Is Scientific Materialism Compatible with Dogmatic Theology?
The Inaugural Address delivered before the Literary and Philosophical Society of Liverpool at the opening of the Sixty-seventh Session, 1st of October, 1877. By John Drysdale, President of the Society. Liverpool: Adam Holden, 1877.
We might ask Dr Drysdale another question as an answer to his: Is dogmatic materialism compatible with scientific theology ? Bat questions like these do not help inquiry. If materialism be false, as many of onr best thinkers believe, there is no use discussing the question whether it is compatible with theology or not. Dr Drysdale is unfortunately between two stools. He is a believer in Christianity and, at the same time, in materialism, and he struggles hard to reconcile them. He is, in fact, attempting an impossibility.
The following passage will show his strong materialistic tendency:?
” If we imagine a piece of protoplasm removed from all external influence, it would not be living, but possess the pecu- liar properties summed up as ‘ vitality,’ in the static state, as it were; and it is only when some interaction takes place with the surrounding medium that life can be said to exist. The environment is often vaguely spoken of as conditions, and the protoplasm as undergoing its changes spontaneously by its inherent power, although these conditions may be required for it to work with. Such is not the case. The environment and the protoplasm are two factors in the process equally essential. It is not everything in the environment which can interact with the living matter; on the contrary, a vast variety of things are indifferent. But what does act may be divided into three categories? Conditions, Pabulum, and Stimuli. The conditions are those, such as heat and moisture, which are essential for the mobility and play of the affinities, but do not take part in the process; the pabulum is that from which the living matter is renewed, and force evolved; and the stimuli afford the initiatory impulse, without which the foregoing agents and conditions would be ineffectual. In the inorganic world the stimulus is not necessarily represented, although its action is capable of illustration from what takes place on the application of a spark to gunpowder. The stimuli in organised bodies are either force or matter?thus physical or chemical? the latter differing from pabulum only in the degree of mole- cular disturbances they produce, compared with the quantity of matter they furnish for assimilation. Thus, in all stimulation, either force must be consumed and transferred, or matter of the environment must enter for the time into the living matter.” In strange contrast with these extraordinary materialistic notions we will now quote some eloquent remarks of a very different character in which Dr Drysdale gives expression to higher and nobler aspirations :?
” If some .are willing to accept negative atheism as their creed here, and feel no repugnance to the prospect of annihila- tion hereafter, others are far diffex*ently constituted. To them the idea of a universe without plan and moral purpose, and the sight of a being like man, with such transcendent mental capacities, weltering on from age to age in sorrow and suffer- ing, with nothing at the end but a meaningless extinction, is perfectly overwhelming, and they are irresistibly impelled to escape from it. Even the bloody and pedantic Robespierre was fain to fall back upon his ridiculous and theatrical rehabi- litation of the Eire Supreme, when he saw speculative atheism translated from the easy chair of the philosopher to the anarchy of an ignorant and starving populace. And J. S. Mill recoiled in the latter part of his life from the outcome of his own teaching; and to this is no doubt owing his revulsion into Deism. It was probably owing to still existing early prejudices against Christianity that a man of such profound intellect and candour of heart should have been compelled to be satisfied? though, had he lived, we may imagine it would not have been for long?with a God mutilated in power, and with the con- clusion in respect of ourselves, ‘ there is no assurance whatever of a life after death, on the grounds of natural religion.’ ” Dr Drysdale, like most evolutionists, frequently confuses his arguments by speaking of evolution as a fixed law. He calls it a ” great discovery.” How can a theory which has not been proved by inductive reasoning be termed a discovery ?
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