The Teleological Argument therefore needs to be supplemented by the Anthropological Argument, or the argument from the mental and moral constitution of man. By itself, it does not prove a Creator. See Calderwood, Moral Philosophy, 26; Ritter, Hist. Anc. Philos., bk. 9, chap. 6; Foundations of our Faith, 38; Murphy, Scientific Bases, 215; Habit and Intelligence, 2:6, and chap. 27. On immanent finality, see Janet, Final Causes, 345–415; Diman, Theistic Argument, 201–203. Since righteousness belongs only to personality, this argument cannot prove righteousness in God. Flint, Theism, 66—“Power and Intelligence alone do not constitute God, though they be infinite. A being may have these, and, if lacking righteousness, may be a devil.” Here again we see the need of the Anthropological Argument to supplement this.
B. Even if this argument could prove personality in the intelligence and will that originated the order of the universe, it could not prove either the unity, the eternity, or the infinity of God; not the unity—for the useful collocations of the universe might be the result of oneness of counsel, instead of oneness of essence, in the contriving intelligence; not the eternity—for a created demiurge might conceivably have designed the universe; not the infinity—since all marks of order and collocation within our observation are simply finite.
Diman asserts (Theistic Argument, 114) that all the phenomena of the universe must be due to the same source—since all alike are subject to the same method of sequence, e.g., gravitation—and that the evidence points us irresistibly to some one explanatory cause. We can regard this assertion only as the utterance of a primitive belief in a first cause, not as the conclusion of logical demonstration, for we know only an infinitesimal part of the universe. From the point of view of the intuition of an Absolute Reason, however, we can cordially assent to the words of F. L. Patton: “When we consider Matthew Arnold's ‘stream of tendency,’ Spencer's ‘unknowable,’ Schopenhauer's ‘world as will,’ and Hartmann's elaborate defence of finality as the product of unconscious intelligence, we may well ask if the theists, with their belief in one personal God, are not in possession of the only hypothesis that can save the language of these writers from the charge of meaningless and idiotic raving” (Journ. Christ. Philos., April, 1883:283–307).
The ancient world, which had only the light of nature, believed in many gods. William James, Will to Believe, 44—“If there be a divine Spirit of the universe, nature, such as we know her, cannot possibly be its ultimate word to man. Either there is no spirit revealed in nature, or else it is inadequately revealed there; and (as all the higher religions have assumed) what we call visible nature, or this world, must be but a veil and surface-show whose full meaning resides in a supplementary unseen, or other world.” Bowne, Theory of Thought and Knowledge, 234—“But is not intelligence itself the mystery of mysteries? … No doubt, intellect is a great mystery. … But there is a choice in mysteries. Some mysteries leave other things clear, and some leave things as dark and impenetrable as ever. The former is the case with the mystery of intelligence. It makes possible the comprehension of everything but itself.”
3. The value of the Teleological Argument is simply this—it proves from certain useful collocations and instances of order which have clearly had a beginning, or in other words, from the present harmony of the universe, that there exists an intelligence and will adequate to its contrivance. But whether this intelligence and will is personal or impersonal, creator or only fashioner, one or many, finite or infinite, eternal or owing its being to another, necessary or free, this argument cannot assure us.
In it, however, we take a step forward. The causative power which we have proved by the Cosmological Argument has now become an intelligent and voluntary power.
John Stuart Mill, Three Essays on Theism, 168–170—“In the present state of our knowledge, the adaptations in nature afford a large balance of probability in favor of causation by intelligence.” Ladd holds that, whenever one being acts upon its like, each being undergoes changes of state that belong to its own nature under the circumstances. Action of one body on another never consists in transferring the state of one being to another. Therefore there is no more difficulty in beings that are unlike acting on one another than in beings that are like. We do not transfer ideas to other minds—we only rouse them to develop their own ideas. So force also is positively not transferable. Bowne, Philos. of Theism, 49, begins with “the conception of things interacting according to law and forming an intelligible system. Such a system cannot be construed by thought without the assumption of a unitary being which is the fundamental reality of the system. 53—No passage of influences or forces will avail to bridge the gulf, so long as the things are regarded as independent. 56—The system itself cannot explain this interaction, for the system is only the members of it. There must be some being in them which is their reality, and of which they are in some sense phases or manifestations. In other words, there must be a basal monism.”All this is substantially the view of Lotze, of whose philosophy see criticism in Stählin's Kant, Lotze, and Ritschl, 116–156, and especially 123. Falckenberg, Gesch. der neueren Philosophie, 454, shows as to Lotze's view that his assumption of monistic unity and continuity does not explain how change of condition in one thing should, as equalization or compensation, follow change of condition in another thing. Lotze explains this actuality by the ethical conception of an all-embracing Person. On the whole argument, see Bib. Sac., 1849:634; Murphy, Sci. Bases, 216; Flint, Theism, 131–210; Pfleiderer, Die Religion, 1:164–174; W. R. Benedict, on Theism and Evolution, in Andover Rev., 1886:307–350, 607–622.
III. The Anthropological Argument, or Argument from Man's Mental and Moral Nature.
This is an argument from the mental and moral condition of man to the existence of an Author, Lawgiver, and End. It is sometimes called the Moral Argument.
The common title “Moral Argument” is much too narrow, for it seems to take account only of conscience in man, whereas the argument which this title so imperfectly designates really proceeds from man's intellectual and emotional, as well as from his moral, nature. In choosing the designation we have adopted, we desire, moreover, to rescue from the mere physicist the term “Anthropology”—a term to which he has attached altogether too limited a signification, and which, in his use of it, implies that man is a mere animal—to him Anthropology is simply the study of la bête humaine. Anthropology means, not simply the science of man's physical nature, origin, and relations, but also the science which treats of his higher spiritual being. Hence, in Theology, the term Anthropology designates that division of the subject which treats of man's spiritual nature and endowments, his original state and his subsequent apostasy. As an argument, therefore, from man's mental and moral nature, we can with perfect propriety call the present argument the Anthropological Argument.
The argument is a complex one, and may be divided into three parts.
1. Man's intellectual and moral nature must have had for its author an intellectual and moral Being. The elements of the proof are as follows:—(a) Man, as an intellectual and moral being, has had a beginning upon the planet. (b) Material and unconscious forces do not afford a sufficient cause for man's reason, conscience, and free will. (c) Man, as an effect, can be referred only to a cause possessing self-consciousness and a moral nature, in other words, personality.
This argument is is part an application to man of the principles of both the Cosmological and the Teleological Arguments. Flint, Theism, 74—“Although causality does not involve