Evolution: Its nature, its evidence, and its relation to religious thoughtLeConte, Joseph
Religion
Evolution: Its nature, its evidence, and its relation to religious thought
LeConte, Joseph
Evolution (Biology); Evolution (Biology) -- Religious aspects; Religion and science
3. _Divine Personality._--I have used the word personality as
expressing the nature of God. But let me not be misunderstood. I
well know we can not conceive clearly of an infinite, unconditioned
personality. Deeply considered, it seems nothing short of a
contradiction in terms. All I insist on is this: In our view of the
nature of God, the choice is not between personality and something
_lower_ than personality, viz., an _unconscious force_ operating
Nature by _necessity_, as the materialists and pantheists would have
us believe; but between personality as we know it in ourselves and
something inconceivably _higher_ than personality. Language is so
poor that we are obliged to represent even _our_ mental phenomena by
physical images. How much more, then, the Divine nature by its human
image! Self-conscious personality is the highest thing we know or can
conceive. We offer him the very best and truest we have when we call
him a Person; even though we know that this, our best, falls far short
of the infinite reality.
4. =Cause in Nature.=--We have thus far spoken only or principally
of self-consciousness, but the same precisely is true of another
essential attribute of personality, viz., _free-will_. Every one
admits causative force or forces operating in Nature. Science has shown
that all the different kinds of force are but different forms of one
omnipresent energy. Now, looking abroad on Nature from the outside,
this omnipresent energy seems to modern science as simply resident,
inherent in matter itself, and therefore as operating unconsciously
and by necessity. But the question occurs, “Whence did we get the idea
of force, energy, _causation_?” I answer unhesitatingly: We get it
not from without by observation of Nature, but from within through
consciousness; not from the outside view, but from, the inside view of
phenomena. We can not conceive of phenomena without force, of effects
without cause, because we are intensely conscious of being ourselves
through our wills an active cause of external phenomena. If we were
merely passive observers, not active causers of changes in the external
world, then these external phenomena would seem to us merely to shift
and change and succeed each in a certain order. We might note the
order and determine the laws of sequence, and thus form a science;
but it would never enter into our minds to imagine any causal or
dynamical nexus between them. In the mind of such passive observer,
but not doer--thinker, but not worker--would be completely realized
the only thorough-going and consistent materialistic philosophy,
i. e., a philosophy in which, like Comte’s, cause and force have no
place--are in fact banished as a superstition from science. But the
clear consciousness of essential energy, of causative force within, the
certainty that we ourselves, through our wills and by the conscious
exertion of force do determine changes in the external world, compels
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