Moses commences his story by telling us that in the beginning God
created the heaven and the earth.
If this means anything, it means that God produced, caused to exist,
called into being, the heaven and the earth. It will not do to say that
he formed the heaven and the earth of previously existing matter. Moses
conveys, and intended to convey the idea that the matter of which the
heaven and the earth are composed, was created.
It is impossible for me to conceive of something being created from
nothing. Nothing, regarded in the light of a raw material, is a decided
failure. I cannot conceive of matter apart from force. Neither is it
possible to think of force disconnected with matter. You cannot imagine
matter going back to absolute nothing. Neither can you imagine nothing
being changed into something. You may be eternally damned if you do not
say that you can conceive these things, but you cannot conceive them.
Such is the constitution of the human mind that it cannot even think of
a commencement or an end of matter, or force.
If God created the universe, there was a time when he commenced to
create. Back of that commencement there must have been an eternity. In
that eternity what was this God doing? He certainly did not think.
There was nothing to think about. He did not remember. Nothing had ever
happened. What did he do? Can you imagine anything more absurd than an
infinite intelligence in infinite nothing wasting an eternity?
I do not pretend to tell how all these things really are; but I do
insist that a statement that cannot possibly be comprehended by any
human being, and that appears utterly impossible, repugnant to every
fact of experience, and contrary to everything that we really know, must
be rejected by every honest man.
We can conceive of eternity, because we cannot conceive of a cessation
of time. We can conceive of infinite space because we cannot conceive
of so much matter that our imagination will not stand upon the farthest
star, and see infinite space beyond. In other words, we cannot conceive
of a cessation of time; therefore eternity is a necessity of the mind.
Eternity sustains the same relation to time that space does to matter.
In the time of Moses, it was perfectly safe for him to write an account
of the creation of the world. He had simply to put in form the crude
notions of the people. At that time, no other Jew could have written
a better account. Upon that subject he felt at liberty to give his
imagination full play. There was no one who could authoritatively
contradict anything he might say. It was substantially the same story
that had been imprinted in curious characters upon the clay records
of Babylon, the gigantic monuments of Egypt, and the gloomy temples of
India. In those days there was an almost infinite difference between
the educated and ignorant. The people were controlled almost entirely
by signs and wonders. By the lever of fear, priests moved the world. The
sacred records were made and kept, and altered by them. The people could
not read, and looked upon one who could, as almost a god. In our day it
is hard to conceive of the influence of an educated class in a barbarous
age. It was only necessary to produce the "sacred record," and ignorance
fell upon its face. The people were taught that the record was inspired,
and therefore true. They were not taught that it was true, and therefore
inspired.
After all, the real question is not whether the Bible is inspired, but
whether it is true. If it is true, it does not need to be inspired. If
it is true, it makes no difference whether it was written by a man or a
god. The multiplication table is just as useful, just as true as though
God had arranged the figures himself. If the Bible is really true,
the claim of inspiration need not be urged; and if it is not true, its
inspiration can hardly be established. As a matter of fact, the truth
does not need to be inspired. Nothing needs inspiration except a
falsehood or a mistake. Where truth ends, where probability stops,
inspiration begins. A fact never went into partnership with a miracle.
Truth does not need the assistance of miracle. A fact will fit every
other fact in the Universe, because it is the product of all other
facts. A lie will fit nothing except another lie made for the express
purpose of fitting it. After a while the man gets tired of lying, and
then the last lie will not fit the next fact, and then there is an
opportunity to use a miracle. Just at that point, it is necessary to
have a little inspiration.
It seems to me that reason is the highest attribute of man, and that if
there can be any communication from God to man, it must be addressed
to his reason. It does not seem possible that in order to understand a
message from God it is absolutely essential to throw our reason away.
How could God make known his will to any being destitute of reason? How
can any man accept as a revelation from God that which is unreasonable
to him? God cannot make a revelation to another man for me. He must make
it to me, and until he convinces my reason that it is true, I cannot
receive it.
The statement that in the beginning God created the heaven and the
earth, I cannot accept. It is contrary to my reason, and I cannot
believe it. It appears reasonable to me that force has existed from
eternity. Force cannot, as it appears to me, exist apart from matter.
Force, in its nature, is forever active, and without matter it could
not act; and so I think matter must have existed forever. To conceive
of matter without force, or of force without matter, or of a time when
neither existed, or of a being who existed for an eternity without
either, and who out of nothing created both, is to me utterly
impossible. I may be damned on this account, but I cannot help it. In my
judgment, Moses was mistaken.
It will not do to say that Moses merely intended to tell what God did,
in making the heavens and the earth out of matter then in existence.
He distinctly states that in the _beginning_ God created them. If this
account is true, we must believe that God, existing in infinite space
surrounded by eternal nothing, naught and void, created, produced,
called into being, willed into existence this universe of countless
stars.
The next thing we are told by this inspired gentleman is, that God
created light, and proceeded to divide it from the darkness.
Certainly, the person who wrote this believed that darkness was a thing,
an entity, a material that could get mixed and tangled up with light,
and that these entities, light and darkness, had to be separated. In his
imagination he probably saw God throwing pieces and chunks of darkness
on one side, and rays and beams of light on the other. It is hard for a
man who has been born but once to understand these things. For my part,
I cannot understand how light can be separated from darkness. I had
always supposed that darkness was simply the absence of light, and that
under no circumstances could it be necessary to take the darkness away
from the light. It is certain, however, that Moses believed darkness to
be a form of matter, because I find that in another place he speaks of
a darkness that could be felt. They used to have on exhibition at Rome a
bottle of the darkness that overspread Egypt.
You cannot divide light from darkness any more than you can divide heat
from cold. Cold is an absence of heat, and darkness is an absence of
light. I suppose that we have no conception of absolute cold. We know
only degrees of heat. Twenty degrees below zero is just twenty degrees
warmer than forty degrees below zero. Neither cold nor darkness are
entities, and these words express simply either the absolute or partial
absence of heat or light. I cannot conceive how light can be divided
from darkness, but I can conceive how a barbarian several thousand years
ago, writing upon a subject about which he knew nothing, could make a
mistake. The creator of light could not have written in this way. If
such a being exists, he must have known the nature of that "mode of
motion" that paints the earth on every eye, and clothes in garments
seven-hued this universe of worlds.