Supernatural Religion (Discovering the Reality of Divine Revelation). Walter Richard Cassels

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СКАЧАТЬ necessary, and fatal, to miracles. If there be no order of nature, miracles cannot be considered supernatural occurrences, and have no evidential value; if there be an order of nature, the evidence for its immutability must consequently exceed the evidence for these isolated deviations from it. If we are unable rationally to form expectations of the future from unvarying experience in the past, it is still more irrational to call that supernatural which is merely different from our past experience. Take, for instance, the case of supposed exemption from the action of the law of gravitation, which Archbishop Trench calls "a lost prerogative of our race:"(1) we cannot rationally affirm that next week we may not be able to walk on the sea, or ascend bodily into the air. To deny this because we have not hitherto been able to do so is unreasonable; for, as Dr. Mozley maintains, it is a mere irrational impulse which expects that which has hitherto happened, when we have made such attempts, to happen again next week. If we cannot rationally deny the possibility, however, that we may be able at some future time to walk on the sea or ascend into the air, the statement that these phenomena have already occurred loses all its force, and such occurrences cease to be in any way supernatural. If, on the other hand, it would be irrational to affirm that we may next week become exempt from the operation of the law of gravitation, it can only be so by the admission that unvarying experience forbids the entertainment of such a hypothesis, and in that case it equally forbids belief in the statement that such acts ever actually took place. If we deny the future possibility on any ground of reason, we admit that we have grounds of reason for expecting the future to be like the past, and therefore contradict Dr. Mozley's conclusion; and if we cannot deny it upon any ground of reason, we extinguish the claim of such occurrences in the past to any supernatural character. Any argument which could destroy faith in the order of nature would be equally destructive to miracles. If we have no right to believe in a rule, there can be no right to speak of exceptions. The result in any case is this, that whether the principle of the order of nature be established or refuted, the supernatural pretensions of miracles are disallowed.

      More than this, however, must inevitably be deduced from Dr. Mozley's reasoning. In denying, as he does, the doctrine of a permanent cause, Dr. Mozley must equally renounce, as without foundation in reason, the assumption of a permanent agent working miracles. Not only do the supposed miracles, in the complete isolation of all effects, cease to be supernatural or even exceptional, but as it cannot be affirmed that there is any cause of a nature more permanent than its existing or known effects, it is obvious that miracles cannot be traced to an eternal Being of permanent omnipotence. If Dr. Mozley, therefore, be understood to adopt this reasoning as his own, he has involved himself, in the necessary abandonment both of miracles as supernatural occurrences, and of a permanent and unlimited cause of miracles. If, on the other hand, he has merely snatched the sword of an adversary to turn it against him, he has unfortunately impaled himself upon the borrowed weapon.

      2.

      Throughout the whole of his argument against the rationality of belief in the order of nature, the rigorous precision which Dr. Mozley unrelentingly demands from his antagonists is remarkable. They are not permitted to deviate by a hair's breadth from the line of strict logic, and the most absolute exactness of demonstration is required. Anything like an assumption or argument from analogy is excluded; induction is allowed to add no reason to bare and isolated facts; and the belief that the sun will rise to-morrow morning is, with pitiless severity, written down as mere unintelligent impulse. Belief in the return of day, based upon the unvarying experience of all past time, is declared to be without any ground of reason. We find anything but fault with strictness of argument; but it is fair that equal precision should be observed by those who assert miracles, and that assumption and inaccuracy should be excluded. Hitherto, as we have frequently pointed out, we have met with very little or nothing but assumption in support of miracles; but, encouraged by the inflexible spirit of Dr. Mozley's attack upon the argument from experience, we may look for similar precision from himself.

      Proceeding, however, from his argument against the rationality of belief in the order of nature to his more direct argument for miracles, we are astonished to find a total abandonment of the rigorous exactness imposed upon his antagonists, and a complete relapse into assumptions. Dr. Mozley does not conceal the fact. "The peculiarity of the argument of miracles," he frankly admits, "is, that it begins and ends with an assumption; I mean relatively to that argument."(1) Such an argument is no argument at all; it is a mere petitio principii, incapable of proving anything. The nature of the assumptions obviously does not in the slightest degree affect this conclusion. It is true that the statement of the particular assumptions may constitute an appeal to belief otherwise derived, and evolve feelings which may render the calm exercise of judgment more difficult, but the fact remains absolute, that an argument which "begins and ends with an assumption" is totally impotent. It remains an assumption, and is not an argument at all.

      Notwithstanding this unfortunate and disqualifying "peculiarity" we may examine the argument. It is as follows: "We assume the existence of a Personal Deity prior to the proof of miracles in the religious sense; but with this assumption the question of miracles is at an end; because such a Being has necessarily the power to suspend those laws of nature which He has Himself enacted."(1) The "question of miracles," which Dr. Mozley here asserts to be at an end on the assumption of a "Personal Deity," is of course merely that of the possibility of miracles; but it is obvious that, even with the precise definition of Deity which is assumed, instead of the real "question" being at an end, it only commences. The power to suspend the laws of nature being assumed, the will to suspend them has to be demonstrated, and the actual occurrence of any such suspension, which, it has already been shown, is contrary to reason. The subject is, moreover, complicated by the occurrence of Satanic as well as Divine suspensions of the order of nature, and by the necessity of assuming a Personal Devil as well as a Personal Deity, and his power to usurp that control over the laws of nature, which is assumed as the prerogative of the Deity, and to suspend them in direct opposition to God. The express ascription of miracles to the special intervention of a Personal God is also, as we have seen, excluded by the Scriptural admission that there are other supernatural beings capable of performing them. Even Dr. Newman has recognized this, and, in a passage already quoted, he says: "For the cogency of the argument from Miracles depends on the assumption, that interruptions in the course of nature must ultimately proceed from God; which is not true, if they may be effected by other beings without His sanction."(1) The first assumption, in fact, leads to nothing but assumptions connected with the unseen, unknown and supernatural, which are beyond the limits of reason.

      Dr. Mozley is well aware that his assumption of a "Personal" Deity is not susceptible of proof;(2) indeed, this is admitted in the statement that the definition is an "assumption." He quotes the obvious reply which may be made regarding this assumption:—"Everybody must collect from the harmony of the physical universe the existence of a God, but in acknowledging a God, we do not thereby acknowledge this peculiar doctrinal conception of a God. We see in the structure of nature a mind—a universal mind—but still a mind which only operates and expresses itself by law. Nature only does and only can inform us of mind in nature, the partner and correlative of organized matter. Nature, therefore, can speak to the existence of a God in this sense, and can speak to the omnipotence of God in a sense coinciding with the actual facts of nature; but in no other sense does nature witness to the existence of an Omnipotent Supreme Being. Of a universal Mind out of nature, nature says nothing, and of an Omnipotence which does not possess an inherent limit in nature, she says nothing either. And, therefore, that conception of a Supreme Being which represents him as a Spirit independent of the physical universe, and able from a standing-place external to nature to interrupt its order, is a conception of God for which we must go elsewhere. That conception is obtained from revelation which is asserted to be proved by miracles. But that being the case, this doctrine of Theism rests itself upon miracles, and, therefore, miracles cannot rest upon this doctrine of Theism."(1) With his usual fairness, Dr. Mozley, while questioning the correctness of the premiss of this argument, admits that, if established, the consequence stated would follow, "and more, for miracles being thrown back upon the same ground on which Theism is, the whole evidence of revelation becomes a vicious circle, and the fabric is left suspended in space, revelation resting on miracles and miracles resting on revelation."(2) СКАЧАТЬ