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VIII

Anthropomorphic Conceptions of God

Between the two ideas of God which we have exhibited in such striking contrast, there is nevertheless one point of resemblance; and this point is fundamental, since it is the point in virtue of which both are entitled to be called theistic ideas. In both there is presumed to be a likeness of some sort between God and Man. In both there is an element of anthropomorphism. Even upon this their common ground, however, there is a wide difference between the two conceptions. In the one the anthropomorphic element is gross, in the other it is refined and subtle. The difference is so far-reaching that some years ago I proposed to mark it by contrasting these two conceptions of God as Anthropomorphic Theism and Cosmic Theism. For the doctrine which represents God as immanent in the universe and revealing himself in the orderly succession of events, the name Cosmic Theism is eminently appropriate: but it is not intended by the antithetic nomenclature to convey the impression that in cosmic theism there is nothing anthropomorphic.²⁰ A theory which should regard the Human Soul as alien and isolated in the universe, without any links uniting it with the eternal source of existence, would not be theism at all. It would be Atheism, which on its metaphysical side is "the denial of anything psychical in the universe outside of human consciousness." It is far enough from any such doctrine to the cosmic theism of Clement and Origen, of Spinoza and Lessing and Schleiermacher. The difference, however, between this cosmic conception of God and the anthropomorphic conception held by Tertullian and Augustine, Calvin and Voltaire and Paley, is sufficiently great to be described as a contrast. The explanation of the difference must be sought far back in the historic genesis of the two conceptions. Cosmic theism, as we have seen, was reached through nature-worship with its notion of vast elemental spirits indwelling in physical phenomena. Anthropomorphic theism is descended from the notion of tutelar deities which was part of the primitive ancestor-worship. In the process by which men attained to cosmic theism, physical generalization was the chief agency at work; but into anthropomorphic theism, as we have seen, there entered conceptions derived from men's political thinking. For such a people as the Romans, who could deify Imperator Augustus in just the same way that the Japanese have deified their Mikado, it was natural, and easy to conceive of God as a monarch enthroned in the heavens and surrounded by a court of ministering angels. Such was the popular conception in the early ages of Christianity, and such it has doubtless remained with the mass of uninstructed people even to this day. The very grotesqueness of the idea, as it appears to the mind of a philosopher, is an index of the ease with which it satisfies the mind of an uneducated man. Many persons, no doubt, have entertained this idea of God without ever giving it very definite shape, and many have recognized it as in great measure symbolic: yet nothing can be more certain than that untold thousands have conceived it in its full intensity of anthropomorphism. Alike in sermons and theological treatises, in stately poetry and in every-day talk, the Deity has been depicted as pleased or angry, as repenting of his own acts, as soothed by adulation and quick to wreak vengeance upon silly people for blasphemous remarks. In those curious bills of expenses for the mediæval miracle-plays, along with charges of twopence for keeping up a "fyre at hell mouthe," we find such items as a shilling for a purple coat for God. In one of these plays an angel who has just witnessed the crucifixion comes rushing into Heaven, crying, "Wake up, almighty Father! Here are those beggarly Jews killing your son, and you asleep here like a drunkard!" "Devil take me if I knew anything about it!" is the drowsy reply. Not the slightest irreverence was intended in these miracle-plays, which were the only dramatic performances tolerated by the mediæval church, for the sake of their wholesome educational influence upon the common people. In the light of such facts, one sees that the representations of the Deity as an old man of august presence, with flowing hair and beard, by the early modern painters, must have meant to all save the highest minds much more than a mere symbol. Until one's thoughts have become accustomed to range far and wide over the universe it is doubtless impossible to frame a conception of Deity that is not grossly anthropomorphic. I remember distinctly the conception which I had formed when five years of age. I imagined a narrow office just over the zenith, with a tall standing-desk running lengthwise, upon which lay several open ledgers bound in coarse leather. There was no roof over this office, and the walls rose scarcely five feet from the floor, so that a person standing at the desk could look out upon the whole world. There were two persons at the desk, and one of them – a tall, slender man, of aquiline features, wearing spectacles, with a pen in his hand and another behind his ear – was God. The other, whose appearance I do not distinctly recall, was an attendant angel. Both were diligently watching the deeds of men and recording them in the ledgers. To my infant mind this picture was not grotesque, but ineffably solemn, and the fact that all my words and acts were thus written down, to confront me at the day of judgment, seemed naturally a matter of grave concern.

If we could cross-question all the men and women we know, and still more all the children, we should probably find that, even in this enlightened age, the conceptions of Deity current throughout the civilized world contain much that is in the crudest sense anthropomorphic. Such, at any rate, seems to be the character of the conceptions with which we start in life. With those whose studies lead them to ponder upon the subject in the light of enlarged experience, these conceptions become greatly modified. They lose their anthropomorphic definiteness, they grow vague by reason of their expansion, they become recognized as largely symbolic, but they never quite lose all traces of their primitive form. Indeed, as I said a moment ago, they cannot do so. The utter demolition of anthropomorphism would be the demolition of theism. We have now to see what traces of its primitive form the idea of God can retain, in the light of our modern knowledge of the universe.

