Darwin and Modern Science (1909)
Edited by A.C. Seward
XXIV. THE INFLUENCE OF DARWIN UPON RELIGIOUS THOUGHT.
By P.N. WAGGETT, M.A., S.S.J.E.
I.
he object of this paper is first to point out certain elements of the
Darwinian influence upon Religious thought, and then to show reason for the
conclusion that it has been, from a Christian point of view, satisfactory.
I shall not proceed further to urge that the Christian apologetic in
relation to biology has been successful. A variety of opinions may be held
on this question, without disturbing the conclusion that the movements of
readjustment have been beneficial to those who remain Christians, and this
by making them more Christian and not only more liberal. The theologians
may sometimes have retreated, but there has been an advance of theology. I
know that this account incurs the charge of optimism. It is not the worst
that could be made. The influence has been limited in personal range,
unequal, even divergent, in operation, and accompanied by the appearance of
waste and mischievous products. The estimate which follows requires for
due balance a full development of many qualifying considerations. For this
I lack space, but I must at least distinguish my view from the popular one
that our difficulties about religion and natural science have come to an
end.
Concerning the older questions about origins—the origin of the world, of
species, of man, of reason, conscience, religion—a large measure of
understanding has been reached by some thoughtful men. But meanwhile new
questions have arisen, questions about conduct, regarding both the reality
of morals and the rule of right action for individuals and societies. And
these problems, still far from solution, may also be traced to the
influence of Darwin. For they arise from the renewed attention to
heredity, brought about by the search for the causes of variation, without
which the study of the selection of variations has no sufficient basis.
Even the existing understanding about origins is very far from universal.
On these points there were always thoughtful men who denied the necessity
of conflict, and there are still thoughtful men who deny the possibility of
a truce.
It must further be remembered that the earlier discussion now, as I hope to
show, producing favourable results, created also for a time grave damage,
not only in the disturbance of faith and the loss of men—a loss not
repaired by a change in the currents of debate—but in what I believe to be
a still more serious respect. I mean the introduction of a habit of facile
and untested hypothesis in religious as in other departments of thought.
Darwin is not responsible for this, but he is in part the cause of it.
Great ideas are dangerous guests in narrow minds; and thus it has happened
that Darwin—the most patient of scientific workers, in whom hypothesis
waited upon research, or if it provisionally outstepped it did so only with
the most scrupulously careful acknowledgment—has led smaller and less
conscientious men in natural science, in history, and in theology to an
over-eager confidence in probable conjecture and a loose grip upon the
facts of experience. It is not too much to say that in many quarters the
age of materialism was the least matter-of-fact age conceivable, and the
age of science the age which showed least of the patient temper of inquiry.
I have indicated, as shortly as I could, some losses and dangers which in a
balanced account of Darwin's influence would be discussed at length.
One other loss must be mentioned. It is a defect in our thought which, in
some quarters, has by itself almost cancelled all the advantages secured.
I mean the exaggerated emphasis on uniformity or continuity; the
unwillingness to rest any part of faith or of our practical expectation
upon anything that from any point of view can be called exceptional. The
high degree of success reached by naturalists in tracing, or reasonably
conjecturing, the small beginnings of great differences, has led the
inconsiderate to believe that anything may in time become anything else.
It is true that this exaggeration of the belief in uniformity has produced
in turn its own perilous reaction. From refusing to believe whatever can
be called exceptional, some have come to believe whatever can be called
wonderful.
But, on the whole, the discontinuous or highly various character of
experience received for many years too little deliberate attention. The
conception of uniformity which is a necessity of scientific description has
been taken for the substance of history. We have accepted a postulate of
scientific method as if it were a conclusion of scientific demonstration.
In the name of a generalisation which, however just on the lines of a
particular method, is the prize of a difficult exploit of reflexion, we
have discarded the direct impressions of experience; or, perhaps it is more
true to say, we have used for the criticism of alleged experiences a
doctrine of uniformity which is only valid in the region of abstract
science. For every science depends for its advance upon limitation of
attention, upon the selection out of the whole content of consciousness of
that part or aspect which is measurable by the method of the science.
Accordingly there is a science of life which rightly displays the unity
underlying all its manifestations. But there is another view of life,
equally valid, and practically sometimes more important, which recognises
the immediate and lasting effect of crisis, difference, and revolution.
Our ardour for the demonstration of uniformity of process and of minute
continuous change needs to be balanced by a recognition of the catastrophic
element in experience, and also by a recognition of the exceptional
significance for us of events which may be perfectly regular from an
impersonal point of view.
