Miracle and natural law—Belief in miracles of savages (fetichism), of semi-civilized (idolatry), of civilized (theism), and of educated people (dualism)—Religious belief in miracles—Apostles' Creed—Article relating to creation—Article relating to redemption—Article relating to immortality—Philosophic belief in miracles—Academic thinkers and Free-thinkers—Dualism of Plato and Kant—Belief in miracles in the nineteenth century, in modern metaphysics, theology, and politics.

In ordinary parlance the word "miracle" means a number of different things. We say a phenomenon is miraculous or wonderful[5] when we cannot explain it and trace its causes. But we say a natural object or a work of art is wonderful when it is unusually beautiful and imposing—when it passes the ordinary limits of our experience. In this work I do not take the word in this relative sense, but in the absolute sense in which a phenomenon is said to transcend the limits of natural law and lie beyond the range of rational explanation. In this sense it means the same as "supernatural" or "transcendental." We can know natural phenomena by our reason and bring them within our cognizance. The miraculous can only be accepted on faith.

The belief in supernatural miracles is in contradiction to pure reason, which lays the foundations of all science. Kant, who won so great a vogue for the term "pure reason," understood by this originally "reason as independent of experience." The phrase was used in a narrower sense subsequently to express independence of dogma and prejudice, as the base of pure and unprejudiced science. In this sense we oppose pure reason to superstition.

I have dealt in the sixteenth chapter of the Riddle with the important question of the relations of knowledge and faith. But I must return to the subject here, as what I said has given rise to a good deal of misunderstanding and criticism. I by no means claimed, as my opponents allege, to "know everything," or to have solved every problem. In fact, I said repeatedly that there are narrow limits to our knowledge, and always will be. I had also expressly stated that the irresistible impulse to learn in the intelligent man, or reason's constant demand to know causes, presses us to fill up the gaps in our knowledge by faith. But I had at the same time pointed out the contrast between scientific (natural) and religious (supernatural) faith. The one leads us to form hypotheses and theories; the other ends in myths and superstition. Scientific faith fills the gaps in our knowledge of natural law with temporary hypotheses; but mystic religious faith contradicts natural law, and transcends its limits in the form of a belief in miracles.

The great triumph of the progress of science in the nineteenth century, its theoretical value in the formation of a rational philosophy of life, and its practical value on the various sides of modern civilization, consist, above all, in the absolute recognition of fixed natural laws. That relation of things to each other, which we call causation, makes it possible for us to understand and explain facts. We feel that our thirst for a knowledge of the causes of things is contented when science points out the "sufficient reason" of them. In the whole province of inorganic cosmology natural law is now generally recognized to be all-powerful; in astronomy, geology, physics, and chemistry all phenomena are reduced to fixed laws, and in the long-run to the all-embracing law of substance, the great law of the conservation of matter and force (Riddle, chapter xii.).

It is otherwise in biology, or the organic section of cosmology. Here we still find miracles set up in opposition to the law of substance, and the transgression of natural laws by supernatural forces. The belief in miracles of this kind, which pure reason calls superstition, is still very wide-spread—much more prevalent than is usually thought. For my part, I hold that superstition and unreason are the worst enemies of the human race, while science and reason are its greatest friends. Hence it is our duty and task to attack the belief in miracles wherever we find it, in the interest of the race. We have to prove that the reign of natural law extends over the whole world of phenomena as far as we can reach it. A general survey of the history of faith on the one hand and of science on the other clearly shows that the advance of the latter has always been accompanied by an increasing knowledge of fixed natural laws and the shrinking of superstition into an ever-lessening area. To-day we convince ourselves of this by an impartial examination of mental culture at the various stages of civilization. For this purpose I take the four chief stages of mental development which Fritz Schultze has given in his Physiology of Uncivilized Races, and Alexander Sutherland in his work, On the Origin and Growth of the Moral Instinct: 1, savages; 2, barbarians; 3, civilized races; 4, educated races (cf. chapter i.).

