as that by which the mind and character of Jesus are reduced to a
maneuver of molecules.
The attractiveness of this explanation of the universe as a huge
physical machine is easily understood. It presents a simple picture,
readily grasped. It packs the whole explanation of the world into a
neat parcel, portable by any mind. In the days of monarchy the
government of the universe was pictured in terms of an absolute
sovereign; in feudal times the divine economy was pictured as a
gigantic feudalism; we always use a dominant factor in the life of man
to help us picture the eternal. So in the age whose builder and maker
is machinery we easily portray the universe as a huge machine. The
process is simple and natural, but to suppose that it is adequate is
preposterous. Lord Kelvin, the chemist, knew thoroughly the
mechanistic idea of the world. He felt the fascination of it, for he
said at Johns Hopkins University, "I never satisfy myself until I make
a mechanical model of a thing. If I can make a mechanical model I can
understand it. As long as I cannot make a mechanical model all the way
through, I cannot understand." But Lord Kelvin knew better than to
suppose that this figure comprehended all of reality. "The atheistic
idea," said he, "is so nonsensical, that I do not know how to put it
into words."
The rejection of the no-God hypothesis does not necessarily imply that
a man becomes fully Christian in his thought of deity. There are
way-stations between no-God and Jesus' Father. _But it does mean that
to him reality must be fundamentally spiritual, not physical._ What
other hypothesis possibly can fit the facts? For consider the view of
a growing universe which we see from the outlook that modern science
furnishes. Out of a primeval chaos where physical forces snarled at
each other in unrelieved antagonism, where no man had yet arisen to
love truth and serve righteousness, something has brought us to a
time, when for all our evil, there are mothers and music and the
laughter of children at play, men who love honor and for service' sake
lay down their lives, and homes in every obscure street where
fortitude and sacrifice are splendidly exhibited. Out of a chaos,
where a contemporary observer, could there have been one, would have
seen no slightest promise of spirit, something has brought us to the
Ten Commandments, and the Sermon on the Mount, to great character and
growing achievements in social righteousness, to lofty thoughts of the
Divine and hopes of life eternal. _Something has been at work here
besides matter. No explanation of all this will do, without God._
V
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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