An exorbitant jealousy of miracle, revelation, and ultimate moral
distinctions has been imported from evolutionary science into religious
thought. And it has been a damaging influence, because it has taken men's
attention from facts, and fixed them upon theories.
II.
With this acknowledgment of important drawbacks, requiring many words for
their proper description, I proceed to indicate certain results of Darwin's
doctrine which I believe to be in the long run wholly beneficial to
Christian thought. These are:
The encouragement in theology of that evolutionary method of observation
and study, which has shaped all modern research:
The recoil of Christian apologetics towards the ground of religious
experience, a recoil produced by the pressure of scientific criticism upon
other supports of faith:
The restatement, or the recovery of ancient forms of statement, of the
doctrines of Creation and of divine Design in Nature, consequent upon the
discussion of evolution and of natural selection as its guiding factor.
(1) The first of these is quite possibly the most important of all. It
was well defined in a notable paper read by Dr Gore, now Bishop of
Birmingham, to the Church Congress at Shrewsbury in 1896. We have learnt a
new caution both in ascribing and in denying significance to items of
evidence, in utterance or in event. There has been, as in art, a study of
values, which secures perspective and solidity in our representation of
facts. On the one hand, a given utterance or event cannot be drawn into
evidence as if all items were of equal consequence, like sovereigns in a
bag. The question whence and whither must be asked, and the particular
thing measured as part of a series. Thus measured it is not less truly
important, but it may be important in a lower degree. On the other hand,
and for exactly the same reason, nothing that is real is unimportant. The
"failures" are not mere mistakes. We see them, in St Augustine's words, as
"scholar's faults which men praise in hope of fruit."
We cannot safely trace the origin of the evolutionistic method to the
influence of natural science. The view is tenable that theology led the
way. Probably this is a case of alternate and reciprocal debt. Quite
certainly the evolutionist method in theology, in Christian history, and in
the estimate of scripture, has received vast reinforcement from biology, in
which evolution has been the ever present and ever victorious conception.
(2) The second effect named is the new willingness of Christian thinkers
to take definite account of religious experience. This is related to
Darwin through the general pressure upon religious faith of scientific
criticism. The great advance of our knowledge of organisms has been an
important element in the general advance of science. It has acted, by the
varied requirements of the theory of organisms, upon all other branches of
natural inquiry, and it held for a long time that leading place in public
attention which is now occupied by speculative physics. Consequently it
contributed largely to our present estimation of science as the supreme
judge in all matters of inquiry (F.R. Tennant: "The Being of God in the
light of Physical Science", in "Essays on some theological questions of the
day". London, 1905.), to the supposed destruction of mystery and the
disparagement of metaphysic which marked the last age, as well as to the
just recommendation of scientific method in branches of learning where the
direct acquisitions of natural science had no place.
Besides this, the new application of the idea of law and mechanical
regularity to the organic world seemed to rob faith of a kind of refuge.
The romantics had, as Berthelot ("Evolutionisme et Platonisme", pages 45,
46, 47. Paris, 1908.) shows, appealed to life to redress the judgments
drawn from mechanism. Now, in Spencer, evolution gave us a vitalist
mechanic or mechanical vitalism, and the appeal seemed cut off. We may
return to this point later when we consider evolution; at present I only
endeavour to indicate that general pressure of scientific criticism which
drove men of faith to seek the grounds of reassurance in a science of their
own; in a method of experiment, of observation, of hypothesis checked by
known facts. It is impossible for me to do more than glance across the
threshold of this subject. But it is necessary to say that the method is
in an elementary stage of revival. The imposing success that belongs to
natural science is absent: we fall short of the unchallengeable unanimity
of the Biologists on fundamentals. The experimental method with its sure
repetitions cannot be applied to our subject-matter. But we have something
like the observational method of palaeontology and geographical
distribution; and in biology there are still men who think that the large
examination of varieties by way of geography and the search of strata is as
truly scientific, uses as genuinely the logical method of difference, and
is as fruitful in sure conclusions as the quasi-chemical analysis of
Mendelian laboratory work, of which last I desire to express my humble
admiration. Religion also has its observational work in the larger and
possibly more arduous manner.
