The Churches and Modern Thought An inquiry into the...

Among the concluding remarks of Darwin’s Descent of Man we read: “The belief in God has often been advanced as not only the greatest, but the most complete, of all the distinctions between man and the lower animals. It is, however, impossible, as we have seen, to maintain that this belief is innate or instinctive in man. On the other hand, a belief in all-pervading spiritual agencies seems to be universal, and apparently follows from a considerable advance in the reasoning powers of man, and from a still greater advance in his faculties of imagination, curiosity, and wonder. I am aware that the assumed instinctive belief in God has been used by many persons as an argument for His existence; but this is a rash argument, as we should thus be compelled to believe in the existence of many cruel and malignant spirits, possessing only a little more power than man; for the belief in them is far more general than the belief in a beneficent Deity.”41

Again, in Huxley’s essay on “The Evolution of Theology” we read: “In its simplest condition, such as may be met with among the Australian savages, theology is a mere belief in the existence, powers, and disposition (usually malignant) of ghost-like entities who may be propitiated or scared away; but no cult can properly be said to exist. And in this stage theology is wholly independent of ethics.”

Sir John Lubbock, now Lord Avebury, states the argument against the universality of religion in his Prehistoric Times. He asks: “How can a people who are unable to count their own fingers possibly raise their minds so far as to admit even the rudiments of religion?” And he sums up his observations on various tribes by saying: “Indeed, the first idea of God is almost always an evil spirit.”42

“The idea that the northern tribes [of America] venerated one supreme and all-powerful ‘great spirit,’ by whom man and the world were created, is based on erroneous interpretation; Wakanda of the Dakotas, and Manito of the Algonquins, in no wise coming under such a designation.”43 “These terms,” writes Mr. W. J. McGee, “cannot justly be rendered into Spirit, much less into Great Spirit.”44 “Their religion,” writes another well-known ethnologist, Mr. G. Mooney, “is zootheism, or animal-worship, with the survival of a still earlier stage, which included the worship of all tangible objects, combined with the beginnings of a higher system in which the elements and the great powers of nature are deified.”45 Zootheism, the religion that has survived, does not embrace a belief in a Mightier Being, nor does this deterioration in “religion” suit the theory of a progressive revelation. We may also note that the belief of the North American in witchcraft has led to terrible slaughter, human life being sacrificed on an enormous and frightful scale.

Andrew Lang (in the third chapter of his book, Magic and Religion) instances Australian tribes, and says: “Nobody dreams of propitiating gods or spirits by prayer [compare Bishop Ingram’s statement that man is a praying animal!] while magic is universally practised.” There is, as Mr. Lang observes, “no room for a God, nor for an idea of a future life, except the life of successive re-incarnations.” “I do not think,” writes46 Professor Baldwin Spencer, “that there is really any direct evidence of any Australian native belief in a ‘Supreme Being’ in our sense of the term.”

Similarly among the Fuegians (another of the lowest races of mankind) “almost every old man is a magician, who is supposed to have the power of life and death, and to be able to control the weather. But the members of the French scientific expedition to Cape Horn could detect nothing worthy of the name of religion among these savages.”47 Here, then, even if we adopt Dr. Flint’s broad definition, we surely have examples of the absence of the religious instinct. There is a fundamental distinction, and even opposition of principle, between magic and religion, as we shall see by a study of the opinions of those best qualified to offer them.