[ p. 48 ]
ANY attempt to “explain” the universe must begin with the assumption that it need not have been. We ourselves are so many facts, and the universe as a whole confronts us as a fact with which we have organic relations, so that but for it we could not be. But just as no one part, animate or inanimate, of the whole may be said to be necessary, so neither may the whole be said to be necessary. In that case, the whole the universe is dependent, and a dependent universe calls for a Creator. But the Creator must be free if his act is not necessary, and a free Creator will also be sovereign. His own nature is the final determinant of all his action. His will in greater or lesser degree is everywhere expressed. But for him, nothing could be; but for his will, nothing could come to pass. The difficulties arising from this are to be admitted, but the only final solution of the problem that these difficulties raise is in holding fast to the sovereignty of God, and in adding that the sovereignty is allied to Goodness, since a universe that has in it both evil and good will exist primarily for the sake of the good.
[ p. 49 ]
THE only God who can be made finally intelligible is a God who is absolute Sovereign. Even polytheism had eventually to make provision for one God who gave the law to all lesser gods. [1] Similarly in the Vedantic philosophy there is recognized, as Hoffdmg expresses it, “that which makes the gods,” the final principle of existence. Western thought has for the most part believed that there is indeed, that there must be an ultimate Will, with reference to which all else is to be understood. The one indubitable fact about any life is that it had no choice in the matter of its own existence. Life is pure gift, and the truth of the statement is in nowise changed by any knowledge we have as to the process whereby a given life comes to be. From one point of view the most significant things about ourselves are just those things we do not choose and life itself is only one of these. There is a determinism that is profound enough: all that redeems it from being absolute is the fact that it is a determinism within which are set the conditions for responsible and deliberate choice. [2] Life at the level of self -consciousness is the most challenging of all realities, yet with a pitiable blindness we tend to take it for granted, and to lose our sense of its wonder. When we consider all else that it makes possible it is amazing enough, but its intrinsic nature is always more impressive than its own achievements or its own [ p. 50 ] influence. That there can be an amoeba is a fact full of deep mystery. Connect that amoeba how you will with the human mind, it still remains that the mind is as much more mysterious than the amoeba as it is greater in the range of its powers.
The scientific description of the life-process as a movement from lower to higher has fostered a tendency to explain the higher wholly in terms of the lower. [3] Coleridge, who set himself against the materialistic philosophy of his day, saw the fallacy here. He described it as “a sophism,” consisting in “mistaking the conditions of a thing for its causes and essence.” [4] The slightest reflection will show that Coleridge was right. Because there cannot be life except as there are certain conditions, including in more or less degree the nonliving, does not mean that these conditions can be equated with life. Indeed, we shall come far nearer to a true philosophy if we say that it is life that explains these conditions rather than these conditions that explain life. If, as Lawrence Henderson says, the environment is fitted to life, why may we not believe that the final reason for the environment is that life also might be ? [^5] It is the principle of classical Greek thought that the goal sought is determinative of the method used. Certainly, the very least we can ask of the cause of all things is that it shall not be lower in kind or quality than what is admittedly the highest feature of the “all things” that are to be accounted for. This ranking place must be assigned to mind, and, as far as we are concerned, to mind arrived at the human level. Mind is either to be explained by Other Mind or to be explained by that which is not mind. [5] We have to [ p. 51 ] make a choice, and the choice will reveal our whole philosophical outlook. What is being claimed here is that the first alternative is more rational than the second. The theist may not be able to “prove” God, but he can at least say that the supposition of God offers a reasonable explanation of the fact and the course of the world, whereas the denial of the supposition forces the nontheist to some other explanation which simply does not explain. Atheism is the supreme irrationality.
If mind requires Other Mind to account for it more exactly, if man is inexplicable without God then man is the issue either of God’s free will or of his necessitated will. No adequate philosophy of creation is possible on the ground that creation could not but be. Only a dependent universe can be philosophically construed, and a dependent universe means a creative God whose act the universe is. [6] If God is not free, then he is not God; and if he is free, then is he sovereign as well. As unfree, he would be subject to something other than himself, and such a God would be less than we could conceive God to be, and this we cannot accept. A free Creator is one who knows no will but his own, and who recognizes no obligation except that which arises from his own nature. “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven” is a prayer that touches bottom not only religiously, but philosophically as well. It is easy enough to say things about the divine sovereignty which make God out to be essentially a despot. The great theological necessitarians like Augustine, Duns Scotus, Calvin, and Edwards and their modern successor in Karl Earth may have gone to extremes of statement [ p. 52 ] which to us seem repellent. Yet at the center of their thought was an undeniable truth the truth that man has nothing which he does not owe to Another, and therefore that he has no rights except those which are secured to him by the very nature of that Other to whom he owes his all. [7] In the end the rights of man will have to be seen to have their ground in the rights of God. The case for man and the case for God are parts of one and the same great whole of thought. One does not improve man’s case by getting rid of God. There is nothing that cannot be asked of man and for man if God be surrendered that cannot also be asked of him and for him if God be retained except that in the latter event there is a promise of fulfillment which in the former event is entirely lacking.
