Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith. Robert Patterson
declared that the conquest of India resolved itself ultimately into a question of bullocks, the prime consideration in the construction of the world, after you have got your materials, is that of transportation. When one beholds the three great stones in the temple of Baalbec, each weighing eleven hundred tons, built into the wall twenty feet high, and a fourth in the quarry, a mile away, nearly ready for removal, he asks, "How did the builders move those immense stones, and raise them to their places?" And when we behold the quarry out of which these stones were taken, and all the other quarries of the world, and all the everlasting mountains, and the whole of this solid earth, and boundless sea, brought, as our theorists affirm, from far beyond the orbit of the most distant planet, we raise the question of transportation, and demand some account of the wagon and team which hauled them to their places. We can not get rid of the necessity for transportation by evaporating the building stones into gas, for a world of gas weighs just as many tons as the world made out of it. Before we can make a world we must have power; but we can never get power out of the world to build itself. The atheists' world is only a great machine. The first law of mechanics is that action and reaction are equal; consequently machinery can never create power. You will never lift yourself by pulling at your boot-straps; much less can a machine lift and carry itself.
It is no matter how big you make the wheels of your machine, as big as the orbits of the planets if you like, still it is only a machine, unless it has a mind in it; and your big machine can no more create power than a little machine as small as a lady's watch. Nor does it make the least difference in respect to making power, of what materials your perpetual motion peddler makes his machine—whether of a skein of silk on a reel in a bottle, or of steel and zinc electro magnets running upon diamond points, or whether he melts up his steel, and zinc, and diamonds into red hot fire mist; it is still only a machine, made of these materials, as destitute of power as the smaller machines made out of it. The atheists' universe is only a big machine, and no machine can create power, no more than a paving stone.
It has been, however, proposed to manufacture power by the law of gravitation, according to which all bodies attract each other, directly in proportion to their mass, and inversely as the square of their distances. This law appears to prevail as far as our observation extends through space; and our world builders affirm that it must have operated eternally, and that not only were the separate parts of our earth thus drawn together, but that all the orbs of heaven were caused to revolve under its influence.
Suppose, however, we grant that matter was eternal, and the force of gravitation eternally operating upon it, would that sufficiently account for the building up of even our own little planetary system? By no means.
The unresisted force of gravitation would, in far less than an eternity, draw all things together toward the center of gravity of the universe. We should not have separate stars, and suns, and planets, and moons, revolving in orderly orbits, but one vast mass of matter, in which all motion had long since ceased. There must be some power of resistance to gravitation, and nicely balanced against it, a centrifugal force—no matter whether you call it heat, light, or electricity, or by any other name—from which balance of power the movements of the universe are regulated. But here again we arrive at the same conclusion from the balance of power to which we were before driven by the combination of matter—regulated power proclaims a regulator, a governor. Power belongeth unto God.
In world-building we need not only a quarry of materials, and power for transportation, but a head to plan their arrangement. For, as ten thousand loads of brick and stone dumped down higgledy piggledy will not build a house, neither will ten thousand millions of materials poured into a chaos make a world like this earth, arranged in order and beauty. It is grossly absurd to imagine that the inanimate materials of the earth arranged themselves in their present orderly structure.
Absurd as it seems to every man of common sense, there are persons claiming to be philosophers who not only assert that they did, but will tell you how they did it. One class of them think they have found it out by supposing every thing in the universe reduced to very fine powder, consisting of very small grains, which they call atoms; or, if that is not fine enough, into gas, of which it is supposed the particles are too fine to be perceived; and then by different arrangements of these atoms, according to the laws of attraction and electricity, the various elements of the world were made, and arranged in its present form.
Suppose we grant this gassy supposition, that the world millions of ages ago existed as a cloud of atoms, does that bring us any nearer the object of getting rid of a Creator than before? The atoms must be material, if a material world is to be made from them; and so they must be extended; each one of them must have length, breadth and thickness. The atheist, then, has only multiplied his difficulties a million times, by pounding up the world into atoms, which are only little bits of the paving stones he intends to make out of them. Each bit of the paving stone, no matter how small you break it, remains just as incapable of making itself, or moving itself, as was the whole stone composed of all these bits. So we are landed back again at the sublime question, Did the paving stones make themselves, and move themselves?
Others will tell you that millions of years ago the world existed as a vast cloud of fire mist, which, after a long time, cooled down into granite, and the granite, by dint of earthquakes, got broken up on the surface, and washed with rain into clay and soil, whence plants sprang up of their own accord, and the plants gradually grew into animals of various kinds, and some of the animals grew into monkeys, and finally the monkeys into men. The fire mist they stoutly affirm to have existed from eternity. They do not allege that they remember that (and yet as they themselves are, as they say, composed body and soul of this eternal fire mist, they ought to remember), but only that there are certain comets which occasionally come within fifty or sixty millions of miles of this earth, which they suppose may be composed of the fire mist which they suppose this world is made of. A solid basis, truly, on which to build a world! A cloud in the sky, fifty million of miles away, may possibly be fire mist, may possibly cool down and condense into a solid globe; therefore, this fire mist is eternal, and had no need of a Creator; and our world, and all other worlds, may possibly have been like it; therefore, they also were never created by Almighty God. Such is the atheist's ground of faith. The thinnest vapor or the merest supposition will suffice to risk his eternal salvation upon; provided only it contradicts the Bible and gets rid of God. We can not avoid asking with as much gravity as we can command, Where did the mist come from? Did the mist make itself? Where did the fire come from? Did it kindle of its own accord? Who put the fire and mist together? Was it red hot enough from all eternity to melt granite? Then why is it any cooler now? How could an eternal red heat cool down? If it existed as a red hot fire mist from eternity, until our atheist began to observe it beginning to cool, why should it ever begin to cool at all, and why begin to cool just then? Fill it as full of electricity, magnetism and odyle as you please; do these afford any reason for its very extraordinary conduct? The utmost they do is to show you how such a change took place, but they neither tell you where the original matter came from, nor why its form was changed. Change is an effect, and every effect requires a cause. There could be no cause outside of the fire mist; for they say there was nothing else in the universe. Then the cause must be in the mist itself. Had it a mind, and a will, and a perception of propriety? Did the mist become sensible of the lightness of its behavior, and the fire resolve to cool off a little, and both consult together on the propriety of dropping their erratic blazing through infinite space, and resolve to settle down into orderly, well-behaved suns and planets? In the division of the property, what became of the mind? Did it go to the sun, or to the moon, or to the pole star, or to this earth? Or, was it clipped up into little pieces and divided among the stars in proportion to their respective magnitudes; so that the sun may have, say the hundredth part of an idea, and the moon a faint perception of it? Did the fire mist's mind die under this cruel clipping and dissecting process; or is it of the nature of a polypus, each piece alive and growing up to perfection in its own way? Has each of the planets and fixed stars a great "soul of the world" as well as this earth, and are they looking down intelligently and compassionately on the little globe of ours? Had we not better build altars to all the host of heaven and return to the religion of our acorn-fed ancestors, who burned their children alive, in honor of the sun, on Sun-days?
An aqueous solution of this difficulty