Part 7 (1/2)
When we examine the whole question of miracles inductively and deductively, I think that we must acknowledge that their basis is exceedingly weak. Already, the educated world is in a fair way to outgrow them; and this tendency will undoubtedly increase as science continues to explore the world we live in.
In conclusion, it seems worth while to call attention to the fact that very few people realize what they are really believing when they accept miracles. They do not know enough about nature to grasp the real content of their beliefs; and, until they do, their belief represents simply a point of view which has not been confronted with its implications. It expresses innocence rather than virtue. Let us glance at a couple of the biblical miracles to show what they involve.
Tyndall has brought out, very strikingly, the difference between the miracle supposed to have aided Joshua in his battle with the Amorites, as this appeared in the eyes of an Israelite of old, and as it appears to a man of science. For the one the miracle probably consisted in the stoppage of a fiery ball less than a yard in diameter, while to the other it would be the stoppage of an orb fourteen thousand times the earth in size. ”There is,” he writes, ”a scientific as well as a historic {136} imagination; and when, by the exercise of the former, the stoppage of the earth's rotation is clearly realized, the event a.s.sumes proportions so vast, in comparison with the result to be obtained by it, that belief reels under the reflection. The energy here involved is equal to that of six trillion of horses working for the whole of the time employed by Joshua in the destruction of his foes.” If we pa.s.s from the great to the small, from the employment of tremendous forces to the reconstruction of endless, minute relations, the same divergence between superficial appearance and the reality stares us in the face. Let us consider the raising of Lazarus from the dead. It is a well-known fact that the nervous system begins to disintegrate very quickly after death. Now research has shown that there are nearly a billion of cells in the brain alone. Think of the disorganization which would ensue in such a complicated system after a period of four days. Those who are acquainted with the delicacy of organic compounds can realize the condition of the brain when the body was already beginning to stink. But the ancients did not even know that the brain was closely connected with consciousness, let alone its structure. Of the character of the economy of the body, they knew practically nothing; they dealt with wholes, not with parts. How different this miracle appears from these two stand-points! It is the same only in name. It may be of interest to note that this miracle, characteristic of John, is very evidently related to ill.u.s.trate the principle that Jesus as the Logos is the resurrection and the life. It is a demonstration miracle.
Our answer to the question, Do miracles happen? must be in the negative. While there is nothing {137} irrational in the idea in itself, it does not fit the world as experience presents it. The a.s.sertion that G.o.d performs miracles, like the similar a.s.sertion that he created the world, is purely hypothetical and unverifiable.
{138}
CHAPTER XI
THE SOUL AND IMMORTALITY
The hope of immortality is an essential feature of practically all modern religions. Even those oriental religions which lack its clear presence postulate a dim kind of personal continuity. Buddhism has always been a puzzle to the optimistic Westerner who is in love with himself and does all his thinking in terms of personality and personal relations. The idea of re-birth in accordance with a rigid moral law is alien to his traditions; while the impersonalism of the whole process leaves him cold. It is not untrue to the facts to call Buddhism an atheistic religion. Yet it is a religion because it postulates the objective efficacy of moral categories. Freedom from the wheel of re-birth is gained by the Eightfold Path of right beliefs and right acts. Enough of the idea of a soul and enough of the idea of immortality exists even in this religion to make these a.s.sumptions important. But what have modern science and philosophy to say about these age-old ideas? Is the soul any longer in favor?
Here, again, an historical approach is worth while, because it gives the proper perspective. If we can understand why people in the past developed and fostered these ideas, we can judge their reasons pretty objectively, even though we realize that we have been strongly affected by the beliefs erected upon them. {139} Destroy the roots of a tree and the foliage will wither before long. Has science dug so sharply around the roots of these old beliefs that they are bound to decay?
The subject is an extremely interesting one.
A belief in some sort of an after-life is wide-spread. It is common knowledge that the American Indians spoke of a happy hunting-ground in the West, in which the soul of the warrior would rejoice in abundance of game. Other peoples thought of the abode of the dead as in the East where the sun arises. Still others taught that it was in the sun or the other heavenly bodies, or underneath the earth in a subterranean region. We are seldom able to determine the motives which led to these varying locations.
All sorts of beliefs flourished in the Mediterranean basin a few centuries before our era; but the drift of religious thought was moving rapidly toward a pa.s.sionate acceptance of another life somewhere in the heavens. Immortality was taking on a more vivid coloring and was being transformed from a pa.s.sive survival to an event of marked religious significance. New ethical motives were attaching themselves to an old tendency and modifying it almost beyond recognition. The sentiments and rituals built up around the ideas of sin and salvation were reflected into the next world and created the vision of a heaven and h.e.l.l. What a rich field this was for the mythopeic imagination to exploit! And what an interesting sociological fact is it that the human imagination has always been more fertile in its descriptions of h.e.l.l than in its descriptions of paradise!
But a few words ought to be said about the earlier conceptions of an after-life. Both the Greeks and the {140} Hebrews thought of the other-world as a joyless reflection of the present. Death was, to all intents, the end of what really counted. Those who deny that men can live n.o.bly without the hope of immortality forget that men like Pericles were unaffected by that phantom dream. Even the great Hebrew prophets extolled righteousness without the promise of a reward in the next world. What men have done, we can surely do again. The Greek father felt himself a member of a family whose traditions and loyalties he wished to hand on intact. For himself, he desired only the customary funeral rites so that his shade might rest in peace. In the house of Hades dwell the senseless dead, the phantoms of men outworn.
