The Origin of the World According to Revelation and Science Part 1

The Origin of the World According to Revelation and Science.

by John William Dawson.

PREFACE.

The scope of this work is in the main identical with that of "Archaia," published in 1860; but in attempting to prepare a new edition brought up to the present condition of the subject, it was found that so much required to be rewritten as to make it essentially a new book, and it was therefore decided to give it a new name, more clearly indicating its character and purpose.

The intention of this new publication is to throw as much light as possible on the present condition of the much-agitated questions respecting the origin of the world and its inhabitants. To students of the Bible it will afford the means of determining the precise import of the biblical references to creation, and of their relation to what is known from other sources. To geologists and biologists it is intended to give some intelligible explanation of the connection of the doctrines of revealed religion with the results of their respective sciences.

A still higher end to which the author would gladly contribute is that of aiding thoughtful men perplexed with the apparent antagonisms of science and religion, and of indicating how they may best harmonize our great and growing knowledge of nature with our old and cherished beliefs as to the origin and destiny of man.

In aiming at these results, it has not been thought necessary to a.s.sume a controversial att.i.tude or to stand on the defensive, either with regard to religion or science, but rather to attempt to arrive at broad and comprehensive views which may exhibit those higher harmonies of the spiritual and the natural which they derive from their common Author, and which reach beyond the petty difficulties arising from narrow or imperfect views of either or both. Such an aim is too high to be fully attained, but in so far as it can be reached we may hope to rescue science from a dry and barren infidelity, and religion from mere fruitless sentiment or enfeebling superst.i.tion.

Since the publication of "Archaia," the subject of which it treats has pa.s.sed through several phases, but the author has seen no reason to abandon in the least degree the principles of interpretation on which he then insisted, and he takes a hopeful view as to their ultimate prevalence. It is true that the wide acceptance of hypotheses of "evolution" has led to a more decided antagonism than heretofore between some of the utterances of scientific men and the religious ideas of mankind, and to a contemptuous disregard of revealed religion in the more shallow literature of the time; but, on the other hand, a barrier of scientific fact and induction has been slowly rising to stem this current of crude and rash hypothesis. Of this nature are the great discoveries as to the physical const.i.tution and probable origin of the universe, the doctrine of the correlation and conservation of forces, the new estimates of the age of the earth, the overthrow of the doctrine of spontaneous generation, the high bodily and mental type of the earliest known men, the light which philology has thrown on the unity of language, our growing knowledge of the uniformity of the constructive and other habits of primitive men, and of the condition of man in the earlier historic time, the greater completeness of our conceptions as to the phenomena of life and their relation to organizable matters--all these and many other aspects of the later progress of science must tend to bring it back into greater harmony with revealed religion.

On the other side, there has been a growing disposition on the part of theologians to inquire as to the actual views of nature presented in the Bible, and to separate these from those accretions of obsolete philosophy which have been too often confounded with them. With respect to the first chapter of Genesis more especially, there has been a decided growth in the acceptance of those principles for which I contended in 1860. In ill.u.s.tration of this I may refer to the fact that in 1862 it was precisely on these principles that Dr. McCaul conducted his able defence of the Mosaic record of creation in the "Aids to Faith," which may almost be regarded as an authoritative expression of the views of orthodox Christians in opposition to those of the once notorious "Essays and Reviews." Equally significant is the adoption of this method of interpretation by Dr. Tayler Lewis in his masterly "Special Introduction" to the first chapter of Genesis, in the American edition of Lange's Commentary, edited by Dr. Philip Schaff; and the manifest approval with which the lucid statement of the relations of Geology and the Bible by Dr. Arnold Guyot, was received by the great gathering of divines at the Convention of the Evangelical Alliance in New York, in 1873, bears testimony to the same fact. The author has also had the honor of being invited to ill.u.s.trate this mode of reconciliation to the students of two of the most important theological colleges in America, in lectures afterwards published and widely circulated.

