Theism

LECTURE IV

We have now to consider the principle of causality so far as it is implied in the theistic inference, and the theistic inference so far as it is conditioned by the principle of causality. It is not necessary to discuss the nature of the principle of causality in itself or for its own sake; it is even expedient, I believe, not to attempt to penetrate farther into its metaphysics and psychology than the work on hand imperatively requires. We must of course go as far as those have gone who have maintained on metaphysical or psychological grounds that the principle of causality warrants no theistic inference; we must show that their metaphysics and psychology are irrelevant when true, and false when relevant; but we may be content to stop when we have reached this result. The truth of theism has been very generally represented, both by those who admit and by those who deny the validity of the theistic inference, as much more dependent than it really is on the truth or falsity of some one or other of the many views which have been entertained as to the nature of causation, and the origin of the causal judgment. We are constantly being warned by theists that unless we accept this or that particular notion of causation, and account for it in this or that particular manner, we cannot reasonably believe in the existence of God; we are constantly being assured by anti-theists that belief in God is irrational, because it assumes some erroneous view of causation, or some erroneous explanation of the process by which causation is apprehended. But it will be found that representations of this kind seldom prove more than one-sidedness and immaturity of thought in those who make them. An accurate and comprehensive view of the nature of causation, and of our apprehension of it, will, it is true, have here as elsewhere great advantages over an erroneous and narrow one, but hardly any of the theories which have been held on these points can be consistently argued by those who hold them to invalidate theistic belief. Even utterly inadequate statements and explanations of the principle of causality – as, for example, those of Hume and J. S. Mill – are not more incompatible with the theistic inference than they are with any other inference which is a real extension of knowledge. Unless they are understood and applied more rigidly than by those who propound them, they allow us to draw the theistic inference; if understood and applied so as to forbid our drawing it, they logically disallow all scientific inference except such as is purely formal and deductive. In a word, if compatible with science they are compatible with theism, and if incompatible with theism they are incompatible with science.

When we assume the principle of causality in the argument for the existence of God, what precisely is it that we assume? Only this: that whatever has begun to be, must have had an antecedent, or ground, or cause which accounts for it. We do not assume that every existence must have had a cause. We have no right, indeed, to assume that any existence has had a cause until we have found reason to regard it as not an eternal existence, but one which has had an origin. Whatever we believe, however, to have had an origin, we at once believe also to have had a cause. The theistic argument assumes that this belief is true. It assumes that every existence, once new, every event or occurrence or change, must have a cause. This is certainly no very large assumption: on the contrary, if any assumption can claim to be self-evident, it surely may. Thought implies the truth of it every moment. Sensation only gives rise to thought in virtue of it. Unless it were true there could be no such thing as thought. To deny that the principle of causality, understood as has been indicated, is true, would be to deny that reason is reason; it would be equivalent to affirming that to seek for a reason is always and essentially an unreasonable process. And, in fact, so understood, the principle never has been denied. Hume even did not venture to deny it, although he ought in consistency to have denied it, and obviously desired to be able to deny it. He did not, however, deny that every object which begins to exist must have a cause, – he did not venture to do more than deny that this is either intuitively or demonstratively certain, and that any bond or tie can be perceived between what is called a cause and what is called an effect. The inquiry which he instituted was not whether we pronounce it necessary that everything whose existence has a beginning should also have a cause or not, but for what reason we pronounce it necessary. He assumed that we pronounce it necessary, and his elaborate investigation into the nature of causation was undertaken expressly and entirely to discover why we do so. The conclusion to which he came – viz., that the causal judgment is an "offspring of experience engendered upon custom" – was not only a very inadequate and erroneous one in itself, but inconsistent with the reality of what it professed to explain: still the admission which has been mentioned was what was professed to be explained.

