A Candid Examination of TheismRomanes, George John
Religion
A Candid Examination of Theism
Romanes, George John
Theism
theory of evolution, and inductively by the doctrine of utilitarianism. On
the whole, then, with regard to the argument from the existence of the
human mind, we were compelled to decide that it is destitute of any
assignable weight, there being nothing more to lead to the conclusion that
our mind has been caused by another mind, than to the conclusion that it
has been caused by anything else whatsoever.
With regard to the argument from Design, it was observed that Mill's
presentation of it is merely a resuscitation of the argument as presented
by Paley, Bell, and Chalmers. And indeed we saw that the first-named writer
treated this whole subject with a feebleness and inaccuracy very surprising
in him; for while he has failed to assign anything like due weight to the
inductive evidence of organic evolution, he did not hesitate to rush into a
supernatural explanation of biological phenomena. Moreover, he has failed
signally in his _analysis_ of the Design argument, seeing that, in common
with all previous writers, he failed to observe that it is utterly
impossible for us to know the relations in which the supposed Designer
stands to the Designed,--much less to argue from the fact that the Supreme
Mind, even supposing it to exist, caused the observable products by any
particular intellectual _process_. In other words, all advocates of the
Design argument have failed to perceive that, even if we grant nature to be
due to a creating Mind, still we have no shadow of a right to conclude that
this Mind can only have exerted its creative power by means of such and
such cogitative operations. How absurd, therefore, must it be to raise the
supposed evidence of such cogitative operations into evidences of the
existence of a creating Mind! If a theist retorts that it is, after all, of
very little importance whether or not we are able to divine the _methods_
of creation, so long as the _facts_ are there to attest that, _in some way
or other_, the observable phenomena of nature must be due to Intelligence
of some kind as their ultimate cause, then I am the first to endorse this
remark. It has always appeared to me one of the most unaccountable things
in the history of speculation that so many competent writers can have
insisted upon _Design_ as an argument for Theism, when they must all have
known perfectly well that they have no means of ascertaining the subjective
psychology of that Supreme Mind whose existence the argument is adduced to
demonstrate. The truth is, that the argument from teleology must, and can
only, rest upon the observable _facts_ of nature, without reference to the
intellectual _processes_ by which these facts may be supposed to have been
accomplished. But, looking to the "present state of our knowledge," this is
merely to change the teleological argument from its gross Paleyerian form,
into the argument from the ubiquitous operation of general laws. And we saw
that this transformation is now a rational necessity. How far the great
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