Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 61:244 (Oct 1904)
Article: Balfour On Design In Nature
Author: Anonymous

BSac 61:244 (Oct 1904) p. 780

Balfour On Design In Nature

It seems worth while to put into more permanent form the concluding paragraphs of the remarkable address of Right Honorable Arthur J. Balfour, Prime Minister of England, given in Cambridge, England, at the recent meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, of which be was president. After giving a summary of the new theory of matter, winch seems to do away with the ultimate atom, and resolve everything into diverse manifestations of force, of which electricity is the fullest type, so that matter is now “not merely explained, but explained away,” he closes with the following most powerful and convincing statement of the impossibility of maintaining scientific conceptions without involving the doctrine of design and of an intelligent Creator: —

“Now the point to which I desire to call attention is not to be sought in the great divergence between matter as thus conceived by the physicist and matter as the ordinary man supposes himself to know it, between matter as it is perceived and matter as it really is, but to the fact that the first of these two quite inconsistent views is wholly based on the second.

“This is surely something of a paradox. We claim to found all scientific opinions on experience; and the experience on which we found our theories of the physical universe is our sense-perception of that universe. That is experience and in this region of belief there is no other. Yet the conclusions which thus profess to be entirely founded upon experience are to all appearance fundamentally opposed to it; our knowledge of reality is based upon illusion, and the very conceptions we use in describing it to others, or in thinking of it ourselves, are abstracted from anthropomorphic fancies, which science forbids us to believe and nature compels us to employ.

“We here touch the fringe of a series of problems with which inductive logic ought to deal, but which that most unsatisfactory branch of philosophy has systematically ignored. This is no fault of men of science. They are occupied in the task of making discoveries, not in that of analyzing the fundamental presuppositions which the very possibility of making discoveries implies. Neither is it the fault of transcen-

BSac 61:244 (Oct 1904) p. 781

dental metaphysicians. Their speculations flourish on a different level of thought; their interest in a philosophy of nature is lukewarm; and howsoever the questions in which they are chiefly concerned be answered, it is by no means certain that the answers will leave the humbler difficulties at which I have hinted either nearer to or further from solution. But though men of science and idealists stand acquitted, the same can hardly be said of empirical...