Now, if it be true at all that every event, whether it be a new existence or a change in an old existence, presupposes an explanatory antecedent or cause, there can of course be no accepting in all its breadth one of the propositions which Hume urges most strenuously – viz., that the mere study of an event can tell us nothing about its cause. We may grant that it can tell us very little, – that Hume performed an immense service in showing how extremely little we can know of the particular causes of particular events apart from the study of both in connection, apart from observation, experiment, and induction, – but we cannot grant that the event itself teaches us absolutely nothing. If every event must have a cause, every event must have a sufficient cause. For these two statements, although verbally different, are really identical. The second seems to mean, but does not actually mean, more than the first. The whole cause of the elevation of a weight of ten pounds a foot high cannot be also the whole cause of the elevation of twenty pounds to the same height, for the simple reason that in the latter case the elevation of ten pounds – of half the weight – would be an event which had no cause at all. And this is universally true. If every event have not a sufficient cause, some events have no cause at all. This, then, I say, we necessarily know that the efficient cause of every event is a sufficient cause, however vague may be our knowledge of efficiency and sufficiency.

If every event – using this term as convenient to denote either a new existence or a change in some existence – must have a cause, to prove that the universe must have had a cause we require to prove it to have been an event – to have had a commencement. Can this be done? That is the question in the theistic argument from causality. Compared therewith, all other questions which have been introduced into or associated with the argument are of very subordinate importance. Now there is only one way of reasonably answering the question, and that is by examining the universe, in order to determine whether or not it bears the marks of being an event – whether or not it has the character of an effect. We have no right to assume it to be an event, or to have had a beginning. The entire argument for the Divine existence, which is at present under consideration, can be no stronger than the strength of the proof which we can adduce in favour of its having had a beginning, and the only valid proof of that which reason can hope to find must be derived from the examination of the universe itself.

What, then, is the result of such an examination? An absolute certainty that all the things which are seen are temporal, – that every object in the universe which presents itself to the senses has had a beginning, – that the most powerful, penetrating, and delicate instruments devised to assist our senses reach no cause which is not obviously also an effect. The progress of science has not more convincingly and completely disproved the once prevalent notion that the universe was created about six thousand years ago, than it has convincingly and completely established that everything of which our senses inform us has had a commencement in time, and is of a compound, derivative, and dependent nature. It is not long since men had no means of proving that the rocks, for example, were not as old as the earth itself – no direct means of proving even that they were not eternal; but science is now able to tell us with confidence under what conditions, in what order, and in what epochs of geological time they were formed. We have probably a more satisfactory knowledge of the formation of the coal-measures than of the establishment of the feudal system. We know that the Alps, although they look as if they might have stood for ever, are not even old, as geologists count age. The morning and night, the origin and disappearance of the countless species of living things which have peopled the earth from the enormously remote times when the rocks of the Laurentian period were deposited down to the births and deaths of contemporaneous animals, have been again brought into the light of day by the power of science. The limits of research are not even there reached, and with bold flight science passes beyond the confines of discovered life – beyond the epochs of formation even of the oldest rocks – to a time when there was no distinction of earth and sea and atmosphere, as all were mingled together in nebulous matter, in some sort of fluid or mist or steam; yea, onwards to a time when our earth had no separate existence, and suns, moons, and stars were not yet divided and arranged into systems. If we seek, then, after what is eternal, science tells us that it is not the earth nor anything which it contains, not the sea nor the living things within it, not the moving air, not the sun, nor the moon, nor the stars. These things when interrogated all tell us to look above and beyond them, for although they may have begun to be in times far remote, yet it was within times to which the thoughts of finite beings can reach back.

There is no denying, then, that the universe is to a great extent an effect, an event, something which has begun to be, a process of becoming. Science is, day by day, year by year, finding out more and more that it is an effect. The growth of science is in great part merely the extension of the proof that the universe is an effect. But the scientific proof of the non-eternity of matter is as yet far from a complete one. It leaves it possible for the mind to refer the phases through which the universe has passed, and the forms which it has assumed, to an underlying eternal source in nature itself, and, therefore, not to God. And this is by far the most plausible and forcible way of combating the argument we are employing. It meets it with a direct counter-argument, which every person must acknowledge to be relevant, and which, if sufficiently made out, is obviously decisive. That counter-argument we are bound, therefore, to dispose of. It has been thus stated by Mr J. S. Mill: "There is in nature a permanent element, and also a changeable: the changes are always the effects of previous changes; the permanent existences, so far as we know, are not effects at all. It is true we are accustomed to say not only of events, but of objects, that they are produced by causes, as water by the union of hydrogen and oxygen. But by this we only mean that when they begin to exist, their beginning is the effect of a cause. But their beginning to exist is not an object, it is an event. If it be objected that the cause of a thing's beginning to exist may be said with propriety to be the cause of the thing itself, I shall not quarrel with the expression. But that which in an object begins to exist, is that in it which belongs to the changeable element in nature; the outward form and the properties depending on mechanical or chemical combinations of its component parts. There is in every object another and a permanent element – viz., the specific elementary substance or substances of which it consists and their inherent properties. These are not known to us as beginning to exist: within the range of human knowledge they had no beginning, and consequently no cause; though they themselves are causes or non-causes of everything that takes place. Experience, therefore, affords no evidences, not even analogies, to justify our extending to the apparently immutable, a generalisation grounded only on our observation of the changeable."15