IX

The Argument from Design

The most highly refined and scientific form of anthropomorphic theism is that which we are accustomed to associate with Paley and the authors of the Bridgewater treatises. It is not peculiar to Christianity, since it has been held by pagans and unbelievers as firmly as by the devoutest members of the church. The argument from design is as old as Sokrates, and was relied on by Voltaire and the English deists of the eighteenth century no less than by Dr. Chalmers and Sir Charles Bell. Upon this theory the universe is supposed to have been created by a Being possessed of intelligence and volition essentially similar to the intelligence and volition of Man. This Being is actuated by a desire for the good of his creatures, and in pursuance thereof entertains purposes and adapts means to ends with consummate ingenuity. The process by which the world was created was analogous to manufacture, as being the work of an intelligent artist operating upon unintelligent materials objectively existing. It is in accordance with this theory that books on natural theology, as well as those text-books of science which deem it edifying to introduce theological reflections where they have no proper place, are fond of speaking of the "Divine Architect" or the "Great Designer."

This theory, which is still commonly held, was in high favour during the earlier part of the present century. In view of the great and sudden advances which physical knowledge was making, it seemed well worth while to consecrate science to the service of theology; and at the same time, in emphasizing the argument from design, theology adopted the methods of science. The attempt to discover evidences of beneficent purpose in the structure of the eye and ear, in the distribution of plants and animals over the earth's surface, in the shapes of the planetary orbits and the inclinations of their axes, or in any other of the innumerable arrangements of nature, was an attempt at true induction; and high praise is due to the able men who have devoted their energies to reinforcing the argument. By far the greater part of the evidence was naturally drawn from the organic world, which began to be comprehensively studied in the mutual relations of all its parts in the time of Lamarck and Cuvier. The organic world is full of unspeakably beautiful and wonderful adaptations between organisms and their environments, as well as between the various parts of the same organism. The unmistakable end of these adaptations is the welfare of the animal or plant; they conduce to length and completeness of life, to the permanence and prosperity of the species. For some time, therefore, the arguments of natural theology seemed to be victorious along the whole line. The same kind of reasoning was pushed farther and farther to explain the classification and morphology of plants and animals; until the climax was reached in Agassiz's remarkable "Essay on Classification," published in 1859, in which every organic form was not only regarded as a concrete thought of the Creator interpretable by the human mind, but this kind of explanation was expressly urged as a substitute for inquiries into the physical causes whereby such forms might have been originated.

In its best days, however, there was a serious weakness in the argument from design, which was ably pointed out by Mr. Mill, in an essay wherein he accords much more weight to the general argument than could now by any possibility be granted it. Its fault was the familiar logical weakness of proving too much. The very success of the argument in showing the world to have been the work of an intelligent Designer made it impossible to suppose that Creator to be at once omnipotent and absolutely benevolent. For nothing can be clearer than that Nature is full of cruelty and maladaptation. In every part of the animal world we find implements of torture surpassing in devilish ingenuity anything that was ever seen in the dungeons of the Inquisition. We are introduced to a scene of incessant and universal strife, of which it is not apparent on the surface that the outcome is the good or the happiness of anything that is sentient. In pre-Darwinian times, before we had gone below the surface, no such outcome was discernible. Often, indeed, we find the higher life wantonly sacrificed to the lower, as instanced by the myriads of parasites apparently created for no other purpose than to prey upon creatures better than themselves. Such considerations bring up, with renewed emphasis, the everlasting problem of the origin of evil. If the Creator of such a world is omnipotent he cannot be actuated solely by a desire for the welfare of his creatures, but must have other ends in view to which this is in some measure subordinated. Or if he is absolutely benevolent, then he cannot be omnipotent, but there is something in the nature of things which sets limits to his creative power. This dilemma is as old as human thinking, and it still remains a stumbling-block in the way of any theory of the universe that can possibly be devised. But it is an obstacle especially formidable to any kind of anthropomorphic theism. For the only avenue of escape is the assumption of an inscrutable mystery which would contain the solution of the problem if the human intellect could only penetrate so far; and the more closely we invite a comparison between divine and human methods of working, the more do we close up that only outlet.

