Systematic Theology (Volume 2 of 3)Strong, Augustus Hopkins
Religion
Systematic Theology (Volume 2 of 3)
Strong, Augustus Hopkins
Baptists -- Doctrines; Theology, Doctrinal
Leibnitz declined to accept the Newtonian theory of gravitation
because it seemed to him to substitute natural forces for God. In
our own day many still refuse to accept the Darwinian theory of
evolution because it seems to them to substitute natural forces
for God; see John Fiske, Idea of God, 97-102. But law is only a
method; it presupposes a lawgiver and requires an agent.
Gravitation and evolution are but the habitual operations of God.
If spontaneous generation should be proved true, it would be only
God’s way of originating life. E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology,
91—“Spontaneous generation does not preclude the idea of a
creative will working by natural law and secondary causes.... Of
beginnings of life physical science knows nothing.... Of the
processes of nature science is competent to speak and against its
teachings respecting these there is no need that theology should
set itself in hostility.... Even if man were derived from the
lower animals, it would not prove that God did not create and
order the forces employed. It may be that God bestowed upon animal
life a plastic power.”
Ward, Naturalism and Agnosticism, 1:180—“It is far truer to say
that the universe is a life, than to say that it is a
mechanism.... We can never get to God through a mere mechanism....
With Leibnitz I would argue that absolute passivity or inertness
is not a reality but a limit. 269—Mr. Spencer grants that to
interpret spirit in terms of matter is impossible. 302—Natural
selection without teleological factors is not adequate to account
for biological evolution, and such teleological factors imply a
psychical something endowed with feelings and will, _i. e._, Life
and Mind. 2:130-135—Conation is more fundamental than cognition.
149-151—Things and events precede space and time. There is no
empty space or time. 252-257—Our assimilation of nature is the
greeting of spirit by spirit. 259-267—Either nature is itself
intelligent, or there is intelligence beyond it.
274-276—Appearances do not veil reality. 274—The truth is not God
_and_ mechanism, but God _only_ and no mechanism. 283—Naturalism
and Agnosticism, in spite of themselves, lead us to a world of
Spiritualistic Monism.” Newman Smyth, Christian Ethics,
36—“Spontaneous generation is a fiction in ethics, as it is in
psychology and biology. The moral cannot be derived from the
non-moral, any more than consciousness can be derived from the
unconscious, or life from the azoic rocks.”
IV. The Mosaic Account of Creation.
1. Its twofold nature,—as uniting the ideas of creation and of
development.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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