But the scientific work in religion makes its way through difficulties and
dangers. We are far from having found the formula of its combination with
the historical elements of our apologetic. It is exposed, therefore, to a
damaging fire not only from unspiritualist psychology and pathology but
also from the side of scholastic dogma. It is hard to admit on equal terms
a partner to the old undivided rule of books and learning. With Charles
Lamb, we cry in some distress, "must knowledge come to me, if it come at
all, by some awkward experiment of intuition, and no longer by this
familiar process of reading?" ("Essays of Elia", "New Year's Eve", page
41; Ainger's edition. London, 1899.) and we are answered that the old
process has an imperishable value, only we have not yet made clear its
connection with other contributions. And all the work is young, liable to
be drawn into unprofitable excursions, side-tracked by self-deceit and
pretence; and it fatally attracts, like the older mysticism, the curiosity
and the expository powers of those least in sympathy with it, ready writers
who, with all the air of extended research, have been content with narrow
grounds for induction. There is a danger, besides, which accompanies even
the most genuine work of this science and must be provided against by all
its serious students. I mean the danger of unbalanced introspection both
for individuals and for societies; of a preoccupation comparable to our
modern social preoccupation with bodily health; of reflection upon mental
states not accompanied by exercise and growth of the mental powers; the
danger of contemplating will and neglecting work, of analysing conviction
and not criticising evidence.
Still, in spite of dangers and mistakes, the work remains full of hopeful
indications, and, in the best examples (Such an example is given in Baron
F. von Hugel's recently finished book, the result of thirty years'
research: "The Mystical Element of Religion, as studied in Saint Catherine
of Genoa and her Friends". London, 1908.), it is truly scientific in its
determination to know the very truth, to tell what we think, not what we
think we ought to think. (G. Tyrrell, in "Mediaevalism", has a chapter
which is full of the important MORAL element in a scientific attitude.
"The only infallible guardian of truth is the spirit of truthfulness."
"Mediaevalism" page 182, London, 1908.), truly scientific in its employment
of hypothesis and verification, and in growing conviction of the reality of
its subject-matter through the repeated victories of a mastery which
advances, like science, in the Baconian road of obedience. It is
reasonable to hope that progress in this respect will be more rapid and
sure when religious study enlists more men affected by scientific desire
and endowed with scientific capacity.
The class of investigating minds is a small one, possibly even smaller than
that of reflecting minds. Very few persons at any period are able to find
out anything whatever. There are few observers, few discoverers, few who
even wish to discover truth. In how many societies the problems of
philology which face every person who speaks English are left unattempted!
And if the inquiring or the successfully inquiring class of minds is small,
much smaller, of course, is the class of those possessing the scientific
aptitude in an eminent degree. During the last age this most distinguished
class was to a very great extent absorbed in the study of phenomena, a
study which had fallen into arrears. For we stood possessed, in rudiment,
of means of observation, means for travelling and acquisition, qualifying
men for a larger knowledge than had yet been attempted. These were now to
be directed with new accuracy and ardour upon the fabric and behaviour of
the world of sense. Our debt to the great masters in physical science who
overtook and almost out-stripped the task cannot be measured; and, under
the honourable leadership of Ruskin, we may all well do penance if we have
failed "in the respect due to their great powers of thought, or in the
admiration due to the far scope of their discovery." ("Queen of the Air",
Preface, page vii. London, 1906.) With what miraculous mental energy and
divine good fortune—as Romans said of their soldiers—did our men of
curiosity face the apparently impenetrable mysteries of nature! And how
natural it was that immense accessions of knowledge, unrelated to the
spiritual facts of life, should discredit Christian faith, by the apparent
superiority of the new work to the feeble and unprogressive knowledge of
Christian believers! The day is coming when men of this mental character
and rank, of this curiosity, this energy and this good fortune in
investigation, will be employed in opening mysteries of a spiritual nature.
They will silence with masterful witness the over-confident denials of
naturalism. They will be in danger of the widespread recognition which
thirty years ago accompanied every utterance of Huxley, Tyndall, Spencer.
They will contribute, in spite of adulation, to the advance of sober
religious and moral science.
And this result will be due to Darwin, first because by raising the dignity
of natural science, he encouraged the development of the scientific mind;
secondly because he gave to religious students the example of patient and
ardent investigation; and thirdly because by the pressure of naturalistic
criticism the religious have been driven to ascertain the causes of their
own convictions, a work in which they were not without the sympathy of men
of science. (The scientific rank of its writer justifies the insertion of
the following letter from the late Sir John Burdon-Sanderson to me. In the
lecture referred to I had described the methods of Professor Moseley in
teaching Biology as affording a suggestion of the scientific treatment of
religion.
Oxford, April 30, 1902.
Dear Sir,
I feel that I must express to you my thanks for the discourse which I had
the pleasure of listening to yesterday afternoon.
