| Search Help New search |
| Results 3501-3550 of 3802 for « +text:god » |
| 21% |
A260
Book:
Fenton, Carroll Lane. [1924]. Darwin and the theory of evolution. Girard, Kansas: Haldeman-Julius.
Text
Image
er. But then arises the doubt, can the mind of man, which has, as I fully believe, been developed from a mind as low as that possessed by the lowest animal, be trusted when it draws such grand conclusions? I cannot pretend to throw the least light on such abstruse problems. The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us; and I for one must be content to remain an Agnostic. Such is Darwin's position with relation to the problem of the existence or non-existence of a god. He
|
| 15% |
A260
Book:
Fenton, Carroll Lane. [1924]. Darwin and the theory of evolution. Girard, Kansas: Haldeman-Julius.
Text
Image
did not think much about the existence of a personal God until a considerably later period of my life, I will here give the vague conclusions to which I have been driven. The old argument from design in Nature, as given by Paley, which formerly seemed to me so conclusive, fails now that the law of natural selection has been discovered. We can no longer argue that, for instance, the beautiful hinge of a bivalve shell must have been made by an intelligent being, like the hinge of a door by man
|
| 70% |
fact of life in the universe and the endless curiosity about it were enough. Whether God was there or not was a matter that could not be settled and need not be discussed. To Moody both life and the universe were nothing without God. [page] 16
|
| 50% |
(and I really should like to hear) that God designedly killed this man? Many or most persons do believe this; I can't and don't. If you believe so, do you believe that when a swallow snaps up a gnat that God designed that that particular swallow should snap up that particular gnat at that 73. To Ridley, November 28, 1878, Life, vol. II, p. 412. [page] 16
|
| 44% |
ing, indomitable effort to find out God, being assured that without Him the universe, with all its splendor and all its endless evolving glory, is nothing, merely nothing. Such doubt will express itself in words like those of the modern poet: 'Day and night I wander widely through the wilderness of thought, Catching dainty things of fancy most reluctant to be caught. Shining tangles leading nowhere I persistently unravel, Tread strange paths of meditation very intricate to travel. Gleaming
|
| 43% |
he can. Certainly I agree with you that my views are not at all necessarily atheistical.'17 The belief in God is eminently useful: 'With the more civilized races, the conviction of the existence of an all-seeing Deity has had a potent influence on the advance of morality.'18 At every convenient opportunity God is given fair play and a fighting chance: it rests with Him to make the most of it. At the same time, the obstacles and difficulties are mountainous and it would appear insuperable. Thus
|
| 43% |
they can, to see that after their deaths their wives and children are provided for, and to leave any other lives to take care of themselves. And then there is the question of God, and it seems that He has a tendency to vanish also, with the disappearance of His celestial habitation, so that I feel a pathetic touch of tenderness for departed grandeur in capitalizing the pronoun. The scientific sequence of cause and effect has permeated so thoroughly the minds of even those who do not think of
|
| 35% |
growing absorption of the scientific ardor. It cannot be denied that in the main Darwin's interest in nature was intellectual, not emotional. IV As with sociology and with sthetic experience, so, and even more, with God and the things of God, Darwin's limitations are profoundly interesting, and if the loss was less, because there was less to lose, it was nevertheless, in all its aspects significant. Here again, as with sthetic emotion, it must be remembered that men do not utter all they feel
|
| 35% |
ostentation of piety.'68 But to prayer as a personal experience I find only one single allusion. When Darwin was a boy, he was a good runner, often took part in races, and was often successful. His explanation of his success at that time is interesting: 'When in doubt I prayed earnestly to God to help me, and I well remember that I attributed my success to my prayers and not to my quick running, and marveled how generally I was aided.'69 This recalls the youthful experience of Moody, who was caught under
|
| 35% |
away, and completely to demolish all sense of His intervention in the little daily actions and experiences of common life and all intimate communion and conference with Him in regard to those actions. When 'The Descent of Man' is published, Mrs. Darwin writes to her daughter, quite simply: 'I think it will be very interesting, but that I shall dislike it very much as again putting God further off.'20 For others besides Mrs. Darwin it reduced Him quite to the vanishing point. But if Darwin
|
| 32% |
