The Creation of God - Jacob Hartmann (readict TXT) 📗

The beginning of intellectual development consists of observant experience. By frequent and repeated observation man acquired a familiarity with the subjects of that process—a clearer and better understanding of them.

Thus, the Chaldean shepherds, while minding their flocks of sheep and cattle, lazily and continuously watched the sky and starry hosts, and by degrees recognized, and acquired a knowledge of, many of the stars, laying the foundation for astronomy. Authorities state that they composed seventy-two volumes on that science, these books dating as far back as 2,540 B.C., treating of the polar star, Venus, Mars, and so on. It is possible that many errors attended their observations; many mistakes may have entered their explanations. That was natural, considering the remoteness of the times and the lack of facilities.

Knowledge and truth never come easily. The former is very hard to acquire, the latter very difficult to discover.

Every truth, every new idea, has to battle against old established notions. If the new idea is persisted in, which is ordinarily the case, a struggle must ensue. The old idea resists, refuses to yield, no matter how false, ridiculous, or pernicious it may be. Yield, however, it must, and does in the course of time. Truth must win in the long run, though it has to fight its way through depths of ignorance, prejudice, and superstition, sustained by hate, bigotry, terrorism, and persecution.

As century after century passed in the Dark Ages, apostles of science and truth appeared, here and there, now and then, calm, dignified, patient, persistent and persevering, untiring, self-denying, men of superior intellect, unswayed and undismayed by existing authorities. These men gave us, though not a complete, a very ample revelation of nature, unfolding its mysteries, explaining its phenomena, making known the truth as far as men had been able to discover up to their time.

Nature with its laws man had to observe carefully in order to learn to unravel its secrets, its workings, its forces. There is no way to reveal them except through the mind of man. There are no means of knowing or discovering the intricacies and subtleties of nature’s hidden and inexhaustible resources but by careful thought, reason, constant study and application. Not a single problem has ever been solved—in fact, one cannot be solved—except by acquired intellectual powers, developed by the refining process of education of the great nervous centers of man.

Many scholars have devoted and still devote their time, their energy, their life, in search of new facts, new truths, concerning the stars, planetary system, and this terrestrial globe we live on especially.

Centuries before Christ’s time, and after, men were engaged in developing the science of Astronomy—Anaximander, Hipparchus, Ptolemy, Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Herschel, and many others. These men were the apostles of truth, the teachers of facts, and some of them were martyrs to science.

The great civilizer, the press of modern times, was recently filled with accounts about the planet Mars, comet, etc., giving all the detailed information obtainable.

Everyone who reads the newspapers learns something about Mars, and ventures to give his opinion, whether it is like the earth—inhabited, has seas or atmosphere, etc. So that, whatever new facts are revealed, new truths announced, the minds of men are made so much richer.

Knowledge, the progress of science, the discoveries of important facts, the improvements of political, social, or civil laws, do not come to us spontaneously, nor do they come to us suddenly in overpowering quantities; it is a process of gradual acquirement, a slow accumulation, to which every generation contributes its quota of observation and experience that makes up the total wealth of aggregate thought, and is handed down from generation to generation, our common inheritance.

This common inheritance is neither all true nor all good. A large proportion that has been handed down to us by the ancients is not true or good, though it is believed to be true and good.

The revelations of absolute truths, of actual facts, are of more recent date—discoveries made within the last few centuries. The spurious, so-called revelations are the works of antiquity, which are not based on truth or fact or knowledge or experience. The mental faculties of pristine men were primitive, and their ideas were as primitive. They lived in an age of infancy; it was all surprise, wonder, astonishment, and miracle.

When Kepler discovered the law that “Planets revolve in ellipses with the sun at one focus,” he worked hard for many days, and after many trials succeeded. He also discovered a second law, which he defines, “A line connecting the center of the earth with the center of the sun passes over equal spaces in equal times;” and his third law, “The squares of the times of revolutions of the planets about the sun are proportioned to the center of their mean distance from the sun.”

No one ever claimed for Kepler, nor has he laid claim himself, that he was inspired by God, or received the idea through any supernatural agency.

The hostile and bitter opposition that Galileo met on the part of the Christian Church is too well known; but the importance of his discoveries, and the truth, remains.

All intelligent persons ought to understand Newton’s law of gravitation. If they understood the full import and significance of that law, they would never believe in the absurd miracles of Moses, Joshua, Elijah, Christ and Company. The law: “Every particle of matter in the universe attracts every other particle of matter with a force directly proportional to its quantity of matter, and decreasing as the square of the distance increases.”

It is most remarkable—that man discovering great truths, concerning which there has never been any dispute, or controversy, or fight; that stand, unaltered and unchanged, forever. Such men have not been inspired by God, Jehovah, Christ, or the Holy Ghost, or anything supernatural. They have accomplished their works by their powers of observation, great mental efforts, skillful explanation and elucidation, accomplished by hard and untiring work.

It is astonishing that, in the presence of so many revealed natural truths, so many ascertained scientific facts, and numerous discoveries in this century, which is claimed to be much advanced in civilization, intelligent persons—teachers, preachers, priests, and those laying claim to scholarship—still believe that the visionary figures, the product of distorted imagination or hallucination, of men like Isaiah, Ezekiel, etc., were of supernatural origin.

The incredible stories found in the Bible, the fabulous inventions concocted in the imagination of some person or persons away in Chaldea many thousand years ago, are still taught to be true, and the children in the Sunday-schools are instructed to believe these absurdities.

The undue haste exhibited in the first chapter of Genesis, in creating the earth, etc., is one of those wonderful puzzles to a child’s mind. It is a something that is not easily explained at length to young people without awaking the suspicion of its impossibility, and requires considerable ingenuity to satisfy inquiring minds concerning it. The supernaturalists get over it by a final and complete answer, that admits of no argument—that “With God everything is possible.” That being absolutely untrue, the answer explains nothing, but has a tendency to stupefy the child and hinder its educational advancement, for the reason that such an answer puts a stop to all farther inquiry. This really has been the effect of this pernicious teaching for many centuries.

All the stories, fables, myths, handed down to us from antiquity may be classed in the same category. There are many of them—yes, a perfect wilderness. All are true in part, but false as a whole. Upon close examination we find glimmerings of truth in all of them. The difference lies in the kind, not in the quality. In the biblical story of creation, the writers had evidently observed, and knew, there were an earth, water, stars, and something above the earth which they called heaven, the atmosphere. That was the limit of their knowledge. They knew they existed, and