I do not mean to say that I was able to follow all that you said as to the
identity of Method in the two fields of Science and Religion, but I
recognise that the "mysticism" of which you spoke gives us the only way by
which the two fields can be brought into relation.
Among much that was memorable, nothing interested me more than what you
said of Moseley.
No one, I am sure, knew better than you the value of his teaching and in
what that value consisted.
Yours faithfully
J. Burdon-Sanderson.
31-2.)
In leaving the subject of scientific religious inquiry, I will only add
that I do not believe it receives any important help—and certainly it
suffers incidentally much damaging interruption—from the study of abnormal
manifestations or abnormal conditions of personality.
(3) Both of the above effects seem to me of high, perhaps the very
highest, importance to faith and to thought. But, under the third head, I
name two which are more directly traceable to the personal work of Darwin,
and more definitely characteristic of the age in which his influence was
paramount: viz. the influence of the two conceptions of evolution and
natural selection upon the doctrine of creation and of design respectively.
It is impossible here, though it is necessary for a complete sketch of the
matter, to distinguish the different elements and channels of this
Darwinian influence; in Darwin's own writings, in the vigorous polemic of
Huxley, and strangely enough, but very actually for popular thought, in the
teaching of the definitely anti-Darwinian evolutionist Spencer.
Under the head of the directly and purely Darwinian elements I should class
as preeminent the work of Wallace and of Bates; for no two sets of facts
have done more to fix in ordinary intelligent minds a belief in organic
evolution and in natural selection as its guiding factor than the facts of
geographical distribution and of protective colour and mimicry. The facts
of geology were difficult to grasp and the public and theologians heard
more often of the imperfection than of the extent of the geological record.
The witness of embryology, depending to a great extent upon microscopic
work, was and is beyond the appreciation of persons occupied in fields of
work other than biology.
III.
From the influence in religion of scientific modes of thought we pass to
the influence of particular biological conceptions. The former effect
comes by way of analogy, example, encouragement and challenge; inspiring or
provoking kindred or similar modes of thought in the field of theology; the
latter by a collision of opinions upon matters of fact or conjecture which
seem to concern both science and religion.
In the case of Darwinism the story of this collision is familiar, and falls
under the heads of evolution and natural selection, the doctrine of descent
with modification, and the doctrine of its guidance or determination by the
struggle for existence between related varieties. These doctrines, though
associated and interdependent, and in popular thought not only combined but
confused, must be considered separately. It is true that the ancient
doctrine of Evolution, in spite of the ingenuity and ardour of Lamarck,
remained a dream tantalising the intellectual ambition of naturalists,
until the day when Darwin made it conceivable by suggesting the machinery
of its guidance. And, further, the idea of natural selection has so
effectively opened the door of research and stimulated observation in a
score of principal directions that, even if the Darwinian explanation
became one day much less convincing than, in spite of recent criticism, it
now is, yet its passing, supposing it to pass, would leave the doctrine of
Evolution immeasurably and permanently strengthened. For in the interests
of the theory of selection, "Fur Darwin," as Muller wrote, facts have been
collected which remain in any case evidence of the reality of descent with
modification.
But still, though thus united in the modern history of convictions, though
united and confused in the collision of biological and traditional opinion,
yet evolution and natural selection must be separated in theological no
less than in biological estimation. Evolution seemed inconsistent with
Creation; natural selection with Providence and Divine design.
Discussion was maintained about these points for many years and with much
dark heat. It ranged over many particular topics and engaged minds
different in tone, in quality, and in accomplishment. There was at most
times a degree of misconception. Some naturalists attributed to
theologians in general a poverty of thought which belonged really to men of
a particular temper or training. The "timid theism" discerned in Darwin by
so cautious a theologian as Liddon (H.P. Liddon, "The Recovery of S.
Thomas"; a sermon preached in St Paul's, London, on April 23rd, 1882 (the
Sunday after Darwin's death).) was supposed by many biologists to be the
necessary foundation of an honest Christianity. It was really more
characteristic of devout NATURALISTS like Philip Henry Gosse, than of
religious believers as such. (Dr Pusey ("Unscience not Science adverse to
Faith" 1878) writes: "The questions as to 'species,' of what variations
the animal world is capable, whether the species be more or fewer, whether
accidental variations may become hereditary...and the like, naturally fall
under the province of science. In all these questions Mr Darwin's careful
observations gained for him a deserved approbation and confidence.") The
study of theologians more considerable and even more typically conservative
than Liddon does not confirm the description of religious intolerance given
in good faith, but in serious ignorance, by a disputant so acute, so
observant and so candid as Huxley. Something hid from each other's
knowledge the devoted pilgrims in two great ways of thought. The truth may
be, that naturalists took their view of what creation was from Christian
men of science who naturally looked in their own special studies for the
supports and illustrations of their religious belief. Of almost every
laborious student it may be said "Hic ab arte sua non recessit." And both
the believing and the denying naturalists, confining habitual attention to
a part of experience, are apt to affirm and deny with trenchant vigour and
something of a narrow clearness "Qui respiciunt ad pauca, de facili
pronunciant." (Aristotle, in Bacon, quoted by Newman in his "Idea of a
University", page 78. London, 1873.)