belief, 215, 216; D. and belief in God, 216 18; and atheism, 218 20; as typifying scientific influence on life, 221; influence on politics, 222 25; and realism, 225; and hell and heaven, 227; and popular belief in God and worship, 229, 230; and substitute for sin, 231 33; philosophical, 233 35; clerical harmonizing with religion, 236; Fundamentalists and, 237, 282; scientific harmonizing, 237 39; and individualism in religious belief, 239, 240; future adjustment with religion, 240; destructive
|
| 26% |
evolution, 213 15, 219; evolution and belief in future life, 215, 216; and belief in God, 216 18, 229; and democracy, 223; evolution and hell and heaven, 227, 228; fundamentalism, 232, 237, 282; clerical harmonizing with evolution, 236; scientific harmonizing, 237 39; egocentric versus ethnocentric, 239, 240; persistence, 240; thirst for God, 285. Renan, J. E., effect of evolution on, 241. Research, element in scientific spirit, 250. Revision, D.'s trait, 73, 118; element in scientific spirit, 255 57
|
| 25% |
ones.'68 And the intense consciousness of objections and difficulties appears even more vividly in the sentence: 'I cannot too strongly express my conviction of the general truth of my doctrines, and God knows I have never shirked a difficulty.'69 67. Vallery-Radot, Pasteur, p. 139. 68. Life, vol. I, p. 71. 69. To Lyell, September 20, 1859, Life, vol. I, p. 521. [page] 7
|
| 25% |
qualities which we have analyzed generally in the preceding chapters. Long and cruel as the controversy was, that large, tranquil disposition could not be warped or embittered, or substantially shaken in its kindly serenity. And first there is the candor, the readiness to admit mistakes and errors, and to recognize the force and significance of an opponent's view and arguments. Darwin himself complains humorously of a weakness in this regard: 'My God, is not the case difficult enough, without
|
| 25% |
any subject as I am in mine.'1 Or again: 'It is a horrid bore to feel as I constantly do, that I am a withered leaf for every subject except Science. It sometimes makes me hate Science, though God knows I ought to be thankful for such a perennial interest, which makes me forget for some hours every day my accursed stomach.'2 And elsewhere he analyzes it with more elaborate regretful curiosity: 'My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of
|
| 25% |
delightful that the Sabbath should be treated with such reverence in the house of one who was to do more than any one else to smash the God of the Sabbath altogether. So it is evident that Darwin grew up with a strong religious habit. There was even serious talk of his entering the church, till his hopeless lack of vocation made it clearly impossible. The net of religious inheritance and circumstance was woven closely about him and in the early days he recognized himself as in general orthodox
|
| 25% |
his mother's knee. 'I don't know what it means,' he said; 'I don't know whether there is a God, or whether He hears me, or what I want of Him; but I pray.' And I, who had not prayed for thirty years, heard him with amazement. Nevertheless, I do not believe that Darwin repeated 'Now I lay me' to the end, or prayed for triumph with evolution as he had prayed for triumph in the foot-race. The question of a future life seems to have had as little actuality for Darwin as that of prayer, and we have
|
| 25% |
, mentally clear but with no prospect of recovery, his calm words were: 'I am not the least afraid of death.'72 As to the question of God, Darwin's statements are as elaborate as in regard to immortality, and for the same reason, because eager inquirers were 70. Life, vol. I, p. 282. 71. To Lyell, September 3, 1874, More Letters, vol. II, p. 237. 72. Family Letters, vol. II, p. 253. [page] 16
|
| 25% |
, to leave all such questions as hopeless and insoluble, beyond the intelligence of man so completely that it does not seem intended that he should grapple with them. And Darwin at least was satisfied to weigh and measure and experiment and let God go. It does not appear that he felt the need and the longing and the desire that torture some of us. Like some other men, perhaps like many others, the life of this world, the work of this world, the pleasure of this world, the interest of this world
|
| 25% |
CHAPTER V DARWIN: THE LOVER I IF Darwin was not conspicuous as a lover of God, he was at least notable in every way as one who loved his fellow men. He liked to meet people, liked to talk with them, liked to have them about him. He was interested in humanity, enjoyed the contact of it, and felt in others the warm throb of a heart that beat as kindly and sympathetically as his own. Men, women, and children were drawn to him and recognized a friend. Of his personal appearance the chief
|
| 25% |
kindliness it is worth while to note the remark of the devout old woman who was told that Darwin would go to hell for his wicked doctrines and answered: 'God Almighty can't afford to do without so good a man.'41 39. Life, vol. I, p. 99. 40. Reminiscences, in Harper's Magazine, December, 1909, vol. cxx, p. 17. 41. Grant Duff, Diary, 1896-1901, vol. I, p. 307. [page] 18
|
| 25% |
