Lord Kelvin, the God-Fearing

IMPROVEMENT ERA. Vol. XI. APRIL, 1908. No. 6. LORD KELVIN, THE GOD-FEARING. BY JOHN A. WIDTSOE, A. M., PH. D., PRESIDENT AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE OF UTAH. The death of William Thompson, Lord Kelvin, on December 17 last, calls to mind the historical fact that the majority of the truly great minds of the world have been and are filled with simple faith in God and his works. For many years preceding his death, Lord Kelvin was ranked with the world's greatest scientists; many thought him the greatest of all living students of nature. His work penetrated many branches of science. With wonderful care and precision he brought to light new laws of nature, or applied for the benefit of man laws already established. The honors of men came to him in such abundance that they had no further meaning for him. He lived to a ripe old age, whence he could review the developments of his generation and fit them into the history of the world. As a result of his practical work he was wealthy, and had no reason to shape his opinions according to the notions of men upon whom he might be dependent. His life was singularly the ideal life of the searcher for scientific truth . He was an example of. the best type of scientific worker. His life and labors show numerous examples of what men may make of their lives. That he was perfect can not be claimed, but that he was sane and rational can not be doubted, for he never exchanged the well established truths of the universe for picturesque theories of enthusiasts.

402 IMPROVEMENT ERA. It is interesting to recall that Lord Kelvin during his whole life never wavered in his belief in the existence of a God, or a great creative power. Read as an example the following quotation: Is the sun a miraculous body ordered to give out heat and to shine forever? Perhaps the sun was so created. He would be a rash man who would say it was not — all things are possible to Creative Power. But we know also, that Creative Power has created in our minds a wish to investigate and a capacity for investigating; and there is nothing too rash, there is nothing audacious, in questioning human assumptions regarding Creative Power. — On Geological Time, page 45, Popular Lectures and Addresses, by Lord Kelvin, Volume II. There can be no humbler faith than that expressed in the preceding paragraph. Upon another occasion he had the opportunity of stating the same powerful faith in God in an even more forceful manner : But it is impossible to conceive a limit'to the extent of matter in the universe ; and therefore science points rather to an endless progress, through an endless space, of action involving the transformation of potential energy into palpable motion and thence into heat, than to a single finite mechanism, running down like a clock, and stopping for ever. It is also impossible to conceive either the beginning or the continuance of life, without an overruling creative power; and, therefore, no conclusions of dynamical science regarding the future condition of the earth can be held to give dispiriting views as to the destiny of the race of intelligent beings by which it is at present inhabited. — On the Age of the Sun's Heat, Popular Lectures and Addresses, by Lord Kelvin, Volume I, pages 356-357. Not only did Lord Kelvin believe that God lives and rules, but he had no sympathy with the idle notion of the day that life began upon this earth and will disappear with death. He believed in the eternity of life, and that life had come to this earth from other heavenly bodies. True, he did not understand the full philosophy of life's beginnings on this earth, but certainly with all the power at his command as the great scientist of his day, he refuted many of the modern theories which teach the origin of life on this earth without the intervention of an overruling Providence. The following paragraph shows that he believed that the phenomena of life are largely beyond the understanding of man. Great as he was, he was content to acknowledge the finite nature of man's work, as compared with the infinitude of nature :