Nor does it follow from this claim as to a free and sovereign God who made us without our consent, and who even, as Matthew Arnold expressed it, “gave our choice the law,” [8] that we are entitled to “talk back” to Mm and this is said with full appreciation of the great “questioning spirits” of the race. Bebellion against God is utter futility. The rebellion of Prometheus was against one whom he believed to be in effect a usurper against a false God in behalf of the true God. In that respect, Prometheus is the noble prototype of a noble line. We may properly enough rebel against what we regard as a false idea of God, or against a false claim made in the name of the God we take as true, but rebellion against the God whom one actually believes in, if it be possible at all, involves an inner self-contradiction, and must end disastrously. In principle, this is “the sin against [ p. 53 ] the Holy Spirit” : it is treating contemptuously that which at the same time we believe claims and deserves our reverence. The God against whom we rebel is proven thereby to be a deposed God, so far as we are concerned and a deposed God is no God. As Hoffding points out, gods are abandoned only when they have ceased to be effective. [9] Which is to say that a God must be sovereign or nothing. When you can rule your God, your God has ceased to rule you. To induce divine action by meeting the prescribed conditions of that action is to make the most complete recognition possible of the divine sovereignty. Was not one of the chief arguments of the Old Testament prophets against idolatry the fact that idojs “strange gods”-^ were sometimes fickle and sometimes helpless? [10] The tragedy of a deposed God is a common theme of the poets, and the poets, with characteristic insight, have always seen that the deposition of one went with the coronation of another: the new God was more truly God than the old God. [11] The young English woman who, having seen the horrors of the World War, is represented to have said: “If God could have prevented all this, and would not do so, then when I see him I’ll spit in his face,” said something that was bizarre rather than courageous. Her real thought was that she did not believe God could have prevented it. A God in whose “face” one could “spit” would by that sign have ceased to be one’s God, and the act would have no other significance than that. You could spit in the face of your devil, or even in the face of somebody’s else God, but not in the face of your own God. What is all this but another way of saying that the only God one can [ p. 54 ] completely believe in and completely trust is a sovereign God, or at least a God believed to be sovereign ? [12] The illiterate but shrewd countryman who, having listened to a thoroughgoing Calvinistic sermon which robbed men of all control over their destinies, replied emphatically, “But the people won’t stand for it,” spoke very much to the point. For it was not sovereignty that he was objecting to, but a God unworthy of sovereignty because he misused it, and the listener simply would not have such a God ^as that.
The idea of divine sovereignty, however, even in the true sense, is admittedly not popular at the present time. God must apparently be elected by human suffrages. It is true, as has already been intimated, that as the man so the God, and more will be said later as to the necessity we are under to choose our own God but for what other purpose would one ^choose God except to crown him? To choose him for any less purpose than that would be to choose him . for something for which he would not be needed. An uncrowned God is an ornament, and hardly that, whereas God is justifiable only as a necessity.
