Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith. Robert Patterson
a Creator, or did it make itself? There are persons who say it did, and who declare that the Bible sets out with a lie when it says, that "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." Whereas, say they, "We know that matter is eternal, and the world is wholly composed of matter; therefore, the heavens and the earth are eternal, never had a beginning nor a Creator."
But, however fully the atheist may know that matter is eternal, we do not know any such thing, and must be allowed to ask, How do you know? As you are not eternal, we can not take it on your word.
The only reason which anybody ever ventured for this amazing assertion is this, that "all philosophers agree that matter is naturally indestructible by any human power. You may boil water into steam, but it is all there in the steam; or burn coal into gas, ashes, and tar, but it is all in the gas, ashes, and tar; you may change the outward form as much as you please, but you can not destroy the substance of anything. Wherefore, as matter is indestructible, it must be eternal."
Profound reasoning! Here is a brick fresh from the kiln. It will last for a thousand years to come; therefore, it has existed for a thousand years past!
The foundation of the argument is as rotten as the superstructure. It is not agreed among all philosophers that matter is naturally indestructible, for the very satisfactory reason that none of them can tell what matter in its own nature is. All that they can undertake to say is, that they have observed certain properties of matter, and, among these, that "it is indestructible by any operation to which it can be subjected in the ordinary course of circumstances observed at the surface of the globe."[1] The very utmost which any man can assert in this matter is a negative, a want of knowledge, or a want of power. He can say, "Human power can not destroy matter;" and, if he pleases, he may reason thence that human power did not create it. But to assert that matter is eternal because man can not destroy it, is as if a child should try to beat the cylinder of a steam engine to pieces, and, failing in the attempt, should say, "I am sure this cylinder existed from eternity, because I am unable to destroy it."
But not only is the assertion of the eternity of matter unproven, and impossible to be proved, it is capable of the most demonstrable refutation, by one of the recent discoveries of science. The principle of the argument is so plain that a child of four years old can understand it. It is simply this, that all substances in heaven and earth are compounded of several elements; but no compound can be eternal.
We say to our would-be philosophers, When you tell us that matter is eternal, how does that account for the formation of this world? What is this matter you speak of? This world consists not of a philosophical abstraction called matter, nor yet of one substance known by that name, but of a great variety of material substances, oxygen, hydrogen, carbon, sulphur, iron, aluminum, and some fifty others already discovered.[2] Now, which of these is the eterna-matter you speak of? Is it iron, or sulphur, or clay, or oxygen? If it is any one of them, where did the others come from? Did a mass of iron, becoming discontented with its gravity, suddenly metamorphose itself into a cloud of gas, or into a pail of water? Or are they all eternal? Have we fifty-seven eternal beings? Are they all eternal in their present combinations? or is it only the single elements that are eternal? You see that your hypothesis—that matter is eternal—gives me no light on the formation of this world, which is not a shapeless mass of a philosophical abstraction called matter, but a regular and beautiful building, composed of a great variety of matters. Was it so from eternity? No man who was ever in a quarry, or a gravel pit, will say so, much less one who has the least smattering of chemistry or geology. Do you assert the eternity of the fifty-seven single substances, either separate or combined in some other way than we now find them in the rocks, and rivers, and atmosphere of the earth? Then how came they to get together at all, and particularly how did they put themselves in their present shapes?
Each of them is a piece of matter of which inertia is a primary and inseparable property. Matter of itself can not begin to move, or assume a quiescent state after being put in motion.
Will you tell us that the fifty-seven primary elements danced about till the air, and sea, and earth, somehow jumbled themselves together into the present shape of this glorious and beautiful world, with all its regularity of day and night, and summer and winter, with all its beautiful flowers and lofty trees, with all its variety of birds, and beasts, and fishes? To bring the matter down to the level of the intellect of the most stupid pantheist, tell us in plain English, Did the paving stones make themselves? For the paving stones are made out of a dozen different chemical constituents, and each one is built up more ingeniously than the house you live in. Now, did the paving stones make themselves?
No conviction of the human mind is more certain than the belief that every combination of matter proves the existence of a combiner, that every house has had a builder, and that every machine has had a maker. No matter how simple the combination, if it be only two laths fastened together by a nail, or two bricks cemented with mortar, or the sole of an old pegged boot, all the atheists in the world could not convince you that those two laths, or those two bricks, or those two bits of leather existed in such a combination from all eternity. If any wise philosopher tried to persuade you that for anything you could tell they might have been always so, you would reply, "No, sir! You can't cram such stuff down my throat. Even a child's common sense shows him that those two laths were not always so nailed together; that those two bricks were not always so placed, one on the top of the other; and that those two pieces of old sole leather were not always pegged together in the sole of a boot." There is no conviction more irresistible than our belief that no compound can possibly be eternal.
But the universe is the greatest of all compounds. Everything in it is compound. Chemists speak of simple substances, or elements of matter, and it is well enough to separate the elements of things in our thoughts, for the sake of distinct consideration, and to speak of the properties of pure oxygen, or of pure hydrogen, or of pure carbon, or of pure gold, or of pure iron, or of pure silver. But then we should always remember that there is nothing pure in the world, that there is no such thing in nature as any substance consisting only of a single element, pure and uncombined with others. Just as your gold eagle is not pure gold, but alloyed with copper, everything in nature is alloyed. Everything in the heavens above, and in the earth beneath, and in the waters under the earth, is compound. The air you breathe, simple as it seems, is composed of three gases, and is besides full of what Huxley calls "a stirabout" of millions of seeds of animalculæ and motes of dust visible in the sunbeam. That hydrant water you are about to swallow is a rich aquarium full of all manner of monsters, which the oxy-hydrogen microscope will exhibit to your terrified gaze, devouring each other alive. Should you get rid of them by evaporating your water, your chemist will tell you that still your pure water must be a compound of oxygen and hydrogen. There is no help for it.
Many years ago some astronomers fancied they had found clouds, or nebulæ, of gas, quite simple and uncompounded with anything else, a great many millions of miles away in the sky. They were so very far away that they thought nobody would ever be able to fly so far to bottle up a specimen of that gas and bring it back here to earth and analyze it, to find out whether it was pure and simple, or compound. So they felt quite safe in affirming that there was the genuine, simple, homogeneous gas, in the nebulæ, with which Almighty God had nothing whatever to do, but which had first made itself and then had condensed into our present world. But unfortunately for this brilliant discovery the spectroscope opened windows into the nebulæ, and showed very plainly that they were on fire; and fire is a compound; it can not burn without fuel and something to support the combustion; so that settled the alleged simplicity of the nebulæ. It is now demonstrated, therefore, that every known substance existing in nature is a compound, and therefore can not be eternal. And the whole is not greater than the sum of its parts. No number of finite existences can be eternal. The universe, then, can not be eternal.
Suppose, however, that, for the sake of argument, we should grant our atheistic world-builder his materials, away off beyond the rings of Saturn, or the orbit of Uranus (since he seems to like to have his quarries a good way off from his building), would he be any nearer the completion of his world-making?