LORD KELVIN, THE GOD-FEARING. ' 403 The considerations of ideal reversibility, by which Carnot was led to his theory, and the true reversibility of every motion in pure dynamics have no place in the world of life. Even to think of it (aud on the merely dynamical hypothesis of life we can think of it as understandingly as of the origination of life and evolution of living beings without creative power), we must imagine men, with conscious knowledge of the future but with no memory of the past, growing backward and becoming again unborn; and plants growing downwards into the seeds from which they sprang. But the real phenomena of life infinitely transcend human science: and speculation regarding consequences of their imagined reversal is utterly unprofitable. — On the Dissipation of Energy, pages 464 and 465, Popular Lectures and Addresses, by Lord Kelvin, Volume II. Though the preceding paragraph shows that Lord Kelvin did not believe in the origin of life without the assistance of a God, yet he makes himself a great deal clearer in the somewhat long extract which follows. Carefully read, this paragraph will be found to teach that life is eternal; that life on this earth came from other spheres ; that the law of natural selection is imperfect , and does not account for the variety of living things ; that the law of evolution is true only as it conforms to the law of progression; that the whole of nature teaches the existence of a great designer or great governing power; and that finally, the power of free agency encircles our lives : The essence of science, as is well illustrated by astronomy and cosmical physics, consists in inferring antecedent conditions, and anticipating future evolutions, from phenomena which have actually come under observation. In biology the difficulties of successfully acting up to this ideal are prodigious. The earnest naturalists of the present day are, however, not appalled or paralyzed by them, and are struggling boldly and laboriously to pass out of the mere ' 'Natural History stage" of their study, and bring zoology within the range of Natural Philosophy. A very ancient speculation, still clung to by many naturalists (so much so that I have a choice of modern terms to quote in expressing it) supposes that, under meteorological conditions very different from the present, dead matter may have run together or crystallized or fermented into "germs of life," or "organic cells," or "protoplasm." But science brings a vast mass of inductive evidence against this hypothesis of spontaneous generation, as you have heard from my predecessor ir the presidential chair. Careful enough scrutiny has, in every case up to the present day, discovered life as antecedent to life. Dead matter cannot become living without coming under the influence of matter previously alive. This seems to me as sure a teaching of science as the law of gravitation. I utterly repudiate, as opposed to all philosophical uniformitarianism, the assumption of "different meteorological conditions" — that is to say, somewhat different vicissitudes of

404 IMPR 0 VEMENT ERA . temperature, pressure, moisture, gaseous atmosphere — to produce or to permit that to take place by force or motion of dead matter alone, which is a direct contravention of what seems to us biological law. I am prepared for the answer, "Our code of biological law is an expression of our ignorance as well as of our knowledge." And I say yes: search for spontaneous generation out of inorganic materials; let any one not satisfied with the purely negative testimony of which we have now so much against it, throw himself into the inquiry. Such investigations as those of Pasteur, Pouchet, and Bastian, are among the most interesting and momentous in the whole range of natural history, and their results, whether positive or negative, must richly reward the most careful and laborious experimenting. I confess to being deeply impressed by the evidence put before us by Professor Huxley, and I am ready to adept, as an article of scientific faith, true through all space and through all time, that life proceeds from life, and from nothing but life. How, then, did life originate on the earth? Tracing the physical history of the earth backwards, on strict dynamical principles, we are brought to a red-hot melted globe on which no life could exist. Hence, when the earth was first fit for life, there was no living thing on it. There were rocks solid and disintegrated, water, iir all around, warmed and illuminated by a brilliant sun, ready to become a garden. Did grass and trees and flowers spring into existence in all the fulness of ripe beauty, by a fiat of Creative Power? or did vegetation, growing up from seed sown, spread and multiply over the whole earth? Science is bound by the everlasting law of honor, to face fearlessly every problem which can fairly be presented to it. If a probable solution, consistent with the ordinary course of nature, can be found, we must not invoke an abnormal act of creative power. When a lava stream flows down the sides of Vesuvius or Etna it quickly cools and becomes solid; and after a few weeks or years it teems with vegetation and animal life; which, for it, originated by the transport of seed and ova and by the migration of individual living creatures. When a volcanic island springs up from the sea, and after a few years is found clothed with vegetation, we do not hesitate to assume that seed has been wafted to it through the air, or floated to it on rafts. Is it not possible, and if possible, is it not probable, that the beginning of vegetable life on the earth is to be similarly explained? Every year thousands, probably millions, of fragments of solid matter fall upon the earth — whence came these fragments? What is the previous history of any one of them? Was it created in the beginning of time an amorphous mass? This idea is so unacceptable that, tacitly or explicitly, all men discard it. It is often assumed that all, and it is certain that some, meteoric stones are fragments which had been broken off from greater masses and launched free into space. It is as sure that collisions must occur between great masses moving through space as it is that ships, steered without intelligence directed to prevent collision , could not cross and recross the Atlantic for thousands of years with immunity from collision. When two great masses come into collision in space it is certain that a large piece of each is melted; but it seems also quite certain that in many cases a large quantity of debris must be shot forth in all directions, much of which may have experienced