It is difficult to understand the motive for modern speculation on a God who is adequate neither to the total cosmic facts nor to the full sweep of human nature nor to the highest reaches of religious experience. Why should a God who is complete Sovereign of the universe and of all human life be supposed to make a greater draft on either reason or faith than a God who never has the situation quite in hand, who is never quite sure as to what is going to happen next, and who, if he could be suddenly called upon to [ p. 55 ] give an accounting of his ways and means, might be found wanting? That there are perplexing problems born of the belief in the divine sovereignty goes without saying, and we shall need to give them serious consideration, but they are much less perplexing than the problems which are born of its denial. The theory of a “finite” God or of a “growing” God or of a God in any real sense impotent is not a sign of intellectual daring, as is so often assumed, but of intellectual hesitancy; at least, it is not, as Urban says, “an intelligible conception.” [13] Men come upon a wilderness in their thinking, and instead of resolutely setting themselves to find or make a trail across the wilderness, they throw up their hands in despair. Instead of conquering the wilderness they allow the wilderness to conquer them. Modern Manichseism, as represented in even such high-toned thinkers as H. B. Alexander and Brightman, is a sign that men have found certain aspects of the world too much for them. Practical difficulties and intellectual difficulties have this in common that they exist to be overcome. In the words of Arthur Hugh Clough, they alike “Call to us, ‘Come and subdue !’ ” [14] But a traveler has not subdued a mountain who simply turns his back on it, nor has a thinker subdued, say, that formidable Mountain of Difficulty, “the problem of evil” who at last despairingly concludes, “God cannot help it.” God would indeed be “a problem to himself” Brightman’s curious phrase if he is involved in a situation whose conditions he did not originally prescribe and whose outcome, therefore, he does not certainly know. The modern situation respecting belief in God will not be helped by men who trim and veer and edge, fearing to [ p. 56 ] make large claims, affrighted by the voices that shriek all around them, building for themselves a hut on the sand when they might build a castle on the rock, failing of the dauntless spirit that sets the slughorn to its lips and blows the blast of victory, reversing the noblest utterance of one of the world’s most tested souls to make it read, “I. will not trust him, lest he slay me.” Perhaps in the end it will be the untrusting who make up the number of the slain ! If somewhere amid the uncertainties of life there is not a point of absolute certainty, then are we of all men most miserable. Is not Hocking right, that it is only “the presence of a Changeless Absolute” that could “set us wholly free to grow” ? [15] A sovereign God not only answers more intellectual questions than a God who is not sovereign, but he makes possible to those who believe in him an inward peace and certitude such as the soul of ^man has ever craved. The philosopher may, of course, reply that so far as he is concerned, this latter is no consideration ; but such a reply, deeply considered, reVeals a most unphilosophical frame of mind. A philosopher need feel no disgrace in confessing that he is a human being, with the characteristic human needs and desires. Has not even Bertrand Russell written a book on The Conquest of Happiness? And if it be said that belief in a sovereign God merely serves as an opiate, encourages acquiescence in the status quo, cuts the nerve of effort, and the like, the objection breaks on the undeniable fact, so clearly shown by Troeltsch, that the most aggressive nations of the modern West were precisely those nations in which the Calvinistic theology was regnant. [16]
[ p. 57 ]
A conspicuous feature of our time is the supposition that the older and larger the universe is seen to be, the more difficult the belief in God becomes. [17] Isaiah could write his glowing periods because his universe was “snug” and “friendly.” Had he liyed to-day, he would have found it less easy to talk of a God who “hath measured the waters in the hollow of his hand, and meted out heaven with the span, and comprehended the dust of the earth in a measure, and weighed the mountains in scales and the hills in a balance,” one who “sitteth above the circle of the earth, . . . and stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain, and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in.” This, we are told, was easy and natural rhetoric in a prescientific age, but the geologist, the astronomer, and the biologist have conspired together to render it impossible for us. We look back, and there is no discernible beginning; we look up, and there is no discernible limit. “How,” men ask, “can there be a Will equal to all this?” They do not seem to realize that it is a question of choosing between alternatives, and that the denial that “all this” is accounted for by a Will only forces us to another choice which may be much less rational unless, indeed, we refuse to choose at all. But apart from that, what shall we say to the logic that contends that it would be easier to believe in God if there were less for God to do ? We need to see that whatever explains the small also suffices to explain the great. The problem of the burning coals in the fire-grate, around which we gather to find warmth and cheer, is in the end the same problem as that of the sun itself whence the earth (Jraws its light and heat. Heat is heat and [ p. 58 ] light is light, whether it be little or much : the mystery is not as to the quantity, but as to the quality the thing itself. The dance of