Newman says of some secular teachers that "they persuade the world of what
is false by urging upon it what is true." Of some early opponents of
Darwin it might be said by a candid friend that, in all sincerity of
devotion to truth, they tried to persuade the world of what is true by
urging upon it what is false. If naturalists took their version of
orthodoxy from amateurs in theology, some conservative Christians, instead
of learning what evolution meant to its regular exponents, took their view
of it from celebrated persons, not of the front rank in theology or in
thought, but eager to take account of public movements and able to arrest
public attention.
Cleverness and eloquence on both sides certainly had their share in
producing the very great and general disturbance of men's minds in the
early days of Darwinian teaching. But by far the greater part of that
disturbance was due to the practical novelty and the profound importance of
the teaching itself, and to the fact that the controversy about evolution
quickly became much more public than any controversy of equal seriousness
had been for many generations.
We must not think lightly of that great disturbance because it has, in some
real sense, done its work, and because it is impossible in days of more
coolness and light, to recover a full sense of its very real difficulties.
Those who would know them better should add to the calm records of Darwin
("Life and Letters" and "More Letters of Charles Darwin".) and to the story
of Huxley's impassioned championship, all that they can learn of George
Romanes. ("Life and Letters", London, 1896. "Thoughts on Religion",
London, 1895. "Candid Examination of Theism", London, 1878.) For his life
was absorbed in this very struggle and reproduced its stages. It began in
a certain assured simplicity of biblical interpretation; it went on,
through the glories and adventures of a paladin in Darwin's train, to the
darkness and dismay of a man who saw all his most cherished beliefs
rendered, as he thought, incredible. ("Never in the history of man has so
terrific a calamity befallen the race as that which all who look may now
(viz. in consequence of the scientific victory of Darwin) behold advancing
as a deluge, black with destruction, resistless in might, uprooting our
most cherished hopes, engulphing our most precious creed, and burying our
highest life in mindless destruction."—"A Candid Examination of Theism",
page 51.) He lived to find the freer faith for which process and purpose
are not irreconcilable, but necessary to one another. His development,
scientific, intellectual and moral, was itself of high significance; and
its record is of unique value to our own generation, so near the age of
that doubt and yet so far from it; certainly still much in need of the
caution and courage by which past endurance prepares men for new
emergencies. We have little enough reason to be sure that in the
discussions awaiting us we shall do as well as our predecessors in theirs.
Remembering their endurance of mental pain, their ardour in mental labour,
the heroic temper and the high sincerity of controversialists on either
side, we may well speak of our fathers in such words of modesty and self-
judgment as Drayton used when he sang the victors of Agincourt. The
progress of biblical study, in the departments of Introduction and
Exegesis, resulting in the recovery of a point of view anciently tolerated
if not prevalent, has altered some of the conditions of that discussion.
In the years near 1858, the witness of Scripture was adduced both by
Christian advocates and their critics as if unmistakeably irreconcilable
with Evolution.
Huxley ("Science and Christian Tradition". London, 1904.) found the path
of the blameless naturalist everywhere blocked by "Moses": the believer in
revelation was generally held to be forced to a choice between revealed
cosmogony and the scientific account of origins. It is not clear how far
the change in Biblical interpretation is due to natural science, and how
far to the vital movements of theological study which have been quite
independent of the controversy about species. It belongs to a general
renewal of Christian movement, the recovery of a heritage. "Special
Creation"—really a biological rather than a theological conception,—seems
in its rigid form to have been a recent element even in English biblical
orthodoxy.
The Middle Ages had no suspicion that religious faith forbad inquiry into
the natural origination of the different forms of life. Bartholomaeus
Anglicus, an English Franciscan of the thirteenth century, was a
mutationist in his way, as Aristotle, "the Philosopher" of the Christian
Schoolmen, had been in his. So late as the seventeenth century, as we
learn not only from early proceedings of the Royal Society, but from a
writer so homely and so regularly pious as Walton, the variation of species
and "spontaneous" generations had no theological bearing, except as
instances of that various wonder of the world which in devout minds is food
for devotion.