The time is perhaps nearer than we antic.i.p.ate when Natural Science and Theology will unite in the conviction that the first chapter of Genesis "stands alone among the traditions of mankind in the wonderful simplicity and grandeur of its words," and that "the meaning of these words is always a meaning ahead of science--not because it antic.i.p.ates the results of science, but because it is independent of them, and runs as it were round the outer margin of all possible discovery."[1]

In the Appendix the reader will find several short essays on special points collateral to the general subject, and important in the solution of some of its difficulties, but which could not be conveniently included in the text. More especially I would refer to the summaries given in the Appendix of the present state of our knowledge as to the origin of life, of species, and of man--topics not discussed in much detail in the body of the work, both because of the wide fields of controversy to which they lead, and because I have treated of them somewhat fully in a previous work, "The Story of the Earth and Man," in which the detailed history of life as disclosed by science was the main subject in hand.

J. W. D.

THE ORIGIN OF THE WORLD.

CHAPTER I.

THE MYSTERY OF ORIGINS AND ITS SOLUTIONS.

"The things that are seen are temporal."--PAUL.

Have we or can we have any certain solution of those two great questions--Whence are all things? and Whither do all things tend? No thinking man is content to live merely in a transitory present, ever emerging out of darkness and ever returning thither again, without knowing any thing of the origin and issue of the world and its inhabitants. Yet it would seem that to-day men are as much in uncertainty on these subjects as at any previous time. It even appears as if all our added knowledge would only, for a time at least, deprive us of the solutions to which we trusted, and give no others in their room. Christians have been accustomed to rest on the cosmogony and prophecy of the Bible; but we are now frankly told on all hands that these are valueless, and that even ministers of religion more or less "sacrifice their sincerity" in making them the basis of their teachings. On the other hand, we are informed that nothing can be discerned in the universe beyond matter and force, and that it is by a purely material and spontaneous evolution that all things exist. But when we ask as to the origin of matter and force, and the laws which regulate them--as to the end to which their movement is tending, as to the manner in which they have evolved the myriad forms of life and the human intelligence itself--the only answer is that these are "insoluble mysteries."

Are we, then, to fall back on the real or imagined revelations and traditions of the past, and to endeavor to find in them some foothold of a.s.surance; or are we to wait till further progress in science may have cleared up some of the present mysteries? Whatever may be said of the former alternative, all honest students of science will unite with me in the admission that the latter is hopeless. We need not seek to belittle the magnificent triumphs of modern science. They have been real and stupendous. But it is of their very nature to conduct us to ultimate facts and laws of which science can give no explanation; and the further we push our inquiries the more insuperably does the wall of mystery rise before us. It is true we can furnish the materials for philosophical speculations which may be built on scientific facts and principles; but these are in their nature uncertain, and must constantly change as knowledge advances. They can not solve for us the great practical problems of our origin and destiny.

In these circ.u.mstances no apology is needed for a thorough and careful inquiry into those foundations of religious belief which rest on the idea of a revelation of origins and destinies made to man from without, and on which we may build the superstructure of a rational religion, giving guidance for the present and hope for the future. In the following pages I propose to enter upon so much of this subject as relates to the origin and earliest history of the world, in so far as these are treated of in the Bible and in the traditions of the more ancient nations; and this with reference to the present standpoint of science in relation to these questions.

To discuss such questions at all, certain preliminary admissions are necessary. These are: (1) The reality of an unseen universe, spiritual rather than material in its nature. (2) The existence of a personal G.o.d, or of a great Universal Will. (3) The possibility of communication taking place between G.o.d and man. I do not propose to attempt any proof of these positions, but it may be well to explain what they mean.

(1) That the great machine for the dissipation of energy, in which we exist, and which we call the universe, must have a correlative and complement in the unseen, is a conclusion now forced upon physicists by the necessities of the doctrine of the conservation of force. In short, it seems that, unless we admit this conclusion, we can not believe in the possible existence of the material universe itself, and must sink into absolute nihilism. This doctrine is expressed by the apostle Paul in the statement, "The things that are seen are temporal, but the things that are not seen are eternal," and it has been ably discussed by the authors of the remarkable work, "The Unseen Universe." That this unseen world is spiritual--that is, not subject to the same material laws with the visible universe--is also a fair deduction from physical science, as well as a doctrine of Scripture. I prefer the term spiritual to supernatural, because the first is the term used in the Bible, and because the latter has had a.s.sociated with it ideas of the miraculous and abnormal, not implied at all in the idea of the spiritual, which in some important senses may be more natural than the material.

