Theologiae Christianae Principia Mathematica. Auctore Johanne Craig.[268]
London, 1699, 4to.
This is a celebrated speculation, and has been reprinted abroad, and
seriously answered. Craig is known in the early history of fluxions, and
was a good mathematician. {130} He professed to calculate, on the
hypothesis that the suspicions against historical evidence increase with
the square of the time, how long it will take the evidence of Christianity
to die out. He finds, by formulae, that had it been oral only, it would have
gone out A.D. 800; but, by aid of the written evidence, it will last till
A.D. 3150. At this period he places the second coming, which is deferred
until the extinction of evidence, on the authority of the question "When
the Son of Man cometh, shall he find faith on the earth?" It is a pity that
Craig's theory was not adopted: it would have spared a hundred treatises on
the end of the world, founded on no better knowledge than his, and many of
them falsified by the event. The most recent (October, 1863) is a tract in
proof of Louis Napoleon being Antichrist, the Beast, the eighth Head, etc.;
and the present dispensation is to close soon after 1864.
In order rightly to judge Craig, who added speculations on the variations
of pleasure and pain treated as functions of time, it is necessary to
remember that in Newton's day the idea of force, as a quantity to be
measured, and as following a law of variation, was very new: so likewise
was that of probability, or belief, as an object of measurement.[269] The
success of the _Principia_ of Newton put it into many heads to speculate
about applying notions of quantity to other things not then brought under
measurement. Craig imitated Newton's title, and evidently thought he was
making a step in advance: but it is not every one who can plough with
Samson's heifer.
It is likely enough that Craig took a hint, directly or indirectly, from
Mohammedan writers, who make a reply to the argument that the Koran has not
the evidence derived {131} from miracles. They say that, as evidence of
Christian miracles is daily becoming weaker, a time must at last arrive
when it will fail of affording assurance that they were miracles at all:
whence would arise the necessity of another prophet and other miracles.
Lee,[270] the Cambridge Orientalist, from whom the above words are taken,
almost certainly never heard of Craig or his theory.