite and impressive order which discloses even —

"In Nature's most minute design,The signature and stamp of power divine;Contrivance intricate, expressed with ease,Where unassisted sight no beauty sees.The shapely limb and lubricated jointWithin the small dimensions of a point;Muscle and nerve miraculously spun,His mighty work, who speaks and it is done.The Invisible, in things scarce seen revealed,To whom an atom is an ample field."– (Cowper.)26

The traces of a Supreme Reason crowd still more upon the vision when we come to the human mind, —

"The varied scene of quick-compounded thought,And where the mixing passions endless shift."– (Thomson.)

The mere existence of originated minds necessarily implies the existence of an unoriginated mind. "What can be more absurd," asks Montesquieu, "than to imagine that a blind fatalistic force has produced intelligent beings?" The complicated and refined adjustments of the body to the mind, and of the mind to the body, are so numerous and interesting that their study has now become the task of a special class of scientific men. A very little disorder in the organisation of the brain – such as even microscopic post-mortem examination may fail to detect – suffices to cause hallucinations of the senses, to shake intellect from its throne, to paralyse the will, and to corrupt the sentiments and affections. How precise and skilful must the adjustment be between the sound brain and sane mind! Who sufficiently realises the mystery of wisdom which lies in the familiar fact that the mind, by merely willing to use the members of the body, sets in motion instantaneously and unconsciously, without effort and without failure, cords and pulleys and levers, joints and muscles, of which it only vaguely, if at all, surmises the existence? The laws of our various appetencies, affections, and emotions, and their relations to their special ends or objects, the nature of the several intellectual faculties and their subservience to mental culture, and still more the general constitution of the mind as a system consisting of a multitude of powers under the government of reason and conscience, present to us vast fields filled with the evidences of Divine Wisdom.27