was based. Nevertheless, he does not appear to have felt, or at least to have been haunted by, the dread of a solitary and God-abandoned universe that afflicts some of us. He was sensitive to concrete fears: 'You will then get rest, and I do hope some lull in anxiety and fear. Nothing is so dreadful in this life as fear; it still sickens me when I cannot help remembering some of the many illnesses our children have endured.'1 But his general mental attitude was so healthy and so practical that he
|
| 25% |
supremacy and even the orthodox God. The sheer, simple statement of the matter appears in one vivid phrase: 'What a book a devil's chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low, and horribly cruel works of nature!'5 Especially Darwin knew well what fierce 3. Descent, p. 145. 4. In Life, vol. II, p. 245. 5. To Hooker, July 13, 1856, More Letters, vol. I, p. 94. [page] 21
|
| 25% |
to follow the loss of belief in another. And again, there is evolution and God. Darwin frequently insists that he is no atheist, and that his system must not be charged with any atheistical conclusion: 'Let each man hope and believe what 15. To Hooker, February 9, 1865, More Letters, vol. I, p. 260. 16. To Lyell, August 21, 1861, More Letters, vol. I, p. 194. [page] 21
|
| 25% |
urge that the value and importance of the individual is a gradual effect and an essential element of Christian doctrine. It is true that Christianity has always proclaimed the equality of all souls before God and their equal need of salvation. 27. Lull, p. 146. [page] 22
|
| 25% |
ing sense of the Divine presence, and to become a mere polite fraternizing for social purposes. You hear many people say that they worship God better alone in the fields than in the churches. As to some of the churches the feeling is natural enough, but I wonder how many think of Him on the golf-links, except in the form of profanity, or in the hurry and swirl of traffic-crowded highways, or even in the fields, if anybody ever gets there any more. And prayer? I have spoken in connection with
|
| 25% |
the world of evolving phenomena, was itself a thing of dynamic growth and force, able to create by its own native energy a future and a reality and a God that should embody its highest ideals. A parallel development appears in the 'Creative Evolution' of Bergson, the theory of the creative spirit perpetually evolving in richer, more splendid, more satisfying forms, through the eternal depths of a luminous future. From the day when Darwin's views were first announced up to this very moment, up
|
| 25% |
processes of the reasonable wriggling which so much amused Darwin in himself and others31 the two were contentedly brought together. Then appeared this later disturber of the peace, and at first the theologians despaired. But when did a theologian ever quite despair? Mankind must have God, must have Christ, must have the Bible, and above all things must have a priesthood. If Darwinism did away with the first three, I ask you what would the priesthood do for a living? Therefore the contending
|
| 25% |
the future is to be no worse than that of the past: who knows but it may be infinitely better? 'In the past religion has dealt to a large extent with the individual and his relation to God; its chief concern was the salvation of individual souls and their preparation for a future life; it has been largely egocentric. The religion of the future must more and more deal with the salvation of society; it must be ethnocentric.'35 In the charming words of Meilhac and Hal vy: 'C'est impr vu, mais c'est
|
| 25% |
considerations appeal to me very little. In so far as the good of the race is identified with my personal comfort and well-being, I am interested in it. But my ego cries out for God simply for itself, and if it is to vanish like a dewdrop in the sun, words cannot express my utter indifference to the well-being of the race, of the world, and of the universe. Nevertheless, it is probable that humanity will achieve some adjustment in this matter. Mankind has always demanded spiritual ideals and the
|
| 25% |
scientists will suffice to keep religion and the human soul and even God upon Their feet and to enable Them to carry on decorously through the dreamy flight of centuries to come. IV Meantime, it is interesting to consider how many of the great spirits of the last generation, and especially of those most intellectually influential, were profoundly moved by Darwinism and felt more or less its haunting gloom of destruction and its far-reaching effect. In Ibsen the struggle for existence shows
|
| 25% |
baldly, love and hunger are the two poles of our being. And when he makes intimate confession of the workings of the theory in his own person and life, this is the result: 'It is said, Man is the lord of creation. Man is the lord of suffering, my friend. There is no clearer proof of the non-existence of God than life . If you could read in my soul, you would be terrified . There is not in all the universe a creature more unhappy than I. People think me happy. I have never been happy for one day
|
| 25% |
his own credit, puts into the mouth of Satan in 'The Mysterious Stranger': 'A God who mouths justice and invented hell mouths mercy and invented hell mouths Golden Rules, and forgiveness multiplied by seventy times seven, and invented hell; who mouths morals to other people and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man's acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon
