Editorial May 11, 1946 Issue

He Put Aside Physical Causation

Paul Stark Seeley

If you should stop the first person you met in the street and say that you had some extraordinarily good news, namely, that there is no such thing as physical causation, your news might not be very graciously received. And yet there is nothing, absolutely nothing, so important for each individual to understand as causation—what is his cause, and what is not his cause. Unless the cause or source of creation is understood, how can any correct conclusion in regard to creation and man be reached? The uncertainty of human thought as to what existence is, as to why we are, as to whence we came and whither we are going, evidence the confusion of men in regard to this most basic verity.

Generally speaking, mortals believe that what they call physical, material forces have caused man, and they believe that this is proved by the testimony of material sight, hearing, and feeling. An infant is born. It is caused by physical forces, they say, and is a proof that causation is physical. What causes these material forces and processes they do not explain. If pressed for an answer, they may say it is nature. Some may say it is God.

But God, Christ Jesus tells us, is Spirit, and Spirit means Mind, pure and perfect Mind. How perfect Mind could conceive and cause mindless, unspiritual material forces and processes and their product, a materially organic personality, subject to affliction and destruction, no one has ever been able logically to explain. "To begin with the divine noumenon, Mind," writes Mary Baker Eddy, "and to end with the phenomenon, matter, is minus divine logic and plus human hypothesis, with its effects, sin, disease, and death" (The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, p. 350). Effect must be like its cause. Mind's effect must be Mindlike.

Send a comment to the editors

We'd love to hear from you!

Easily submit your testimonies, articles, and poems online.

Submit

He Put Aside Physical Causation

We'd love to hear from you!

Sign up for unlimited access