The mental life of savages rises little above that of the higher mammals, especially the apes, with which they are genealogically connected. Their whole interest is restricted to the physiological functions of nutrition and reproduction, or the satisfaction of hunger and thirst in the crudest animal fashion. Without fixed habitation, constantly struggling for existence, they live on the raw produce of nature—fruits, the roots of wild plants, and the animals they fish in the water or catch on land. Their intelligence moves within the narrowest bounds, and one can no more (or no less) speak of their reason than of that of the more intelligent animals. Of art and science there is no question. Their impulse to discover causes is satisfied with the simplest association of phenomena which have a merely external connection, but no intimate relation to each other. Thus arises their fetichism, that irrational trust in fetiches which Fritz Schultze has traced to four distinct causes: their false estimate of the value of an object, their anthropomorphic conception of nature, the imperfect association of their ideas, and the strength of their emotions, especially hope and fear. Any favorite object, a stone or a bone, may work miracles as a fetich and exercise all kinds of good or evil influence, and is therefore honored, feared, and worshipped. At first the worship was paid to the invisible spirit that dwelt in the particular object; but it was often transferred afterwards to the dead object itself. Among the different savage races the belief in fetiches presents a number of stages, corresponding to the beginnings of reason. The lowest stage is found in the lowest races, such as the Veddahs of Ceylon, the Andaman Islanders, Bushmen, and Akkas (of New Guinea). A somewhat higher stage is met in the middle races (Australian negroes, Tasmanians, Hottentots, and Tierra del Fuegians); and a still higher intellectual development is shown by the next group (most of the Indians of North and South America, the aboriginal inhabitants of India, etc.). Modern comparative ethnography and evolution and prehistoric and anthropological research have shown us that our own ancestors, ten thousand and more years ago, were (like the prehistoric ancestors of all races of men) savages, and that their earliest belief in miracles was a crude fetichism.

By barbarians we understand the races that are found between savage and civilized peoples. They show the first beginnings of civilization, and are superior to savages chiefly in the possession of agriculture and the keeping of cattle. They make a provident use of the productive forces of organic nature, artificially produce large quantities of food, and are thus enabled by the abundance of food to turn their minds to other interests. We find that they have the rudiments of art and science. Their religion does not at first rise much above fetichism, but soon reaches the stage of animism, lifeless objects in nature being credited with souls. Worship is no longer paid to favorite dead objects (stones, bones, etc.), but generally to living things, trees and animals, and especially to images of gods which have the form of animals or men, and are believed to possess souls. As demons or spirits, these have a great influence on the fortunes of men. At first this soul is conceived to be purely material; it disappears at the death of the body and lives apart. As the breathing and the beat of the pulse and heart cease when a man dies, the seat of the soul is thought to be the lungs, heart, or some other part of the body. The idea of the immortality of the soul takes on innumerable forms among them, like the belief in the miracles which are worked by the gods, demons, spirits, etc. Evolution again points out a long gradation of forms of faith, if we compare the lower, middle, and higher races.

Civilized races are distinguished from barbaric by the formation of states with an extensive division of labor. The social organism is not only larger and more powerful, but is capable of a greater variety of achievements, the functions of the various states and classes of workers being more highly differentiated and mutually complementary (like the cells and tissues in the higher animal body of the metazoa). Nutrition is easier and more luxurious. Art and science are well developed. A great advance is seen in regard to religion, the numerous gods being generally conceived as manlike spirits, and finally subordinated to a chief god. The belief in miracles flourishes greatly in poetry; in philosophy it is more and more restricted. In the end, the working of miracles is limited monotheistically to one god, or to his priests and other men to whom he communicates the power.

Modern civilization in the narrower sense, as a contrast to the older civilization, opens, in my opinion, at the beginning of the sixteenth century. At that time took place some of the greatest achievements of human thought among civilized peoples, and these broke the chains of tradition and gave a fresh impetus to progress. Men's own mental outlook was widened by the system of Copernicus and the Reformation freed them from the yoke of the papacy. Shortly before, the discovery of the New World and the circumnavigation of the globe had convinced men of the rotundity of the earth; geography, natural history, medicine, and other sciences gained inspiration and independence; printing and engraving provided an important means of spreading the new knowledge. This fresh impetus was chiefly of service to philosophy, which now more and more rejected the dictation of the Church and superstition; though it was far from casting off the fetters altogether. This was not generally possible until the nineteenth century, when empirical science assumed an enormous importance, and in the ensuing period of speculation the physical conception of the world gained more and more on the metaphysical. Pure knowledge, thus grounded on science, entered into sharper conflict than ever with religious faith. If, as in the preceding cases, we distinguish three stages in the development of modern civilization, we recognize the progressive liberation from superstition by scientific knowledge.

