Chapter IX: The Insoluble

What desperate efforts mankind has made to shape this vast, blind, unconscionable power we call Nature into an image of a God that would satisfy our moral and spiritual wants and aspirations! Where did men get their standards of such a God? They have evidently been slowly evolved through the friction of man with man. They have possessed survival value. Love, truth, justice, mercy, have contributed to the fullness of life and to length of days. One may adopt Biblical language and say that righteousness endureth forever. The triumph of the wicked is only for a season; it may be a long season, it may embrace whole periods of human history, and entail measureless suffering on the human race, but change and retribution surely come. The way of man’s moral and material progress is like the stream that now hurries, now tarries, is now disrupted and noisy in rapids and falls, now sluggish and almost stagnant in long level reaches, but which does go forward and reach its goal at last. But is there not some predetermined bent toward righteousness,--not of the ecclesiastical sort, but of the scientific sort,--toward the relations of man with man, that results in the greatest good to the greatest number,--a bent inherent in the nature of things? Would evolution have taken the road toward man and all the other forms of life blindly, accidentally? Would it have started at all had there not been some initial impulse, or some thought, somewhere, of all that was to follow?

The doctrine of design does not meet the problem; the doctrine of chance does not meet it. Design in our human world means a designer. What, then, does it mean in the non-human world? There can be no design in such a world, because the human mind is not present. There can be no chance, because a chance jumbling and collision of the primordial elements could not result in the organized matter that is life, any more than a thousand of brick dumped upon the ground can take the form of a house. The brick and mortar demand an architect, and organized matter demands an organizing principle. Whence its source? There we are where no further step can be taken. What about the divine mind? But that is jumping the whole question. If you place your God here, I shall ask him some embarrassing questions, such as, Where did you come from? Where have you been all these æons? Why are you so wasteful and dilatory in your methods? Why have you made the world so full of misery? Or, I might ask the question a little boy asked his father: “Why did God make Satan?” The problem, it seems to me, is quite as embarrassing to us mortals with a God as without one. It is just as hard to account for a God as to account for the initial impulse. In both cases we have in our hands a rope with only one end. In trying to find the other end, we only get ourselves hopelessly tied up.