It was in the eighteenth century that the harder statement took shape.
Something in the preciseness of that age, its exaltation of law, its cold
passion for a stable and measured universe, its cold denial, its cold
affirmation of the power of God, a God of ice, is the occasion of that
rigidity of religious thought about the living world which Darwin by
accident challenged, or rather by one of those movements of genius which,
Goethe ("No productiveness of the highest kind...is in the power of
anyone."—"Conversations of Goethe with Eckermann and Soret". London,
1850.) declares, are "elevated above all earthly control."
If religious thought in the eighteenth century was aimed at a fixed and
nearly finite world of spirit, it followed in all these respects the
secular and critical lead. ("La philosophie reformatrice du XVIIIe siecle
(Berthelot, "Evolutionisme et Platonisme", Paris, 1908, page 45.) ramenait
la nature et la societe a des mecanismes que la pensee reflechie peut
concevoir et recomposer." In fact, religion in a mechanical age is
condemned if it takes any but a mechanical tone. Butler's thought was too
moving, too vital, too evolutionary, for the sceptics of his time. In a
rationalist, encyclopaedic period, religion also must give hard outline to
its facts, it must be able to display its secret to any sensible man in the
language used by all sensible men. Milton's prophetic genius furnished the
eighteenth century, out of the depth of the passionate age before it, with
the theological tone it was to need. In spite of the austere magnificence
of his devotion, he gives to smaller souls a dangerous lead. The rigidity
of Scripture exegesis belonged to this stately but imperfectly sensitive
mode of thought. It passed away with the influence of the older
rationalists whose precise denials matched the precise and limited
affirmations of the static orthodoxy.
I shall, then, leave the specially biblical aspect of the debate—interesting
as it is and even useful, as in Huxley's correspondence with
the Duke of Argyll and others in 1892 ("Times", 1892, passim.)—in order to
consider without complication the permanent elements of Christian thought
brought into question by the teaching of evolution.
Such permanent elements are the doctrine of God as Creator of the universe,
and the doctrine of man as spiritual and unique. Upon both the doctrine of
evolution seemed to fall with crushing force.
With regard to Man I leave out, acknowledging a grave omission, the
doctrine of the Fall and of Sin. And I do so because these have not yet,
as I believe, been adequately treated: here the fruitful reaction to the
stimulus of evolution is yet to come. The doctrine of sin, indeed, falls
principally within the scope of that discussion which has followed or
displaced the Darwinian; and without it the Fall cannot be usefully
considered. For the question about the Fall is a question not merely of
origins, but of the interpretation of moral facts whose moral reality must
first be established.
I confine myself therefore to Creation and the dignity of man.
The meaning of evolution, in the most general terms, is that the
differentiation of forms is not essentially separate from their behaviour
and use; that if these are within the scope of study, that is also; that
the world has taken the form we see by movements not unlike those we now
see in progress; that what may be called proximate origins are continuous
in the way of force and matter, continuous in the way of life, with actual
occurrences and actual characteristics. All this has no revolutionary
bearing upon the question of ultimate origins. The whole is a statement
about process. It says nothing to metaphysicians about cause. It simply
brings within the scope of observation or conjecture that series of changes
which has given their special characters to the different parts of the
world we see. In particular, evolutionary science aspires to the discovery
of the process or order of the appearance of life itself: if it were to
achieve its aim it could say nothing of the cause of this or indeed of the
most familiar occurrences. We should have become spectators or convinced
historians of an event which, in respect of its cause and ultimate meaning,
would be still impenetrable.
With regard to the origin of species, supposing life already established,
biological science has the well founded hopes and the measure of success
with which we are all familiar. All this has, it would seem, little chance
of collision with a consistent theism, a doctrine which has its own
difficulties unconnected with any particular view of order or process. But
when it was stated that species had arisen by processes through which new
species were still being made, evolutionism came into collision with a
statement, traditionally religious, that species were formed and fixed once
for all and long ago.
What is the theological import of such a statement when it is regarded as
essential to belief in God? Simply that God's activity, with respect to
the formation of living creatures, ceased at some point in past time.
"God rested" is made the touchstone of orthodoxy. And when, under the
pressure of the evidences, we found ourselves obliged to acknowledge and
assert the present and persistent power of God, in the maintenance and in
the continued formation of "types," what happened was the abolition of a
time-limit. We were forced only to a bolder claim, to a theistic language
less halting, more consistent, more thorough in its own line, as well as
better qualified to assimilate and modify such schemes as Von Hartmann's
philosophy of the unconscious—a philosophy, by the way, quite intolerant
of a merely mechanical evolution. (See Von Hartmann's "Wahrheit und
Irrthum in Darwinismus". Berlin, 1875.)
