Systematic Theology (Volume 1 of 3)Strong, Augustus Hopkins
Religion
Systematic Theology (Volume 1 of 3)
Strong, Augustus Hopkins
Baptists -- Doctrines; Theology, Doctrinal
Martineau, Study, 2:26—“Nature is as worthy of trust in her
processes, as in her gifts.” Bowne, Examination of Spencer, 163,
164—“Are we to seek truth in the minds of pre-human apes, or in
the blind stirrings of some primitive pulp? In that case we can
indeed put away all our science, but we must put away the great
doctrine of evolution along with it. The experience-philosophy
cannot escape this alternative: either the positive deliverances
of our mature consciousness must be accepted as they stand, or all
truth must be declared impossible.” See also Harris, Philos. Basis
Theism, 137-142.
Charles Darwin, in a letter written a year before his death,
referring to his doubts as to the existence of God, asks: “Can we
trust to the convictions of a monkey’s mind?” We may reply: “Can
we trust the conclusions of one who was once a baby?” Bowne,
Ethics, 3—“The genesis and emergence of an idea are one thing; its
validity is quite another. The logical value of chemistry cannot
be decided by reciting its beginnings in alchemy; and the logical
value of astronomy is independent of the fact that it began in
astrology.... 11—Even if man came from the ape, we need not
tremble for the validity of the multiplication-table or of the
Golden Rule. If we have moral insight, it is no matter how we got
it; and if we have no such insight, there is no help in any
psychological theory.... 159—We must not appeal to savages and
babies to find what is natural to the human mind.... In the case
of anything that is under the law of development we can find its
true nature, not by going back to its crude beginnings, but by
studying the finished outcome.” Dawson, Mod. Ideas of Evolution,
13—“If the idea of God be the phantom of an apelike brain, can we
trust to reason or conscience in any other matter? May not science
and philosophy themselves be similar phantasies, evolved by mere
chance and unreason?” Even though man came from the ape, there is
no explaining his ideas by the ideas of the ape: “A man ’s a man
for a’ that.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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