(2) The idea of a personal G.o.d implies not merely the existence of an unknown absolute power, as Herbert Spencer seems to hold, or of "an Eternal, not ourselves, that makes for righteousness," as Matthew Arnold puts it, but of a Being of whom we can affirm will, intelligence, feeling, self-consciousness, not certainly precisely as they occur in us, but in a higher and more perfect form, of which our own consciousness furnishes the type, or "image and shadow," as Moses long ago phrased it. On the one hand, it is true that we can not fully comprehend such a personal G.o.d, because not limited by the conditions which limit us. On the other hand, it is clear that our intellect, as const.i.tuted, can furnish us with no ultimate explanation of the universe except in the action of such a primary personal will. In the Bible the absolute personality of G.o.d is expressed by the t.i.tle "I am." His intimate relation to us is indicated by the expression, "In him we live, and move, and have our being." His all-pervading essence is stated as "the fullness of him that filleth all in all." His relative personality is shadowed forth by the attribution to him of love, anger, and other human feelings and sentiments, and by presenting him in the endearing relation of the universal Father.

(3) With reference to the possibility of communication between G.o.d and man, it may truly be said that such communication is not only possible, but infinitely probable. G.o.d is not only near to us, but we are in him, and, independently of the testimony of revelation, it has been felt by all cla.s.ses of men, from the rudest and most primitive savages up to our great English philosopher, John Stuart Mill, that if there is a G.o.d, he can not be excluded from communion with his intelligent creatures, either directly or through the medium of ministering spirits.[2] Farther, placed as man is in the midst of complex and to him inexplicable phenomena, involved in a conflict of good and evil, happiness and misery, to which the wisest and the greatest minds have found no issue, subject to be degraded by low pa.s.sions and tempted to great extremes of evil, and himself weak, impulsive, and vacillating, there seems the most urgent need for divine communication. It may be said that these are conflicts and problems which G.o.d has left man to decide and solve for himself by his own reason. But when we consider how slow this process is, and how imperfect even now, after the experience of ages, we seem to need some intervention that shall stimulate the human mind, and impel it forward with greater rapidity. Farther, it would appear only right that an intelligent and accountable being, placed in a world like this, should have some explanation of his origin and destiny given him at first, and that, if he should perchance go astray, a helping hand should be extended to him.

Practically it is an historical fact that all the great impulses given to humanity have been by men claiming divine guidance or inspiration, and professing to bring light and truth from the unseen world. It would be too much to say that all these prophets and reformers have been inspired of heaven; but scarcely too much to say that they have either received a message of G.o.d, or have been permitted to transmit to our world messages for weal or woe from powers without in subordination to him. Farther, we shall have reason in the sequel to see that in far back prehistoric times there must have been impulses given to mankind, and revelations made to them, as potent as those which have acted in later historic periods. In Holy Scripture the Word of G.o.d is represented as "enlightening every man;[3]" and with reference to our present subject we are told that "by faith we understand that the ages of the world were const.i.tuted by the Word of G.o.d, so that the visible things were not made of those which appear."[4] In other words, that the will of G.o.d has been active and operative as the sole cause throughout all ages of the world's creation and history, and that the visible universe is not a mere product of its own phenomena. We may call this faith, if we please, an intuition or instinct, a G.o.d-given gift, or a product of our own thought acting on evidence afforded by the outer world; but in any case it seems to be the sole possible solution of the mystery of origins.

These points being premised, we are in a position to inquire as to the teaching of our own Holy Scriptures, and in this inquiry we can easily take along with them all other revelations, pretended or true, that deal with our subject.

Max Muller, in his lectures on the Science of Religion, rejects the ordinary division into natural and revealed, and adopts a threefold grouping, corresponding to the great division of languages into Turanian, Aryan, and Semitic. With some modification and explanation, this cla.s.sification will serve well our present purpose. As to natural and revealed religions, if we regard our own as revealed, we must admit an element of revelation in all others as well. According to the Hebrew Scriptures revelation began in Eden, and was continued more or less in all successive ages up to the apostolic times. Consequently the earlier revelations of the antediluvian and postdiluvian times must have been the common property of all races, and must have been a.s.sociated with whatever elements of natural religion they had. When, therefore, we call our religion distinctively a revealed one, we must admit that traces of the same revelation may be found in all others.

