Not Guilty: A Defence of the Bottom DogBlatchford, Robert
Philosophy
Not Guilty: A Defence of the Bottom Dog
Blatchford, Robert
Criminals; Free will and determinism
We are told that man could not and cannot sin against God. We are
invited to believe that the men of every age and nation whose hearts
have bled in sorrow over accomplished sin, who have cried in anguish
of soul for deliverance from the body of this death, whose joy in the
realisation of divine forgiveness has flowed in strains of immortal joy
over countless generations, were ignorant and foolish persons, inventing
their sufferings and imagining their solace, and needing some journalist
of the twentieth century to teach them that no man could really sin
against God! We are, apparently, expected to believe that the author
of this Psalm and the author of the "second Isaiah," that Paul and
Augustine, the author of "Thomas A'Kempis," and John Bunyan, knew
nothing of psychology and nothing of divinity, that they never
understood their own experience, and, though they have interpreted
humanity to uncounted millions of the children of men, yet lived
and died in crass ignorance of the workings of the human heart The
proposition is not modest. That any man should be found, however
flippantly, to advance it is marvellous. That any human being should be
found to accept it seriously is incredible.
Dr. Aked's argument amounts to a claim that we should believe in Free
Will because most men believe in it, because many good and great men
have believed in it.
But many millions of men have believed in a material hell. In which
Dr. Aked does not believe. Many good and great men have believed in a
material hell, and millions of men (some of them good and clever) still
believe in a material hell. And Dr. Aked does not believe in it.
And when the doctrine of hell-fire was first assailed, what did the Dr.
Akeds of the time declare? That without the fear of hell men would be
wicked, and would do wrong in defiance of God; and that the theory that
there was no hell of fire was "incredible." And what is this charge of
audacity which Dr. Aked brings against me for denying sin? It is just
the charge that was brought against Charles Darwin when he had the
immodesty to declare that the human species was evolved from lower
forms.
How was that theory met by the Dr. Akeds of the time? Darwin was
ridiculed and denounced, and nearly all the religious world was aghast
at his folly and his irreverence, and his presumption in advancing a
theory which was contrary to the teachings of Holy Writ. But Darwin's
theory was _true_.
Darwin's theory was true, and I claim that this theory is true. Is it
any answer to tell me that I am presumptuous in opposing the beliefs
of great men past and present? Darwin opposed the general belief,
and Darwin was right and the general belief was wrong. Is it any more
reasonable to condemn this theory for traversing the fifty-first Psalm
than it was to condemn Evolution for traversing the Book of Genesis?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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