electrons that yields the flashing jewel on a lady’s hand is just as challenging a fact as that dance of electrons that yields Betelgeuse. Why should our minds be staggered by a millennium, and then take an hour for granted ? It is no more wonderful that there could be the one than that there could be the other. The problem of time is the same whether we are dealing with aeons or with seconds. Or why is distance supposed to become more baffling according as it grows greater ? Whether two objects in our experienced world are, as we say, a yard apart or a million light-years apart, the fundamental principle involved is identical in each case, and that is true on either an “objective” or a “subjective” theory of space. The microscopic and the macroscopic are equally challenging, and the law of the one, so far as mere existence is concerned, is the law of the other. It is difficult to see why minds of the caliber of S. Alexander should be unable to postulate God, conceived as the Primal and Creative Intelligence of which all other existences are forms and expressions, but should be able to postulate with the most complete intellectual ease an original principle called “Space-Time,” and treat it, sheer abstraction as it is, as the “raw stuff” whence all else, including finally God himself, proceeds. [18] Certainly, not all the credulity belongs to traditional views. Making the purely formal aspects of the universe, space and time, the creative power of the universe is little different from making the stage-furniture the cause of the play. Or what is mere bulk and magnitude ? Size is necessarily [ p. 59 ] relative, and whether we call anything big or small depends entirely on what we judge it by. A towering mountain may arouse in us emotions of awe and wonder, and this is as it should be, but a single rock, a handful of coral, a tiny hillock is, each in its own way, as much an expression of absolute wisdom and power, as much a challenge to reason, as is a mountain it “teases us out of thought as doth eternity.” We cease to be astonished by that which we can control, forgetting that any kind of control involves the discovery and application of law. The limitations here are the limitations imposed by our own nature and its permitted knowledge and power. It is neither scientific nor philosophical to deny that that kind of control which we in our small way continually exemplify could be extended to include the whole universe.
It is, therefore, equally fallacious whether we say that our fathers believed in a sovereign God because they did not know so much as we do, or that the universe has become so big that there cannot be a God equal to it. [19] What is significant is not the mere size or age of the universe, but the fact of it. The God who is equal to the so-called little is also equal to the so-called great. Indeed, it would be just as true to say that only a God who was equal to the great the very greatest would be equal to the little. And if, as we must do later, we turn our thoughts from planets to prayers, from suns to saints, from aeons to anthems, we still find the necessity for a God who is always greater than our greatest thought of him if the most impressive deed of man and therefore the most impressive fact in the universe man’s [ p. 60 ] recognition of Another is not to sink to a mere delusion. Though science has “discountenanced” prayer, nevertheless “men still pray,” as Richard Roberts laconically says, and we shall not only agree with him that ^the spectacle of a man on his knees" is the empiric fact with which the study of religion should begin, [20] but we shall also claim that it is a fact which no philosophy can afford to ignore if it aims to give a complete account of reality.
God, then, like every other existence, has rights, the rights that go with the intrinsic nature. In the case of God, they are the rights which belong to him as the eternal creative source. It is no proper objection to such an idea of God that it is ancient. It is customary to say that the changing ideas of God are due to changes in the social, political, and general cultural status of men. Shailer Mathews has recently developed in a rather striking way the thesis that the idea of atonement is shaped to the “thought pattern” of the given period. [21] The principle is being extended to what men have at different times said about God. For example, the idea of God as King is due to the fact that men lived together in kingdoms under an _earthly ruler. The idea of a Sovereign whose word was law was possible only because despotisms became actually existent on earth. Therefore, since we are now living in a democratic age, we must have a God who is a democrat and not an autocrat. [22] There is truth in this claim that the known necessarily influences our conception of the unknown, but the application of the truth may easily be exaggerated. Even a democracy endeavors to find a common will, and it Invests that common will with authority on occasion, [ p. 61 ] shall we not. say, with absolute authority. “The right of eminent domain” is recognized in the most democratic of states. In other words, the figure under which we express the Ultimate Power, whether father, king, social will, fate, or law, in nowise affects the reality of the power we thereby attempt to describe. When one considers the claims that have been made in modern times in behalf of natural law, one hardly needs to apologize for regarding God as a Sovereign Will. Men profess to find the idea of an omnipotent God intolerable, but they appear to have no difficulty in accommodating their mind to the idea of an omnipotent Law. If it comes to that, one would better be subject to the absolutism of a personal God than to the absolutism of an impersonal law, the more so if the central fact in the nature of such a God is that he is good.