When we compare the higher forms of religion of civilized nations we find the same emotional cravings and thought-processes constantly recurring, and the belief in miracles developing in much the same way. The three founders of the great monotheistic Mediterranean religion—Moses, Christ, and Mohammed—were equally regarded as wonder-working prophets, having direct intercourse with God in virtue of their special gifts, and transmitting his commands to men in the shape of laws. The extraordinary authority they enjoy, which has given so much prestige to the religions they founded, is grounded for ordinary people on their miraculous powers—the healing of the sick, the raising of the dead, the expulsion of devils, and so on. If we examine the miracles of Christ as they are given in the gospels, they run counter to the laws of nature and rational explanation just in the same way as the similar miracles of Buddha and Brahma in Hindoo mythology, or of Mohammed in the Koran. The same must be said of the belief in the miracle of the bread and wine in the Lord's supper, and the like. The Creed which was probably drawn up by the leaders of the Christian communities of the second century, and received its final and present form in the Church of South Gaul in the fourth and fifth centuries, has been obligatory for Christians for fifteen hundred years, and recognized by both Church and State as compulsory. This Apostles' Creed was also recognized in Luther's catechism to be fundamental, and is taught in all Protestant and Roman Catholic schools (though not in the Greek Catholic) as the foundation of religious instruction. This extraordinary prestige of the Apostles' Creed, and its great influence on the education of the young, no less than its glaring inconsistency with rational knowledge, compel us to devote a few pages to a critical examination of its three articles.

The first article of the Creed deals with creation, and runs: "I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth." The modern science of evolution has shown that there never was any such creation, but that the universe is eternal and the law of substance all-ruling. God himself is anthropomorphically conceived as an "Almighty Creator" and the Father of man; heaven (in the sense of the geocentric system) is imagined as a great blue vault spanning the earth. The notion of this "personal God" as an intelligent, immaterial being, creating the material world out of nothing, is wholly irrational and meaningless. That Luther accepted this childish and scientifically worthless idea is clear from his commentary on the first article—"What is that?"

The second article of the Creed deals with the dogma of salvation in the following words: "I believe in Jesus Christ, his only son, our Lord, who was conceived of the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried, descended into hell, on the third day rose again from the dead, ascended into heaven, sitteth at the right hand of God, the Father Almighty, whence he will come to judge the living and the dead." As these dogmas of the second article contain the chief points of the redemption theory, and are still treasured by millions of educated people, it is necessary to point out their flagrant opposition to pure reason. The chief evil of such creeds is that children, who are yet incapable of reflecting, are forced to learn them by heart. They then remain unchallenged as revealed truths.

The myth of the conception and birth of Jesus Christ is mere fiction, and is at the same stage of superstition as a hundred other myths of other religions. Of the three persons who are mysteriously blended in the triune God, the son Christ is supposed to be begotten by both Father and Holy Ghost, parthenogenetically through the Virgin Mary. I have dealt with the physiology of parthenogenesis in the seventeenth chapter of the Riddle. The curious adventures of Christ after his death, the descent into hell, resurrection, and ascension, are also fantastic myths due to the narrow geocentric ideas of an uneducated people. Troelslund has admirably explained the strong influence they have had in his interesting book, The Idea of Heaven and of the World.[6] The idea of the "last judgment," with Christ sitting on the right hand of the Father, as many famous mediÆval pictures represent (notably Michael Angelo's in the Sistine Chapel at the Vatican), is another outcome of a thoroughly childish and anthropomorphic attitude.

It is remarkable that this second article of the Creed says nothing about "redemption," which forms its heading [in Germany]. Luther has dealt with it in his commentary. Christ is believed to have suffered a painful death, like many thousand other martyrs, for his conviction of the truth of his faith and teaching—which reminds one of the more than a hundred thousand men who were done to death by the Inquisition and in the religious wars of the Middle Ages; but not one of the millions of ministers who preach on it every Sunday seems to have shown a rational causal connection of this death with the alleged redemption from sin and death. The whole of this story of redemption has sprung from the primitive, obscure, ethical ideas of uneducated races, especially the crude belief in the propitiatory power of human sacrifice. It has no practical moral value except for those who believe in personal immortality—a scientifically untenable dogma. Whoever builds on this empty promise of a better life beyond may soothe himself with this hope, and reconcile himself to the thousand ills and defects of this world. But the man who studies this life as it really is will not find that the belief in redemption has brought any real improvement. Want and misery and sin are as prevalent as ever; indeed, our modern civilization has, in many respects, increased them.