Here was not the retrenchment of an extravagant assertion, but the
expansion of one which was faltering and inadequate. The traditional
statement did not need paring down so as to pass the meshes of a new and
exacting criticism. It was itself a net meant to surround and enclose
experience; and we must increase its size and close its mesh to hold newly
disclosed facts of life. The world, which had seemed a fixed picture or
model, gained first perspective and then solidity and movement. We had a
glimpse of organic history; and Christian thought became more living and
more assured as it met the larger view of life.
However unsatisfactory the new attitude might be to our critics, to
Christians the reform was positive. What was discarded was a limitation, a
negation. The movement was essentially conservative, even actually
reconstructive. For the language disused was a language inconsistent with
the definitions of orthodoxy; it set bounds to the infinite, and by
implication withdrew from the creative rule all such processes as could be
brought within the descriptions of research. It ascribed fixity and
finality to that "creature" in which an apostle taught us to recognise the
birth-struggles of an unexhausted progress. It tended to banish mystery
from the world we see, and to confine it to a remote first age.
In the reformed, the restored, language of religion, Creation became again
not a link in a rational series to complete a circle of the sciences, but
the mysterious and permanent relation between the infinite and the finite,
between the moving changes we know in part, and the Power, after the
fashion of that observation, unknown, which is itself "unmoved all motion's
source." (Hymn of the Church—
Rerum Deus tenax vigor,
Immotus in te permanens.)
With regard to man it is hardly necessary, even were it possible, to
illustrate the application of this bolder faith. When the record of his
high extraction fell under dispute, we were driven to a contemplation of
the whole of his life, rather than of a part and that part out of sight.
We remembered again, out of Aristotle, that the result of a process
interprets its beginnings. We were obliged to read the title of such
dignity as we may claim, in results and still more in aspirations.
Some men still measure the value of great present facts in life—reason and
virtue and sacrifice—by what a self-disparaged reason can collect of the
meaner rudiments of these noble gifts. Mr Balfour has admirably displayed
the discrepancy, in this view, between the alleged origin and the alleged
authority of reason. Such an argument ought to be used not to discredit
the confident reason, but to illuminate and dignify its dark beginnings,
and to show that at every step in the long course of growth a Power was at
work which is not included in any term or in all the terms of the series.
I submit that the more men know of actual Christian teaching, its fidelity
to the past, and its sincerity in face of discovery, the more certainly
they will judge that the stimulus of the doctrine of evolution has produced
in the long run vigour as well as flexibility in the doctrine of Creation
and of man.
I pass from Evolution in general to Natural Selection.
The character in religious language which I have for short called
mechanical was not absent in the argument from design as stated before
Darwin. It seemed to have reference to a world conceived as fixed. It
pointed, not to the plastic capacity and energy of living matter, but to
the fixed adaptation of this and that organ to an unchanging place or
function.
Mr Hobhouse has given us the valuable phrase "a niche of organic
opportunity." Such a phrase would have borne a different sense in non-
evolutionary thought. In that thought, the opportunity was an opportunity
for the Creative Power, and Design appeared in the preparation of the
organism to fit the niche. The idea of the niche and its occupant growing
together from simpler to more complex mutual adjustment was unwelcome to
this teleology. If the adaptation was traced to the influence, through
competition, of the environment, the old teleology lost an illustration and
a proof. For the cogency of the proof in every instance depended upon the
absence of explanation. Where the process of adaptation was discerned, the
evidence of Purpose or Design was weak. It was strong only when the
natural antecedents were not discovered, strongest when they could be
declared undiscoverable.
Paley's favourite word is "Contrivance"; and for him contrivance is most
certain where production is most obscure. He points out the physiological
advantage of the valvulae conniventes to man, and the advantage for
teleology of the fact that they cannot have been formed by "action and
pressure." What is not due to pressure may be attributed to design, and
when a "mechanical" process more subtle than pressure was suggested, the
case for design was so far weakened. The cumulative proof from the
multitude of instances began to disappear when, in selection, a natural
sequence was suggested in which all the adaptations might be reached by the
motive power of life, and especially when, as in Darwin's teaching, there
was full recognition of the reactions of life to the stimulus of
circumstance. "The organism fits the niche," said the teleologist,
"because the Creator formed it so as to fit." "The organism fits the
niche," said the naturalist, "because unless it fitted it could not exist."