If God be rightly understood as the Creative Will, then he has the right to determine the nature of his own creation, and the conditions under which it shall be carried through. “It is he that hath made us, and not we ourselves.” One sometimes gathers that there are certain people who feel that God should have consulted with them before he made them ! They appear to have a grievance against the whole scheme of things. Few more pessimistic accounts of the world and its ways have been written in recent years than by Joseph Wood Krutch in The Modern Temper. He assures us that we have come to the place where we have no more reason to suppose that our life has a purpose than it could be supposed of itself by the insect of a day. [23] * The curious fact is that those who agree with Krutch in his philosophy of despair seem [ p. 62 ] quite satisfied to go on living, and he justifies them in it. He himself sees small enough hope for the future, but there are many who follow him in his claim that we are fast hurrying toward “a Godless universe” who nevertheless are hopeful that the world x can be “made better.” Indeed, on their own showing, a world without God is “better” than a world with God. But anything that can be made better is not wholly bad, and if there is in the nature of things an intrinsic possibility of improvement, it ought not to be so difficult as our modern pagans claim it is to believe not only in a God, but also in a God who has a purpose of good. Meliorism the doctrine of improvability separated from theism is no less a faith than theism itself: in fact, without theism it is no more than a hope with small enough promise of realization, as Krutch does not hesitate to admit. [24] To accept no other account of man than that he has come to be by impersonal processes, to interpret man’s history as itself an advance from lower to higher, to entertain the hope that this advance will continue, and even to labor zealously to that end to do all this is to suppose that history, the whole life-process, is subject to some law of progress more or less absolute, and those who make the supposition seem to experience no difficulty in doing so. [25] But when this law is identified with the will of God, protests begin to arise. An age that can accept without a question a mechanistic philosophy professes to be pained at the suggestion of a universal and sovereign Will whose activity is precisely those laws which, when conceived as self -explaining and self-acting, are so deeply reverenced. No medieval saint ever worshiped more fervently [ p. 63 ] in the temple of His God than some moderns worship at the shrine in which they have elevated law to be “king of kings and lord of lords.” It seems to be permissible to be a determinist so long as nobody is responsible for what ds determined, but to equate the deterministic influences with the chosen method of a sovereign God this is to lay oneself open to ridicule as a hopeless traditionalist. Rights are freely assigned to such mere concepts as law, energy, concretion, integration, matter, process, libido, value, or whatever else you will; but it is incredible that such rights should belong to a Creator who knows what he is about, and why. There is evidently sovereignty somewhere, since there is a coercive and imperative character about life and its experience that can neither be denied nor successfully resisted. At every turn we are confronted with absolutes. “Thou shalt” or “Thou shalt not” “Thou canst” or “Thou canst not” “Thou mayest” or “Thou mayest not” they hammer on our ears incessantly, yet so purely humanistic a thinker as Haydon assures us that amid all these imperatives it is our business, even our privilege, to “make ourselves at home.” [26] Apparently we are the subjects of a vast tyranny. We are bidden to obey, but no rational account can be given of the authority. We simply find ourselves set down in a world driven by forces utterly blind, utterly unintelligent, continually achieving ends while yet having no ends to achieve. Everything is biological. All that matters is that the vast cosmic machine shall be kept going. There is no reason for man r s life. He has just been thrown up temporarily by the favorable conjunction of impersonal forces.
[ p. 64 ]
Yet lie can “look before and after.” He may choose among the imperatives, and some of them he may resist entirely, and some he may subject to others because he regards these others as of higher worth. Nevertheless, ultimately he has no more significance than “the insects of a day” no more even than the insensate sod beneath his feet. He has been produced by that which is less than he; he bows to an authority, but it is of his own making; he builds for what he conceives to be a better, but Ms fairest achievement will be snuffed out as a candle. Then what a dupe is man the sport of meaningless circumstance, driven hither and yon like dead leaves before the winds of autumn, “a pestilence-stricken multitude” the subject of a vast cosmic hoax, a hoax too cruel for smiles and too stupid for tears!