The answer of Achilles to Ulysses, when that wanderer visits him in the underworld, expresses this shadowy after-life admirably: ”Nay, speak not comfortably to me of death, oh great Ulysses. Rather would I live on ground as the hireling of another, with a landless man who had no great livelihood, then bear sway among all the dead that be departed.”
The Homeric Greeks rejoiced in life like youths whom everything pleases. The shadowy realm of Hades was felt to be a mockery of the sunlit world. The history of the belief in an after-life among the Hebrews is very similar. Yet it is surprising to notice how few remark the paucity of reference to this idea in the Old Testament. In the book of Isaiah occurs that account of Sheol to which attention was called in an earlier chapter: ”Sheol from beneath is moved for thee to meet thee at this coming.... All they shall answer and say unto thee, Art thou become weak as we?” The pa.s.sage is a tremendous one, full of the most biting irony and vindictive hatred. This {141} conception of Sheol evidently scarcely differs from the corresponding one of the Homeric Greek. Toward the Christian era, as a result of the infiltration of the beliefs current among surrounding peoples, the idea of a future life took hold of the Jews. The Pharisees, the popular party of the day, stressed the dogma, while the Sadducees, the Aristocratic party, denied it.
Early religion was largely a state affair, for it concerned itself with the safety of the social group; but it was rapidly becoming an engrossing concern for the individual. The religious imagination was busily painting another world and connecting it with the relations of the individual to divine powers. Given the religious view of the world, what an instrument of appeal and of dread this conception of immortality was! The shadow and suns.h.i.+ne of another world lay athwart this one. Endless vistas of pain and pleasure stretched into the future. No wonder that the true means of salvation became the burning question! From the beginning, Christianity emphasized the fact of another world and its terrific meaning for the soul of man, adopting as an inheritance the current views with regard to a Messianic kingdom and a place of torment. Paul even goes so far as to proclaim the cynical alternative: ”If the dead are not raised, let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die.”
The ideas of immortality and salvation were the central features of the great religious revival which swept over the Roman Empire about the time of the rise of Christianity. The desire for personal safety in this world and the next moved men. Fear and hope worked together; fear of the terrors awaiting the soul after death, hope of a happy existence in some paradise. {142} That early Christianity owed much of its success to its doctrines of final things cannot be denied. It was a period of astrology, theosophy, mysticism, cults of saviors, eschatologies. Few were able to keep their heads above this tide of oracular mythology and superst.i.tion. What moorings did they have?
None of that tested knowledge of the physical world which we possess, and which keeps numbers of people fairly sane to-day in spite of themselves. When we recall the terror at Salem a few centuries ago, we must admit that these Greeks, and Romans, and Jews, and Syrians did not conduct themselves so badly in the demon-ridden world in which they lived. Yet, while it would be unfair to blame those who embraced the various cults, it would be equally unfair not to give praise to those few enlightened souls who would approve none of these things.
Up to the present, the doctrine of immortality has been an essential part of Christianity. The creeds which have come down to us proclaim the faith that Christ Jesus will appear again to judge the quick and the dead. To the average man, religion is absolutely committed to such a belief. It has gone hand in hand with the idea of retribution and reward until the two have grown together. It is not strange, then, that the suspicion that immortality is not justified by physiological and psychological facts is felt to have a grave bearing upon religion.
To the vast majority, religion without immortality is like _Hamlet_ with Hamlet left out. Remove the faith in a special providence, likewise, and the edifice around which many religious emotions and values have entwined themselves is no more than a ruin.
But the idea of a soul always accompanies the belief {143} in immortality. The experiences which led to the one notion naturally encouraged the other. If the soul can leave the body, it is obviously independent, in large measure, of the latter's fate. Let us glance at some of the experiences whose false interpretation is at the foundation of a belief in an immortal soul inhabiting the body for a little s.p.a.ce.
It is surprising what an influence was exercised by dreams. We have so completely outgrown this uncritical att.i.tude toward them that it takes some effort to realize how natural it was. For the educated man of to-day, dreams are subjective experiences, that is, experiences which do not contain information about what is happening in the external world. In the jargon of psychology, they are centrally aroused ideas playing about some organic stimulus or some repressed wish. But the savage knew nothing about such distinctions. The dead appeared to the living and talked with them. Patroclus stands before Achilles and chides him. Do not the dead, then, have some sort of life? Many psychological motives combined to convince primitive man of at least a shadowy existence after death. But there was another side to the dream-life. The living went on long journeys, doing strange things, while their bodies rested in the tent. Added to these suggestions, so naturally lending themselves to a spiritistic interpretation, were still others. Certain kinds of sickness are explained by means of the idea of possession. Invisible agents are at work in the world. What can a trance be if not the temporary absence of just such an agent?
”Among the Kayans of Borneo, for example, it is the custom for an elderly person learned in such matters to sit beside the corpse, where the soul is {144} supposed to hover for some days after death, and to impart to the latter minute directions for its journey to the land of the dead.” We are in the presence, here, of natural illusions, of hypotheses which inevitably arose. Man's first guesses were mistakes.
The whole history of science drives this fact home.
The various opinions men have built up around the idea of a soul are instructive. How gravely men have written about such hidden things!
Only very slowly have they learned to separate an experience from its interpretation, and to seek a wide range of facts before erecting even an hypothesis. To explain by means of _agents_, visible and invisible, is the plausible method to which man always resorts first. It is only when he becomes more sophisticated that he thinks in terms of _processes_. The following examples of divergent opinion upon the soul, gathered by an able French author, show the vagueness of the idea:
Origen, the Alexandrian theologian: ”The soul is material and has a definite shape.”