On the other hand, when we characterize our religion as Hebrew or Semitic, we must bear in mind that in its earlier stages it was not so limited; but that, if as old as it professes to be, it must include a substratum common to it with the old religions of the Turanians and Aryans. Neglect of these very simple considerations often leads to great confusion in the minds both of Christians and unbelievers, as to the relation of Christianity to heathenism, and especially to the older and more primitive forms of heathenism.

The Turanian stock, of which the Mongolian peoples of Northern Asia may be taken as the type, includes also the American races, and the oldest historical populations of Western Asia and of Europe; and they are the peoples who, in their physical features and their art tendencies, most nearly resemble the prehistoric men of the caves and gravels. They largely consist of the populations which the Bible affiliates with Ham. They are remarkable for their permanent and stationary forms of civilization or barbarism, and for the languages least developed in grammatical structure. These people had and still have traditions of the creation and early history of man similar to those in the earlier Biblical books; but the connection of their religions with that of the Bible breaks off from the time of Abraham; and the earlier portions of revelation which they possessed became disintegrated into a polytheism which takes very largely the form of animism, or of attributing some special spiritual indwelling to all natural objects, and also that of wors.h.i.+p of ancestors and heroes. The portion of primitive theological belief to which they have clung most persistently is the doctrine of the immortality of the soul, which in all their religious beliefs occupies a prominent place, and has always been connected with special attention to rites of sepulture and monuments to the dead. Their version of the revelation of creation appears most distinctly in the sacred book of the Quiches of Central America, and in the creation myths of the Mexicans, Iroquois, Algonquins, and other North American tribes; and it has been handed down to us through the Semitic a.s.syrians from the ancient Chaldaeo-turanian population of the valley of the Euphrates.

The Aryan races have been remarkable for their changeable and versatile character. Their religious ideas in the most primitive times appear to have been not dissimilar from those of the Turanians; and the Indians, Persians, Greeks, Scandinavians, and Celts have all gone some length in developing and modifying these, apparently by purely human imaginative and intellectual materials. But all these developments were defective in a moral point of view, and had lost the stability and rational basis which proceed from monotheism. Hence they have given way before other and higher faiths; and at this day the more advanced nations of the Aryan, or in Scriptural language the j.a.phetic stock, have adopted the Semitic faith; and, as Noah long ago predicted, "dwell in the tents of Shem." No indigenous account of the genesis of things remains among the Aryan races, with the exception of that in the Avesta, and in some ancient Hindoo hymns, and these are merely variations of the Turanian or Semitic cosmogony. G.o.d has given to the Aryans no special revelations of his will, and they would have been left to grope for themselves along the paths of science and philosophy, but for the advent among them of the prophets of "Jehovah the G.o.d of Shem."

It is to the Semitic race that G.o.d has been most liberal in his gift of inspiration. Gathering up and treasuring the old common inheritance of religion, and eliminating from it the accretions of superst.i.tion, the children of Abraham at one time stood alone, or almost alone, as adherents of a belief in one G.o.d the Creator. Their theology was added to from age to age by a succession of prophets, all working in one line of development, till it culminated in the appearance of Jesus Christ, and then proceeded to expand itself over the other races. Among them it has undergone two remarkable phases of retrograde development--the one in Mohammedanism, which carries it back to a resemblance to its own earlier patriarchal stage, the other in Roman and Greek ecclesiasticism, which have taken it back to the Levitical system, along with a strong color of paganism. Still its original doc.u.ments survive, and retain their hold on large portions of the more enlightened Aryan nations, while through their means these doc.u.ments have entered on a new career of conquest among the Semites and Turanians. They are, however, it must be admitted, among the Aryan races of Europe, growing in a somewhat uncongenial soil; partly because of the materialistic organization of these races, and partly because of the abundant remains of heathenism which still linger among them; and it is possible that they may not realize their full triumphs over humanity till the Semitic races return to the position of Abraham, and erect again in the world the standard of monotheistic faith, under the auspices of a purified Christianity.

