Article July 4, 1914 Issue

A recent critic says that because the universe teems with...

Frederick Dixon—Weymouth, England

Weymouth Telegram

A recent critic says that because the universe teems with expressions of God's love, therefore God must have created the universe. It will be seen from this that this critic is a very master of the post hoc propter hoc method of argument. Seeing that the earth also teems with sin, disease, and death, to say nothing of misery of every kind, what, it might be asked, does this prove about creation? One cannot help wondering if he ever read a remarkable passage in "The Light of Asia," which, discussing this very fact, concludes, "Each slew a slayer, and in turn was slain."

Then the critic seems to be troubled because Christian Scientists cannot do the whole of the works of Jesus. He appears to think that because Mrs. Eddy passed away, that proves Christian Science healing to be a fraud. This is the sort of argument with which the medieval church met the statement that the earth was a sphere. They said nobody had ever been round it, therefore it was a plane. In the present instance, not only is Jesus known to have raised the dead, but Peter and Paul did also, so that unless the critic is going to contend that because every one is not a senior wrangler, therefore no one can work out any mathematical problem, it is very difficult to discover what he is trying to prove.

Then, again, he wants to know what I mean by saying there is no material law, and he is indiscreet enough to say that he supposes I mean that the law, "Thou shalt not kill," does not mean to kill a material body. As a matter of fact, I meant precisely what I said. I was speaking of law, and when the critic gains a slight perception of what is meant by law in an ordinary scientific sense, he will discover that I was talking about those facts which are described as law because no variation in them has ever been perceived, and not about civil or religious codes which men break just whenever they please. Hume, on a famous occasion, described a miracle as a violation of a law of God, with the result that Huxley was forced to point out that the very fact that what was called a law had been broken, proved scientifically that it was not a law, and that if a miracle seemed to break what human beings regarded as law, it only proved the existence of a law with which those human beings had been hitherto unacquainted.

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