Systematic Theology (Volume 2 of 3)Strong, Augustus Hopkins
Religion
Systematic Theology (Volume 2 of 3)
Strong, Augustus Hopkins
Baptists -- Doctrines; Theology, Doctrinal
Ethik, 1:186-190; also in Bib.
Sac., Jan. 1875:144. See also Lotze, Philos. of Religion, 81-94.
The element of truth in Continuous Creation is its assumption that
all force is will. Its error is in maintaining that all force is
_divine_ will, and divine will in _direct_ exercise. But the human
will is a force as well as the divine will, and the forces of
nature are secondary and automatic, not primary and immediate,
workings of God. These remarks may enable us to estimate the grain
of truth in the following utterances which need important
qualification and limitation. Bowne, Philosophy of Theism, 202,
likens the universe to the musical note, which exists only on
condition of being incessantly reproduced. Herbert Spencer says
that “ideas are like the successive chords and cadences brought
out from a piano, which successively die away as others are
produced.” Maudsley, Physiology of Mind, quotes this passage, but
asks quite pertinently: “What about the performer, in the case of
the piano and in the case of the brain, respectively? Where in the
brain is the equivalent of the harmonic conceptions in the
performer’s mind?” Professor Fitzgerald: “All nature is living
thought—the language of One in whom we live and move and have our
being.” Dr. Oliver Lodge, to the British Association in 1891: “The
barrier between matter and mind may melt away, as so many others
have done.”
To this we object, upon the following grounds:
(_a_) It contradicts the testimony of consciousness that regular and
executive activity is not the mere repetition of an initial decision, but
is an exercise of the will entirely different in kind.
Ladd, in his Philosophy of Mind, 144, indicates the error in
Continuous Creation as follows: “The whole world of things is
momently quenched and then replaced by a similar world of actually
new realities.” The words of the poet would then be literally
true: “Every fresh and new creation, A divine improvisation, From
the heart of God proceeds.” Ovid, Metaph., 1:16—“Instabilis
tellus, innabilis unda.” Seth, Hegelianism and Personality, 60,
says that, to Fichte, “the world was thus perpetually created anew
in each finite spirit,—revelation to intelligence being the only
admissible meaning of that much abused term, creation.” A. L.
Moore, Science and the Faith, 184, 185—“A theory of occasional
intervention implies, as its correlate, a theory of ordinary
absence.... For Christians the facts of nature are the acts of
God. Religion relates these facts to God as their author; science
relates them to one another as parts of a visible order. Religion
does not tell of this interrelation; science cannot tell of their
relation to God.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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