It follows from this hasty survey that it is the Semitic solution of the question of origins, as contained in the Hebrew Scriptures, that mainly concerns us; and in the first place we must consider the foundation and historical development of this solution, as many misconceptions prevail on these points. We may discuss these subjects under the heads of the Abrahamic Genesis and the Mosaic Genesis, and may in a subsequent chapter consider the results of these in the Genesis of the later Scripture writers.

THE ABRAHAMIC GENESIS.

It has been a favorite theory with some learned men that the earlier parts of the book of Genesis existed as ancient doc.u.ments even in the time of Moses, and were incorporated by him in his work, and attempts have been made to separate, on various grounds, the older from the newer portions. Until lately, however, these attempts have been altogether conjectural and dest.i.tute of any positive basis of archaeological fact. A new and interesting aspect has been given to them by the recent readings of the inscriptions on clay tablets found at Nineveh, and to which especial attention has been given by the late Mr. G. Smith, of the Archaeological Department of the British Museum.

a.s.surbanipal, king of a.s.syria, one of the kings known to the Greeks by the name of Sardanapalus, reigned at Nineveh about B.C. 673. He was a grandson of the Biblical Sennacherib, and son of Esarhaddon, and it seems that he had inherited from his fathers a library of Chaldean and a.s.syrian literature, written not on perishable paper or parchment, but on tablets of clay, and containing much ancient lore of the nations inhabiting the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates. a.s.surbanipal, living when the a.s.syrian empire had attained to the acme of its greatness, had leisure to become a greater patron of learning than any preceding king. His scribes ransacked the record chambers of the oldest temples in the world; and Babel, Erech, Accad, and Ur had to yield up their treasures of history and theology to diligent copyists, who transcribed them in beautiful arrow-head characters on new clay tablets, and deposited them in the library of the great king. It would appear that, at the same time, these doc.u.ments were edited, archaic forms of expression translated, and lacunae caused by decay or fracture repaired. They were also inscribed with legends stating the sources whence they had been derived.

The empire of a.s.syria went down in blood, and its palaces were destroyed with fire, but the imperishable clay tablets which had formed the treasure of their libraries remained, more or less broken it is true, among the ruins. Exhumed by Layard and Smith, they are now among the collections of the British Museum, and their decipherment is throwing a new and strange light on the cosmogony and religions of the early East. Though the date of the writing of these tablets is comparatively modern, being about the time of the later kings of Judah, the original records from which they were transcribed profess to have been very ancient--some of them about 1600 years before the time of a.s.surbanipal, so that they go back to a time anterior to that of the early Hebrew patriarchs. Their genuineness has been endorsed, in one case, by the discovery by Mr. Loftus, in the city of Senkereh, of an apparent original, bearing date about 1600 years before Christ, and other inscriptions of equal or greater antiquity have been found in the ruins of Ur, on the Euphrates. Nor does there seem any reason to doubt that the scribes of a.s.surbanipal faithfully transcribed the oldest records extant in their time. Their care and diligence are also shown by the fact that where different versions of these records existed in different cities, they have made copies of these variant ma.n.u.scripts, instead of attempting to reduce them to one text. The subjects treated of in the Nineveh tablets are very various, but those that concern our present purpose are the doc.u.ments relating to the creation, the fall of man, and the deluge, of which considerable portions have been recovered, and have been translated by Mr. Smith.

These doc.u.ments carry us back to a time when the Turanian religions had not yet been separated from the Semitic. The early Chaldeans, termed Cus.h.i.+tes in the Bible, and who under Nimrod seem to have established the first empire in that region, are now known to have been Turanian; and among them apparently arose at a very early period a literature and a mythology. The Chaldeans were politically subjugated by the Semitic a.s.syrians, but they retained their religious predominance; and until a comparatively late period existed as a learned and priestly caste. To these primitive _Chasdim_ were undoubtedly due the creation legends collected by the scribes of a.s.surbanipal. They were obtained in the old Chaldean cities, in the temples under the guardians.h.i.+p of Chaldean priests; and their date carries them back to a time anterior to the a.s.syrian conquest, and in which Chaldean kings still reigned. Here, then, we have an important connecting link between the cosmogonies of the Turanian and Semitic races; and leaving out of sight for the present the legends of the deluge and other matters allied to it, we may inquire as to the nature and contents of the a.s.syrian and Chaldean record of creation.

