Remember "Laburnum Grove."

Dr. T. Kagawa.

On the evening of June 5, a body of students listened to Dr. Kagawa, the Japanese Christian. They listened to an attempt by a man of encyclopedic knowledge to shatter belief in materialism and to prove the existence of God from the order and beauty of the universe. This letter is intended to serve as a channel for the opening of a discussion of Dr. Kagawa's argument. It will be confined mainly to order and beauty as proof of the existence of God.

In the course of an address of bewildering scope, Dr. Kagawa explained how electrons and protons are grouped to form atoms, how atoms are grouped to form the molecules of chemical substances, and how in turn these are grouped to form star and planets . . . and all with mathematical exactitude! He insisted that, confronted with this, we must recognise and admit a principle of intergration and consistency. Is this not a truism. We all admit that there is some quality of basic reality which explains the successive grouping of particles. But to call it God or to suggest that it must be intellient is worse than arbitrary.

It should be scarcely necessary to expose the fallacy of the claim that the many laws of Nature imply a Divine superintendent. A scientific law is a statement of the fact that things behave consistently along a certain line. Instead of this uniformity implying an intelligence, it very largely does the contrary. We would rather suspect the interference of intelligence, if matter varied its behaviour in identically the same circumstances. "The old phrase that 'God has impressed his laws on the universe' is now just about as sensible as to say that instinct tells a bird how to build a nest." (J. McCabe.)

With the rapid advance of modern science we have been given a purely naturalistic explanation of creation and evolution, which makes guidance entirely superfluous, and until that time that guidance is shown to have been and to be necessary, we have no rational ground for considering it. In other words, unless it can be shown that the evolutionary agencies and process needed guidance, the principle is superfluous. And you can only prove that they needed guidance by showing that they were unable of themselves to produce a certain result. No such proof can be alleged in any department of biology. As the distinguished American biologist, Prof. Jennings, said in the Terry Lectures at Harvard, "Science sees no guidance but the opposite in evolution."

The next point of conflict is the existence of evil Dr. Kagawa mentioned design and beauty in geological structure, but he forgot to explain why such a disastrous happening as the Quetta earthquake, causing death and suffering to over 50,000 people, sprang from it. Difficulties of this nature have even reduced the theist to melancholy silence. There is just as much design in the germ of Asiatic cholera or consumption as in the delicate form of a Radiolarian. Whatever made the one made the other. The Book of Nature is a book inscribed with blood and tears. Throughout history the law of murder, destruction and suffering has ben the law of growth. If there was guidance at all, this ghastly method of evolution was deliberately chosen. Whatever in Nature produced the antelope produced the tiger; whatever gave the child its beauty devised the deadly germs of diphtheria and plague and the horrible suffering which they are created to cause. Most of us prefer not to ascribe intelligence to this form of creative power.

There remains still another important consideration. Suppose that we class evil, pain, and so on as hopeless mysteries; suppose that we discover some instance of beauty and order which would seem inexplicable on purely natural principles, and that, as a solution, we entertain the existence of Divine intelligence. It will be realised that the only ground for postulating the existence of this Divine intelligence or consciousness is that it, and it alone, explains certain aspects of reality. Otherwise it is clearly superfluous. But how much does the theory really explain? How can spirit act on matter? Scientific methods mean a movement from the obscure towards the known: here the religious "explanation" leads us into a more bewildering maze of mystery. How do material particles carry out the will or design of a conscious being? How are atoms directed and guided to realise a design of which they are utterly unconscious? We might as well resign ourselves to the initial mystery as attempt to explain it by other mysteries.

Mael.