ON NATURAL THEOLOGY.

BY

THOMAS CHALMERS, D.D. & LL.D.

Professor of Theology in the University of Edinburgh,

and Corresponding Member of the Royal Institute of France.

In Two Volumes

VOLUME I.

New York: Robert Carter & Bros.

1853.

This electronic edition prepared by Dr. David C. Bossard
from original documents in the library holdings of Dartmouth College.

April, 2006.

Copyright © 2006 by David C. Bossard.

BOOK I

PRELIMINARY VIEWS.

>Moral Philosophy, Natural Philosophy, Baconian Philosophy, Ethics,

[024] The objects of Natural Philosophy are the facts or data of the science. The knowledge of these is only to be obtained by observation.

DR. CLARKE'S A PRIORI ARGUMENT ON THE BEING OF A GOD.

[113] We hold it with Paley greatly more judicious, instead of groping for the evidence of a Divinity among the transcendental generalities of time, and space, and matter, and spirit, ... we hold it more judicious simply to open our eyes on the actual and peopled world around us -- or to explore the wondous economy of our own spirits, and try if we can read... the traces of the forth-goings of a creative mind anterior to, or at least distinct from matter, and which both arranged it in its present order and continues to overrule its processes.

MR. HUME'S OBJECTION TO THE A POSTERIORI ARGUMENT, GROUNDED ON THE ASSERTION THAT THE WORLD IS A SINGULAR EFFECT.

>Our expectation of the constancy of nature in time, uniformity of nature.

[121] There seems to exist in the spirit of man, not an underived, but an oboriginal faith, in the uniformity of nature's sequences. ... The child who elicited a noise which it likes from the collision of its spoon with the table would, in the first instance, expect the same result fom a like collision with any material surface spread out before it.... Here the effect of experience would be to correct its first strong and unbridled anticipations. ...

The office of experience is not to strengthen our faith in the uniformity of nature's sequences, but to ascertain what the sequences actually are. The effect of the experience is not to give the faith, but to the faith to add knowledge. ... The great object of repetition in experiments is not to strengthen our confidence in the constancy of nature's sequences -- but to ascertain what be the real and precise terms of each sequence. ... This predisposition to count on the uniformity of nature is an original law of the mind, and is not the fruit of our observation  of that uniformity.

> [127ff] The atheistical argument of David Hume.

[168] The question to be resolved is -- not whether the matter of the world, but whether the present order of the world had a commencement?

PROOFS FOR THE BEING OF A GOD IN THE DISPOSITIONS OF MATTER.

[229] We hold the week of the first chapter of Genesis to have been literally a week of miracles.

[255] We have long regarded the contest between the cause of revelation on the one hand, and the infidelity of the geological schools upon the other, as merely an affair of outposts, which, however terminating, will leave the main strength of the Christian argument unimpaired. ... [W]ithout any invasion even on the literalities of the Mosaic record, the indefinite antiquity of the globe might safely be given up to naturalists, as an arena whether for their sportive fancies or their interminable gladiatorship. On this supposition the details of that operation narrated by Moses, which lasted for six days on the earth's surface, will be regarded as the steps, by which the present economy of terrestrial things was raised, about six thousand years ago, on the basis of an earth then without form and void. ...[T]he earth itself may, before this time, have been the theatre of many lengthened processes -- the dwelling place of older economies that have now gone by; but whereof the vestiges subsist even to the present day, both to the needless alarm of those who befriend the cause of Christianity, and to the unwarrantable triumph of those who have assailed it.

>It is the perfection of his common sense which makes Paley at once so rare and so valuable a specimen of our nature. ... it were curious to have ascertained how he would have stood affected by the perusal of a volume of Kant, or by a volume of lake poetry. We figure that he would have liked Franklin ... he would have abhorred all German sentimentalism ... his appetite for truth and sense would make him intolerang of all which did not engage the discerning faculties of his soul...

BOOK III

PROOFS FOR THE BEING AND CHARACTER OF GOD
IN THE CONSTITUTION OF THE HUMAN MIND.