On this I would remark, first, that mere experience does not take us to anything which we are entitled to call even apparently immutable. It only takes us, even when extended to the utmost by scientific instruments and processes, to elements which we call simple because we have hitherto failed to analyse them into simpler elements. It is a perfectly legitimate scientific hypothesis that all the substances recognised by chemists as elementary and intransmutable, are in reality the modifications or syntheses of a single material element, which have been produced under conditions that render them incapable of being affected by any tests or agencies which the analyst in his laboratory can bring to bear upon them. Indeed, unless this hypothesis be true, the theory of development, so generally accepted at present, can hardly be supposed to be of any very wide application, seeing that at its very outset it has to affirm the existence of no fewer than sixty-four true untransformable species. But suppose the so-called elementary substances of chemistry to be simple, no one can reasonably suppose them as known to us to be ultimate. In oxygen there may be no atoms which are not atoms of oxygen, but we know by experience only oxygen, not atoms of oxygen. No man has ever been able to put himself in sensible contact with what alone can be immutable in oxygen, if there be anything immutable in it, its ultimate atoms. No man has seen, heard, touched, or tasted an ultimate atom of any kind of matter. We know nothing of atoms – nothing of what is permanent in nature – from direct experience. We must pass beyond such experience – beyond all testimony of the senses – when we believe in anything permanent in nature, not less than when we believe in something beyond and above nature. The atomic theory in chemistry demands a faith which transcends experience, not less than the theistic theory in religion.

Then, secondly, although we grant that there is a permanent element in the physical universe, something in matter itself which is self-existent and eternal, we still need, in order to account for the universe which we know, an Eternal Intelligence. The universe, regarded even only so far as it is admitted by all materialists no less than by theists and pantheists to be an effect, cannot be explained, as materialists think, merely physically. The atoms of matter are, it is said, eternal and immutable. Grant them to be so. There are, however, countless millions of them, and manifestly the universe is one, is a single, magnificent, and complicated system, is characterised by a marvellous unity in variety. We must be informed how the universe came to be a universe, – how it came to have the unity which underlies its diversity, – if it resulted from a countless multitude of ultimate causes. Did the atoms take counsel together and devise a common plan and work it out? That hypothesis is unspeakably absurd, yet it is rational in comparison with the notion that these atoms combined by mere chance, and by chance produced such a universe as that in which we live. Grant all the atoms of matter to be eternal, grant all the properties and forces which with the smallest degree of plausibility can be claimed for them to be eternal and immutable, and it is still beyond all expression improbable that these atoms with these forces, if unarranged, uncombined, ununified, unutilised by a presiding mind, would give rise to anything entitled to be called a universe. It is millions to one that they would never produce the simplest of the regular arrangements which we comprehend under the designation of course of nature, or the lowest of vegetable or animal organisms; millions of millions to one that they would never produce a solar system, the earth, the animal kingdom, or human history. No number of material atoms, although eternal and endowed with mechanical force, can explain the unity and order of the universe, and therefore the supposition of their existence does not free us from the necessity of believing in a single intelligent cause – a Supreme Mind – to move and mould, combine and adjust, the ultimate atoms of matter into a single orderly system. There at once rises the question, Is it really necessary to believe both matter and mind to be eternal? No, must be our answer. The law of parsimony of causes directly forbids the belief, unless we can show that one cause is insufficient to explain the universe. And that we cannot do. We can show that matter is insufficient, – that it cannot account of itself even for the physical universe, – but not that mind is insufficient, not that mind cannot account for anything that is in matter. On what grounds can it be shown that a mind possessed of sufficient power to originate the universe, the ultimate elements of matter being given, could not also have created these elements? that the Supreme Intelligence, which gave to each sun, and planet, and satellite its size, and shape, and position, and motion, could not have summoned into being their constituent particles? On none whatever. We may not understand how they could be created, but we have no reason for thinking that they could not be created; and it is surely far easier and far more reasonable to believe that they were created, than that a countless number of inconceivably small indivisible particles of matter, lying far beyond the range of any of our senses, but extending through immeasurable fields of space, should all, inconceivably minute although they be, be self-existent and eternal. The man who asks us to accept the latter supposition, asks us, it seems to me, to believe what is not only as mysterious as the self-existence of Deity, but millions of millions of times more mysterious. I should require strong reasons for assigning infinitely great attributes to excessively little things, and to an inconceivable number of them; but I can in this instance find no reasons at all.