|
| 25% |
own reason, of myself, of men, of life, from doubt which enervates the will and destroys the powers, which makes one forget God, forget prayer, forget duty, from unquiet and corrosive doubt, which renders existence impossible, and makes a ghastly mock of hope.'38 Perhaps reason offers the most curious of all the antinomies or self-contradictions which arise when one seeks to develop the physical, mental, and moral nature of man, on an evolutionary basis, from the fundamental instinct of self
|
| 25% |
if it may be justly said that one wearies of everything except to understand, one wearies of the failure to understand more than of anything else. After all, there are but two things that it is really important to know: oneself and God. And it is precisely in regard to these that the impossibility of final knowledge most overwhelms us. In the rugged language of old Ben Jonson: 'I know no disease of the soul but ignorance; not of the arts and sciences, but of itself.'39 And a Greek, two
|
| 21% |
appreciation, in handling the difficulties, of the danger in over-ingenuity, of the subtle possibilities of betrayal by reason ever toiling with intense ardor to arrive at its preconceived ends. 'God knows I have never shirked a difficulty,' said Darwin.56 But the danger lies not only in shirking, but in the dissolving, transforming power of prejudice and enthusiasm. Here again Darwin tried to be ever on his guard: 'I am fairly rabid on the question, and therefore, if not wrong already, am pretty
|
| 21% |
made me a renegade to Whig principles.'11 And it remained true to old age. When answering a questionaire in 1873, he described himself as 'Liberal or Radical,'12 but the radicalism was of a very conservative and English order. The Whig partisanship even shows itself in quite normal fashion in hatred of the Tories, and on this head the tolerant and kindly scientist expresses himself with a rather amusing bitterness: 'Thank God, the cold-hearted Tories, who, as J. Mackintosh used to say, have no
|
| 21% |
he inclined to witty flings or brilliant repartee. His mind worked too slowly for a rapid-fire exchange of this sort. It was only occasionally that he hit out at a promising interlocutor, as when he remarked to Lady Derby, who had been describing her remarkable peculiarities of vision, 'Ah, Lady Derby, how I should like to dissect you.'9 Above all, he had no taste for the satirical or bitter, and it was only under extreme provocation that he could write to Huxley: 'God bless you! get well, be
|
| 18% |
. Manner, D.'s, 188. Marriage of cousins, D. and, 136. Mendel, Gregor, experiments, 124. Milton, John, D.'s appreciation, 146. Missing links in evolutionary theory, 113. Missionaries, D.'s attitude, 159. Mistakes, D.'s attitude, 77. Mivart, St. G. J., and evolution and religion, 238. Montesquieu, on study, 277. Moody, D. L., absorption of interest, 129; and prayer, 162; and God, 167; and hell and heaven, 227, 228. Moore, Thomas, on children, 196. Morality. See Ethics. Morgan, Lloyd, and evolution
|
| 43% |
A179
Book:
Ward, Henshaw. 1927. Charles Darwin: The man and his warfare. London: John Murray.
Text
Image
Darwin wrote the day after he reached Malvern: Oh, my own, it is very bitter indeed. God preserve and cherish you. We must hope against hope. On the 23d he had to tell of Annie's death. I pray God Fanny's note may have prepared you. She went to her final sleep most tranquilly, most sweetlty, at 12 o'clock today . God bless her. We must be more and more to each other, my dear wife. And the wife replied: My feeling of longing after out lost treasure makes me feel painfully indifferent to the
|
| 35% |
A876
Book:
Abbott, Lawrence F. 1927. Charles Darwin, the saint. In Ibid. Twelve great modernists. New York: Doubleday.
Text
Image
PDF
he did not burst into tears he did, in private, burst into passionate language more than once that suggests the moral fury of an Old Testament prophet. At the outbreak of our Civil War, he wrote to Asa Gray, the distinguished botanist at Harvard: I never knew the newspapers so profoundly interesting. North America does not do England justice; I have not seen nor heard of a soul who is not with the North. Some few, and I am one of them, even wish to God, though at the loss of millions of lives
|
| 31% |
A876
Book:
Abbott, Lawrence F. 1927. Charles Darwin, the saint. In Ibid. Twelve great modernists. New York: Doubleday.
Text
Image
PDF
TEN: CHARLES R. DARWIN THE SAINT BORN 1809 DIED 1882 GAMALIEL BRADFORD, the American biographer, has recently published an essay which he entitles Darwin the Destroyer and which he closes with these sorrowful words: It was Darwin who at least typified the rigorous logic that wrecked the universe for me and for millions of others. If Gamaliel Bradford's conception of the universe was that of the ancient Hebrews a geocentric machine operated by an anthropomorphic God then there is cause for his
|
| 30% |
A179
Book:
Ward, Henshaw. 1927. Charles Darwin: The man and his warfare. London: John Murray.