LORD KELVIN, THE GOD-FEARING. 405 no greater violence than individual pieces of rock experienced in a land-slip or in blasting by gunpowder. Should the time when this earth comes into collision with another body, comparable in dimensions to itself, be when it is still clothed as at present with vegetation, many great and small fragments carrying seed and living plants and animals would undoubtedly be scattered through space. Hence, and because we all confidently believe that there are at present, and have been from time immemorial, many worlds of life besides our own, we must regard it as probable in the highest degree that there are countless seed- bearing meteoric stones moving about through space. If at the present instant no life existed upon this earth, one such stone falling upon it might, by what we blindly call natural causes, lead to its becoming covered with vegetation. I am fully conscious of the many scientific objections which may be urged against this hypothesis, but I believe them to be all answerable. I have already taxed your patience too severely to allow me to think of discussing any of them on the present occasion. The hypothesis that (some) life (has actually) originated from the ruins of another world may seem wild and visionary; all I maintain is that it is not unscientific, (and cannot rightly be said to be improbable). From the earth stocked with such vegetation as it could receive meteorically, to the earth teeming with all the endless variety of plants and animals which now inhabit it, the step is prodigious; yet, according to the doctrine of continuity, most ably laid before the Association by a predecessor in this chair (Mr. Grove), all creatures now living on earth have proceeded by orderly evolution from some such origin. Darwin concludes his great work on The Origin of Species with the following words: It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. * * * * * * * There is grandeur in this view of life with its several powers having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning, endless forms, most beautiful and most wonderful, have been and are being evolved. With the feeling expressed in these two sentences I most cordially sympathize. I have omitted two sentences which come between them, describing briefly the hypothesis of "the origin of species by natural selection,'' because I have always felt that this hypothesis does not contain the true theory of evolution, if evolution there has been, in biology. Sir John Herschel, in expressing a favorable judgment on the hypothesis of zoological evolution, with, however, some reservation in respect to the origin of man, objected to the doctrine of natural selection, that it was too like the Laputan method of making books, and that it did not sufficiently take into account a continually guiding and controlling intelligence. This seems to me a most valuable and instructive criticism . I feel profoundly convinced that the argument of design has been greatly too much

406 IMPROVEMENT ERA. lost sight of in recent zoological speculations. Reaction against frivolities of teleology, such as are to be found, not rarely, in the notes of learned commentators on Paley's Natural Theology, has, I believe, had a temporary effect in turning attention from the solid and irrefragable argument so well put forward in that excellent old book. But overpoweringly strong proofs of intelligent and benevolent design lie all around us, and if ever perplexities, whether metaphysical or scientific, turn us away from them for a time, they come back upon us with irresistible force, showing to us through nature the influence of a free will, and teaching us that all living beings depend on one over-acting Creator and Ruler. — Presidential Address to the British Association, Edinburgh, 1871, pages 197 to 205, Popular Lectures and Addresses, by Lord Kelvin, Volume II. Little comment is needed on these extracts. Does "Mormonism" agree with the sane talks of Lord Kelvin? All who understand it will say, yes. The science of the world is, and can be no more than one phase of the everlasting gospel of Jesus Christ which covers and embraces all truth. Let us learn from the great minds of the world that in or out of this Church, there can.be nothing better than a simple faith in God, and in his intelligent power over men. Logan, Utah. THE GOSPEL'S LIGHT. (For the Improvement Era.) May the gospel's glorious light 'Luminate your path by night And by day, in endless ways, With its most effulgent rays. And may truth forever shine, In its splendor most divine, Coming trom the worlds above, Revealing Father in his love. Then, you should be satisfied Not to hear the Lord denied, But to seek, and him obey , In the right and proper way. And in case you should not find, Keep on seeking, never blind To the fact that he will hear; In the end you need not fear. Wellington, Utah. So, good brother, go right on, Measure not the truth by throng, But by scientific search, All that's claimed within the Church. Search the scriptures, Christ hath said, And you will by him be led; You can trust him in the race, Though men hold you in disgrace. Do not falter, because this Many leads from laws of bliss; And a weakness may lead you From the end you have in view. So my counsel to you now Is to force ahead, and plow Deeper still, and you shall find Greater truths for all mankind. B. M. U. Goold.