The practical solution oftenest adopted has been that which sacrifices the Creator's omnipotence in favour of his benevolence. In the noblest of the purely Aryan religions – that of which the sacred literature is contained in the Zendavesta – the evil spirit Ahriman exists independently of the will of the good Ormuzd, and is accountable for all the sin in the world, but in the fullness of time he is to be bound in chains and shorn of his power for mischief.²¹ This theory has passed into Christendom in the form of Manichæism; but its essential features have been adopted by orthodox Christianity, which at the same time has tried to grasp the other horn of the dilemma and save the omnipotence of the Deity by paying him what Mr. Mill calls the doubtful compliment of making him the creator of the devil. By this device the essential polytheism of the conception is thinly veiled. The confusion of thought has been persistently blinked by the popular mind; but among the profoundest thinkers of the Aryan race there have been two who have explicitly adopted the solution which limits the Creator's power. One of these was Plato, who held that God's perfect goodness has been partially thwarted by the intractableness of the materials he has had to work with. This theory was carried to extremes by those Gnostics who believed that God's work consisted in redeeming a world originally created by the devil, and in orthodox Christianity it gave rise to the Augustinian doctrine of total depravity, and the "philosophy of the plan of salvation" founded thereon. The other great thinker who adopted a similar solution was Leibnitz. In his famous theory of optimism the world is by no means represented as perfect; it is only the best of all possible worlds, the best the Creator could make out of the materials at hand. In recent times Mr. Mill shows a marked preference for this view, and one of the foremost religious teachers now living, Dr. Martineau, falls into a parallel line of thinking in his suggestion that the primary qualities of matter constitute a "datum objective to God," who, "in shaping the orbits out of immensity, and determining seasons out of eternity, could but follow the laws of curvature, measure, and proportion."²²

But indeed it is not necessary to refer to the problem of evil in order to show that the argument from design cannot prove the existence of an omnipotent and benevolent Designer. It is not omnipotence that contrives and plans and adapts means to ends. These are the methods of finite intelligence; they imply the overcoming of obstacles; and to ascribe them to omnipotence is to combine words that severally possess meanings into a phrase that has no meaning. "God said, Let there be light: and there was light." In this noble description of creative omnipotence one would search in vain for any hint of contrivance. The most the argument from design could legitimately hope to accomplish was to make it seem probable that the universe was wrought into its present shape by an intelligent and benevolent Being immeasurably superior to Man, but far from infinite in power and resources. Such an argument hardly rises to the level of true theism.²³

X

Simile of the Watch replaced by Simile of the Flower

It was in its own chosen stronghold that this once famous argument was destined to meet its doom. It was in the adaptations of the organic world, in the manifold harmonies between living creatures and surrounding circumstances, that it had seemed to find its chief support; and now came the Darwinian theory of natural selection, and in the twinkling of an eye knocked all this support from under it. It is not that the organism and its environment have been adapted to each other by an exercise of creative intelligence, but it is that the organism is necessarily fitted to the environment because in the perennial slaughter that has gone on from the beginning only the fittest have survived. Or, as it has been otherwise expressed, "the earth is suited to its inhabitants because it has produced them, and only such as suit it live." In the struggle for existence no individual peculiarity, however slight, that tends to the preservation of life is neglected. It is unerringly seized upon and propagated by natural selection, and from the cumulative action of such slight causes have come the beautiful adaptations of which the organic world is full. The demonstration of this point, through the labours of a whole generation of naturalists, has been one of the most notable achievements of modern science, and to the theistic arguments of Paley and the Bridgewater treatises it has dealt destruction.

But the Darwinian theory of natural selection does not stand alone. It is part of a greater whole. It is the most conspicuous portion of that doctrine of evolution in which all the results hitherto attained by the great modern scientific movement are codified, and which Herbert Spencer had already begun to set forth in its main outlines before the Darwinian theory had been made known to the world. This doctrine of evolution so far extends the range of our vision through past and future time as entirely to alter our conception of the universe. Our grandfathers, in common with all preceding generations of men, could and did suppose that at some particular moment in the past eternity the world was created in very much the shape which it has at present. But our modern knowledge does not allow us to suppose anything of the sort. We can carry back our thoughts through a long succession of great epochs, some of them many millions of years in duration, in each of which the innumerable forms of life that covered the earth were very different from what they were in all the others, and in even the nearest of which they were notably different from what they are now. We can go back still farther to the eras when the earth was a whirling ball of vapour, or when it formed an equatorial belt upon a sun two hundred million miles in diameter, or when the sun itself was but a giant nebula from which as yet no planet had been born. And through all the vast sweep of time, from the simple primeval vapour down to the multifarious world we know to-day, we see the various forms of Nature coming into existence one after the other in accordance with laws of which we are already beginning to trace the character and scope. Paley's simile of the watch is no longer applicable to such a world as this. It must be replaced by the simile of the flower. The universe is not a machine, but an organism, with an indwelling principle of life. It was not made, but it has grown.

That such a change in our conception of the universe marks the greatest revolution that has ever taken place in human thinking need scarcely be said. But even in this statement we have not quite revealed the depth of the change. Not only has modern science made it clear that the varied forms of Nature which make up the universe have arisen through a process of evolution, but it has also made it clear that what we call the laws of Nature have been evolved through the self-same process. The axiom of the persistence of force, upon which all modern science has come to rest, involves as a necessary corollary the persistence of the relations between forces; so that, starting with the persistence of force and the primary qualities of matter, it can be shown that all those uniformities of coexistence and succession which we call natural laws have arisen one after the other in connection with the forms which have afforded the occasions for their manifestation. The all-pervading harmony of Nature is thus itself a natural product, and the last inch of ground is cut away from under the theologians who suppose the universe to have come into existence through a supernatural process of manufacture at the hands of a Creator outside of itself.