Text
Image
-going theory is mere seeming. Lyell's smooth philosophy is not worth mentioning. My geological examination of the country created a good deal of surprise amongst the Chileans . Some (like a few in England who are a century behindhand) thought that all such inquiries were useless and impious. Goliath always considers that a Darwin's curiosity is impious. As Darwin said, quoting the Chilenos: It was quite sufficient that God had made the mountains. A scientist, if he wants to know the steps by
|
| 30% |
A179
Book:
Ward, Henshaw. 1927. Charles Darwin: The man and his warfare. London: John Murray.
Text
Image
explanations: 1. That God makes each species, by a fiat. 2. That a creative force calls each new species into being at some instant of time, at some particular spot, in accordance with some utterly unknown natural law. 3. That great populations of large portions of the globe are suddenly created, at once, by divine fiat, after a previous population is entirely destroyed. This was the opinion most generally held by geologists in 1836. It accounted for the origin of species by catastrophe. That species
|
| 30% |
A179
Book:
Ward, Henshaw. 1927. Charles Darwin: The man and his warfare. London: John Murray.
Text
Image
his convictions about the Creator's Design. But Darwin could only reply that he had no knowledge of how God managed the universe. The theological view of the question is always painful to me. I am bewildered. I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us . I feel most deeply that the whole subject is too profound for the human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton. Let each man believe
|
| 26% |
A179
Book:
Ward, Henshaw. 1927. Charles Darwin: The man and his warfare. London: John Murray.
Text
Image
amidst a fierce struggle for existence. What took place at that instant of birth of a species? It is obvious that nature has no apparatus for creating a species. The creative power must be above natural law. That is what Lyell everywhere implies and nowhere denies. Darwin could have granted that in the days of Noah the hand of God might have been visible to mortal eyes as it placed the new type of animal under the rotten wood. But how about now, in South America, in the presence of a naturalist
|
| 25% |
A179
Book:
Ward, Henshaw. 1927. Charles Darwin: The man and his warfare. London: John Murray.
Text
Image
theory was contrary to the revelation of God in the Scriptures The men cheered; the women waved handkerchiefs. The Bishop's oratory had succeeded. Now the audience shouted for Huxley. He was in no hurry to respond, but waited until call for him became loud and insistent. Then with deliberate dignity he rose, and in quiet self-possession waited for the room to grown silent. It was a hostile audience that he faced. It was somewhat distracted from the issue by a curious coincidence: Huxley looked
|
| 25% |
A179
Book:
Ward, Henshaw. 1927. Charles Darwin: The man and his warfare. London: John Murray.
Text
Image
Whence countless groups of vegetation spring, And breathing realms of fin, and feet, and wing. He declares that the Oak, the Whale, the Lion, Eagle, man [why is he not honored with a capital m?], who styles himself the image of his God, Arose from rudiments of form and sense, An embryon point, or microscopic ens! He poetizes the law of recapitulation that is, that every person passes through, in his embryo life, the stages of animal existence: Half-reasoning Beavers long-unbreathing dart
|
| 25% |
A876
Book:
Abbott, Lawrence F. 1927. Charles Darwin, the saint. In Ibid. Twelve great modernists. New York: Doubleday.
Text
Image
PDF
Far from being a rank materialist Darwin seems to me to have been something of a mystic. The deeper he penetrated into the secrets of nature, the greater the mystery became. In his sixty-fifth year he wrote to a Dutch student I may say that the impossibility of conceiving that this grand and wondrous universe, with our conscious selves, arose through chance, seems to me the chief argument for the existence of God; but whether this is an argument of real value, I have never been able to decide
|
| 25% |
A876
Book:
Abbott, Lawrence F. 1927. Charles Darwin, the saint. In Ibid. Twelve great modernists. New York: Doubleday.
Text
Image
PDF
ape. Is it on his grandfather's or his grandmother's side that the ape ancestry comes in? And then taking a graver tone, he asserted, in solemn peroration, that Darwin's views were contrary to the revelation of God in the Scriptures. Darwin was not present but Huxley was called upon to reply. Turning to a friend before he rose he said sotto voce, The Lord hath delivered into mine hands. Dean Freemantle reports him as beginning: I am here only in the interest of science and I have not heard
|