Then, in the third place, any plausible conceptions we can form of the ultimate nature of matter lead to the belief that even that is an event or effect, a something derivative and caused. It must be admitted that the most plausible of these conceptions are vague and conjectural. We have a practical and relative knowledge of matter which is both exact and trustworthy, – a knowledge of its properties from which we can mathematically deduce a multitude of remote consequences of an extremely precise character – but we are hardly entitled to characterise as knowledge at all any of the views which have been propounded as to what it is in itself. It is only the unreflecting who fancy that matter in itself is something very clear and obvious, which they may apprehend by merely opening their eyes and stretching out their hands. Those who have never reasoned on the subject are apt to imagine that the nature of matter is of all things the easiest to understand, and they unhesitatingly invest it with their own sensations and perceptions. That is the so-called commonsense view of matter; but the slightest inquiry proves it to be delusive and nonsensical. Colour, for example, is just what is seen, and sound just what is heard; they are not qualities inherent in objects independent of the eye and ear: the matter which is supposed to cause by its motions on our senses these and other perceptions of the material world, we cannot see, hear, or apprehend by any sense. Change our senses and the universe will be thereby changed, everything in it becoming something other than it was before, green perhaps red, the bitter sweet, the loudest noise a gentle whisper, the hardest substance soft. As soon, then, as we thoughtfully ask ourselves, What is matter? we begin to discover that it is in itself something utterly mysterious. The collection of phenomena which we call its properties are quite unlike the phenomena of mind in this most important respect, that whatever they may be they are not what they appear to be. A state of mind is what we feel it to be; a state of matter is certainly not what we seem to ourselves to perceive it to be. No one, of course, knew all this better than Mr Mill. He, as a philosopher, had asked himself what matter is; he had formed a theory in answer to the question. And what is his theory? Just this, – that we cannot find a permanent element in matter; that we have no right to suppose that there is a permanent real existence or actual substance in matter; that all that we are warranted to affirm about the ultimate nature of matter is that it is a permanent possibility, – the permanent possibility of sensations. That was the conclusion which he arrived at when he theorised on matter without any theological aim. But he appears to have forgotten it when he came to criticise the argument for a first cause. He could not otherwise have written as if it were quite certain that there was in matter "a permanent element," not an underlying possibility but an inherent real substance. Had he remembered what his own theory as to the nature of matter was, he would have avoided as utterly untrue and misleading every expression which could suggest the notion of there being a permanent element in matter, and would have admitted that very probably the permanent possibilities of sensation, the causes of all material phenomena, lay in the Divine will, since he had been unable to find anything else permanent in which they could be supposed to subsist. That is a view which many profound thinkers have adopted. They have been led to hold that matter is essentially force, and nothing but force; that the whole material world is ultimately resolvable into forces; and that all its forces are but manifestations or outgoings of will-force. If so, the whole material world is not only dependent on, but is, the will of God, and has no being of any kind apart from the will of God. If so, God's will is not only the cause and controlling power of nature, but its substance, its self. And this view, that what alone substantially underlies all the phenomena we designate material is an acting mind, an energising will, has not only been reached by mental philosophers and idealistic speculators, but by those physicists who, like Boscovitch and Faraday, have found themselves forced to conclude that what is constitutive of matter is not indivisible particles, even infinitesimally small, but mere centres of force, since force necessarily implies some sort of substance, and, therefore, spirit where not matter.