"It was fitted to survive," said the theologian. "It survives because it
fits," said the selectionist. The two forms of statement are not
incompatible; but the new statement, by provision of an ideally universal
explanation of process, was hostile to a doctrine of purpose which relied
upon evidences always exceptional however numerous. Science persistently
presses on to find the universal machinery of adaptation in this planet;
and whether this be found in selection, or in direct-effect, or in vital
reactions resulting in large changes, or in a combination of these and
other factors, it must always be opposed to the conception of a Divine
Power here and there but not everywhere active.
For science, the Divine must be constant, operative everywhere and in every
quality and power, in environment and in organism, in stimulus and in
reaction, in variation and in struggle, in hereditary equilibrium, and in
"the unstable state of species"; equally present on both sides of every
strain, in all pressures and in all resistances, in short in the general
wonder of life and the world. And this is exactly what the Divine Power
must be for religious faith.
The point I wish once more to make is that the necessary readjustment of
teleology, so as to make it depend upon the contemplation of the whole
instead of a part, is advantageous quite as much to theology as to science.
For the older view failed in courage. Here again our theism was not
sufficiently theistic.
Where results seemed inevitable, it dared not claim them as God-given. In
the argument from Design it spoke not of God in the sense of theology, but
of a Contriver, immensely, not infinitely wise and good, working within a
world, the scene, rather than the ever dependent outcome, of His Wisdom;
working in such emergencies and opportunities as occurred, by forces not
altogether within His control, towards an end beyond Himself. It gave us,
instead of the awful reverence due to the Cause of all substance and form,
all love and wisdom, a dangerously detached appreciation of an ingenuity
and benevolence meritorious in aim and often surprisingly successful in
contrivance.
The old teleology was more useful to science than to religion, and the
design-naturalists ought to be gratefully remembered by Biologists. Their
search for evidences led them to an eager study of adaptations and of
minute forms, a study such as we have now an incentive to in the theory of
Natural Selection. One hardly meets with the same ardour in microscopical
research until we come to modern workers. But the argument from Design was
never of great importance to faith. Still, to rid it of this character was
worth all the stress and anxiety of the gallant old war. If Darwin had
done nothing else for us, we are to-day deeply in his debt for this. The
world is not less venerable to us now, not less eloquent of the causing
mind, rather much more eloquent and sacred. But our wonder is not that
"the underjaw of the swine works under the ground" or in any or all of
those particular adaptations which Paley collected with so much skill, but
that a purpose transcending, though resembling, our own purposes, is
everywhere manifest; that what we live in is a whole, mutually sustaining,
eventful and beautiful, where the "dead" forces feed the energies of life,
and life sustains a stranger existence, able in some real measure to
contemplate the whole, of which, mechanically considered, it is a minor
product and a rare ingredient. Here, again, the change was altogether
positive. It was not the escape of a vessel in a storm with loss of spars
and rigging, not a shortening of sail to save the masts and make a port of
refuge. It was rather the emergence from narrow channels to an open sea.
We had propelled the great ship, finding purchase here and there for slow
and uncertain movement. Now, in deep water, we spread large canvas to a
favouring breeze.
The scattered traces of design might be forgotten or obliterated. But the
broad impression of Order became plainer when seen at due distance and in
sufficient range of effect, and the evidence of love and wisdom in the
universe could be trusted more securely for the loss of the particular
calculation of their machinery.
Many other topics of faith are affected by modern biology. In some of
these we have learnt at present only a wise caution, a wise uncertainty.
We stand before the newly unfolded spectacle of suffering, silenced; with
faith not scientifically reassured but still holding fast certain other
clues of conviction. In many important topics we are at a loss. But in
others, and among them those I have mentioned, we have passed beyond this
negative state and find faith positively strengthened and more fully
expressed.
We have gained also a language and a habit of thought more fit for the
great and dark problems that remain, less liable to damaging conflicts,
equipped for more rapid assimilation of knowledge. And by this change
biology itself is a gainer. For, relieved of fruitless encounters with
popular religion, it may advance with surer aim along the path of really
scientific life-study which was reopened for modern men by the publication
of "The Origin of Species".
Charles Darwin regretted that, in following science, he had not done "more
direct good" ("Life and Letters", Vol. III. page 359.) to his fellow-creatures.
He has, in fact, rendered substantial service to interests
bound up with the daily conduct and hopes of common men; for his work has
led to improvements in the preaching of the Christian faith.
Home Page |
Further Reading |
Site Map |
Send Feedback