The a.s.syrian Genesis is similar in order and arrangement to that in our own Bible, and gives the same general order of the creative work.

Its days, however, of creation, as indeed there is good internal evidence to prove those of Moses also are, seem to be periods or ages.

It treats of the creation of G.o.ds, as well as of the universe, and thus introduces a polytheistic system; and it seems to recognize, like the Avesta, a primitive principle of evil, presiding over chaos, and subsequently introducing evil among men. These points may be ill.u.s.trated by an extract from Mr. Smith's translation. It relates to the earlier part of the work:

"When above were not raised the heavens, And below on the earth a plant had not grown up The deep also had not broken up its boundaries Chaos (or water) Tiamat (the sea or abyss) was the producing mother of them all These waters at the beginning were ordained But a tree had not grown a flower had not unfolded When the G.o.ds had not sprung up any one of them A plant had not grown and order did not exist Were made also the great G.o.ds The G.o.ds Lahma and Lahamu they caused to come * * *

And they grew * * *

The G.o.ds Sar and Kisar were made A course of days and a long time pa.s.sed The G.o.d Anu * * *

The G.o.ds Sar and * * *"

Here the first existences are Chaos (Mummu, or confusion) and Tiamat, which is the Thalatth of Berosus, representing the sea or primitive abyss, but also recognized as a female deity or first mother. Then we have Lahma and Lahamu, which represent power or motion in nature, and are the equivalents of the Divine Spirit moving on the face of the waters in our Genesis. Next we have the production of Sar or Iloar and Kisar, representing the expanse or firmament. Sar is supposed to be the G.o.d a.s.sur of the a.s.syrians, a great weather G.o.d, and after whom their nation and its founder were named. The next process is the creation of the heaven and the earth, represented by Anu and Anatu.

Anu was always one of the greater G.o.ds, and was identified with the higher or starry heavens. In succeeding tablets to this we find Bel or Belus introduced, as the agent in the creation of animals and of men; and he is the true Demiurgus or Mediator of the a.s.syrian system. Next we have the introduction of Hea or Saturn, who is the equivalent of the Biblical Adam, and of Ishtar, mother of men, who is the Isba or Eve of Genesis. The rest of this legend evidently relates to deified men, among whom are Merodach, Nebo, and other heroes.

The first remark that we may make on this a.s.syrian Genesis is that, while it resembles generally the Mosaic account of creation, it also strongly resembles the old cosmogonies of the Egyptians and Persians, and those of the widely scattered Turanians of Northern Asia and of America. As an extreme ill.u.s.tration of this, and to obviate the necessity of digression at this point of our inquiry, I introduce here some extracts from the Popul Vuh, or sacred book of the Quiche Indians of Central America, an undoubted product of prehistoric religion in the western continent.[5]

"And the heaven was formed, and all the signs thereof set in their angle and alignment, and its boundaries fixed toward the four winds by the Creator and Former, and Mother and Father of life and existence--he by whom all move and breathe, the Father and Cherisher of the peace of nations and of the civilization of his people--he whose wisdom has projected the excellence of all that is on the earth or in the lakes or in the sea."

"Behold the first word and the first discourse. There was yet no man nor any animal, * * * nothing was but the firmament. The face of the earth had not yet appeared over the peaceful sea, and all the s.p.a.ce of heaven * * * nothing but immobility and silence in the night."

"Alone also the Creator, the Former, the Dominator, the Feathered Serpent--those that engender, those that give being--they are upon the water like a growing light. They are enveloped in green and blue, and therefore their name is Guc.u.matz."[6]

"Lo now how the heavens exist, how exists also the Heart of Heaven; such is the name of G.o.d. It is thus that he is called. And they spake, they consulted together and meditated; they mingled their words and their opinions."