The Idea of God as Affected by Modern KnowledgeFiske, John
Religion
The Idea of God as Affected by Modern Knowledge
Fiske, John
God (Christianity)
This subject is of such immense importance that I must illustrate
it from yet another point of view. We must observe the manner in
which, along with the progress of scientific discovery, theological
arguments have come to be permeated by the strange assumption that
the greater part of the universe is godless. Here again we must go
back for a moment to the primeval world and observe how behind every
physical phenomenon there were supposed to be quasi-human passions
and a quasi-human will. Now the phenomena which were first arranged
and systematized in men's thoughts, and thus made the subject of
something like scientific generalization, were the simplest, the
most accessible, and the most manageable phenomena; and from these
the conception of a quasi-human will soonest faded away. There are
savages who believe that hatchets and kettles have souls, but men
unquestionably outgrew such a belief as this long before they outgrew
the belief that there are ghost-like deities in the tempest, or in
the sun and moon. After many ages of culture, men ceased to regard
the familiar and regularly-recurring phenomena of nature as immediate
results of volition, and reserved this primeval explanation for
unusual or terrible phenomena, such as comets and eclipses, or famines
and plagues. As the result of these habits of thought, in course of
time, Nature seemed to be divided into two antithetical provinces. On
the one hand, there were the phenomena that occurred with a simple
regularity which seemed to exclude the idea of capricious volition;
and these were supposed to constitute the realm of natural law. On
the other hand, there were the complex and irregular phenomena in
which the presence of law could not so easily be detected; and these
were supposed to constitute the realm of immediate divine action.
This antithesis has forever haunted the minds of men imbued with the
lower or Augustinian theism; and such have made up the larger part of
the Christian world. It has tended to make the theologians hostile to
science and the men of science hostile to theology. For as scientific
generalization has steadily extended the region of natural law, the
region which theology has assigned to divine action has steadily
diminished. Every discovery in science has stripped off territory from
the latter province and added it to the former. Every such discovery
has accordingly been promulgated and established in the teeth of
bitter and violent opposition on the part of theologians. A desperate
fight it has been for some centuries, in which science has won every
disputed position, while theology, untaught by perennial defeat, still
valiantly defends the little corner that is left it. Still as of old
the ordinary theologian rests his case upon the assumption of disorder,
caprice, and miraculous interference with the course of nature. He
naively asks, "If plants and animals have been naturally originated,
if the world as a whole has been evolved and not manufactured, and if
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