The third and last article of the Apostles' Creed runs: "I believe in the Holy Ghost, the holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and life everlasting." In the curious commentary that Luther made on this article in his catechism, he said that "man cannot believe of his own reason in Jesus Christ"—which is very true—but the Holy Ghost must lead him thereto with his grace; but how the third person of the Trinity effects this enlightenment and sanctification he did not explain. What is meant by the "communion of saints" and the "holy Catholic Church" must be gathered in the light of their history—especially the history of Romanism. This most powerful and still influential section of the Christian Church, which especially claims the title of Catholic and "the one ark of salvation," is really a most pitiful caricature of pure primitive Christianity. It has, with consummate skill, succeeded in preaching the beneficent teaching of Christ in theory and doing just the opposite in practice; we need only recall the Inquisition, the dark history of the Middle Ages, and the political hierarchy which still dominates so much of civilization.

However, by far the most important clause in the third article is the final expression of belief in "the resurrection of the body and life everlasting." That this greatest "wonder of life" was originally conceived in a purely material form is evident from thousands of pictures in which famous painters have realistically depicted the resurrection of the dead, the aËrial flight of the happy souls of the blessed, and the torments of the damned in hell. It is thus conceived still by the majority of believers who take eternal life to be an "enlarged and improved edition" of life here below. This is equally true of Christian and Mohammedan pictures and of the athanatist ideas that prevailed in other religions long before Christ was born, even of the first rudiments of the belief in primitive races. As long as the geocentric theory prevailed, and the heavens were thought to be a sort of blue glass bell, illumined by thousands of little stars and the lamp of the sun, arching like a vault over the flat earth, and the fires of hell burned in the cellars below, this barbaric notion of a resurrection of the body and a last judgment could easily be maintained. But its roots were destroyed when Copernicus refuted the geocentric theory in 1545; and athanatism became quite untenable when Darwin shattered the dogma of anthropocentricism. Not only the crude older materialistic idea of eternal life, but also the refined new spiritualistic version, has been rendered untenable by the progress of science in the nineteenth century. I have shown this in the eleventh chapter of the Riddle, which closes with the words: "If we take a comprehensive glance at all that modern anthropology, psychology, and cosmology teach with regard to athanatism, we are forced to this definite conclusion. The belief in the immortality of the human soul is in hopeless contradiction with the most solid empirical truths of modern science."[7]

The great influence which has been exercised on civilized nations by the Christian beliefs, supported by the practical exigencies of the state, for thousands of years, was chiefly seen in the crude superstition of the mass of the people. Confessions of faith became as much a matter of routine as the latest fashion in dress or the latest custom, etc. But even the majority of the philosophers were more or less subordinated to the influence. It is true that a few great thinkers freed themselves by the use of pure reason at an early date from the prevalent superstition, and framed systems apart from tradition and the priests. But most philosophers could not rise to the altitude of these brave Free-thinkers; they remained "school-men" in the literal sense, dependent on the dictation of authority, the traditions of the school, and the dogmas of the Church. Philosophy was the "handmaid" of theology and ecclesiasticism. If we examine the history of philosophy in this light, we find in it a struggle for twenty-five hundred years between two great tendencies—the dualism of the majority (with theological and mystic leanings) and the monism of the minority (with rationalistic and naturalistic disposition).

Especially notable are those great Free-thinkers of classic antiquity who taught a monistic view of life in the sixth century before Christ—the Ionic natural philosophers, Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes; and a little later, Heraclitus, Empedocles, and Democritus. They made the first thorough attempt to explain the world on rational principles, independently of all mythological tradition and theological dogmas. However, these remarkable efforts to found a primitive monism, which found so finished an expression in the De rerum natura of the great poet-philosopher, Lucretius Carus (98-54 B.C.), were shortly thrust out by the spread—through Plato's curious dualism—of the belief in the immortality of the soul and the transcendental world of ideas.

The Eleatics, Parmenides and Zeno, had foreshadowed in the fifth century the division of philosophy into two branches; but Plato and his pupil Aristotle (in the fourth century B.C.) succeeded in gaining general acceptance for this dualism and antithesis of physics and metaphysics. Physics devoted itself on the ground of experience to the study of the phenomena of things, leaving their real essences (or noumena) that lay behind the phenomena to metaphysics. These inner essences are transcendental and inaccessible to empirical research; they form the metaphysical world of eternal ideas, which is independent of the real world, and has its highest unity in God, as the Absolute. The soul, an eternal idea that dwells for a time in the passing human body, is immortal. This consistent dualism of Plato's system, with its sharp antithesis of this world and the next, of body and soul, of world and God, is its chief characteristic. It became all the more influential when Plato's pupil Aristotle blended it with his empirical metaphysics, based on ample scientific experience, and pointed out the idea in the entelechy, or purposively acting principle, of every being; and especially when Christianity (three hundred years afterwards) found in this dualism a welcome philosophic support of its own transcendental tendency.