'There is a way out of all this confusion a sovereign God. Believing in a creative Will compels us to retract nothing as to the conditions under which life is lived. We can still appreciate the majestic sweep of the universal movement. We can still speak of the law-abiding character of phenomena, of the universality of the causal relation, of the interdependence of all reality, of the low issuing in the high, of the coercive features in the environment of every life, of the immanence of all the past in all the present, of desirables that are yet impossibles, of inscrutabilities that baffle the keenest insight, of “over-historical” and “over-social” and “over-individual” forces Eucken’s terms that bring about results which none intended or foresaw we can still speak in ways such as these, and then we shall make our speech intelligible because we shall see in all this the chosen [ p. 65 ] method of the creative Will. [27] Failing that, these ways of speech are simply not intelligible. The jargon of modern naturalism is impressive enough, but it is mere description without underlying explana- / tion. The belief in a sovereign God who has the right to use his creative power in the ways he deems best fitted to achieve his purpose this answers to every feature 'of life no less adequately than nontheistic naturalism, and in addition explains those higher reaches of existence and of experience as naturalism never can. And if the demand be made, “But eocplain your sovereign God,” the retort courteous will be proper : “Ewplain your proposed substitute for him.” One thing at least is done by belief in a sovereign God which is not done and cannot be done by naturalism the introduction into the scheme of things of the element of hope as defensible and rational. Bertrand Russell made no mistake when having bowed God out he took despair in. [28] Certainly there is nothing but despair to build on if there is nothing but impersonality at the basis of existence. Consistency is not the greatest of virtues, but a little of it may reasonably be looked for. Yet what measure of consistency is there in cultivating hope in the midst of an impersonal world, in believing in moral values and working for them in a situation held to be wholly mechanistic, in offering judgments of either approval or disapproval on the course of events at the same time that the existence of an absolute moral standard is being flatly denied? The man who, like Harry Elmer Barnes, believes in “the good life,” but who has no proper view of the profound organic relation between the good life and the body of conditions [ p. 66 ] which make it possible and by which it is actually achieved, is to be commended much more for his heart than for his head. [29] He believes in an idealism for which he can find no adequate ground in the nature of things. His idealism is therefore an alien element. It has no real right in the world. It is literally a “defense mechanism” a deliberately constructed illusion designed to keep the mind from facing the actual facts. Idealism with such a basis necessarily lacks a final guarantee. Either nioral values are intrinsic to the universe or they are fastened upon it as paper flowers are fastened on trees in winter time. But if man is the issue of nature, man’s highest capacity is likewise the issue of nature. Man as capable of acting morally which is the least that can be meant by “the good life” will therefore be an achievement of that great whole out of which man has come. So that Sorley is right when he says that the claim that moral values have no cosmic reference is inherently fallacious. [30] Whatever can happen in the world, whether it is called good or whether it is called evil, can happen only because there is provision for it in the very conditions of existence. But because evil is provided for does not mean that evil is the final purpose of the conditions that make it possible. The final purpose is good. You can explain evil by good, but never can you explain good by evil. Von Hugel admits that evil in the world is the greatest theoretical difficulty for theism, and yet he rightly insists that it is this same theism which evil seems to deny which alone holds any real promise for the final defeat of evil. [31] While, therefore, the presence alike of good and evil in the universe complicates [ p. 67 ] our problem, it complicates it much more for the man who does not believe in a sovereign God than for the man who does. The unbeliever recognizes/ good, and often himself desires it, but he is quite without any ultimate philosophy of goodness. In fact, he can only speak of evil as well in a purely relative way. If the world is Godless, what is the point of railing against its inequity? In what sense can the impersonal and the mechanical be unjust and cruel ? It is incredible that good can have final significance in a universe that is not grounded in good, but it is not incredible that a universe that is grounded in good and that seeks good should have evil as a by-product or an accompaniment of the process. If, however, good is assigned this ultimate character, then a teleology of good is inescapable, and a teleology of good without God that is, a theory that makes good the purpose and goal of existence, but has no mind that projects the purpose and no Will that moves toward the goal such a teleology is possible only on condition that we stubbornly refuse to think clearly. If naturalism, the explanation of all things by reference to natural law, charges theism with being blind to the significance of evil, is not theism entitled to charge naturalism with being blind to the significance of good? The quite generally accepted hope that “somehow good will be the final goal of ill” is rational only as there is a sovereign God. The very fact that men work for the good is evidence that they believe in the good and that the forces of life may be harnessed to their aim. Then why is not the conclusion justifiable that the hope of the persistence of the good and of its ‘final triumph [ p. 68 ] must lie in the fact of a God who purposes it and provides for it and supports it, and who constitutes men so that they desire and seek it? Meliorism, the doctrine that life and its conditions are intrinsically improvable, is made rational only by belief in God. Still to hope after such a belief has been surrendered is rather a tribute to a certain fine indomitableness in the will than evidence to any marked clarity of thinking. ’ A striking illustration of this is in Joseph Wood Krutch’s call to us to “die as men” rather than “live as animals/’ even although he assures us that ”our cause is lost and that there is no place for us in the natural universe." [32]
The choice, therefore, seems to be between allowing the dark facts of life to rule out altogether the idea of a sovereign God who is also good, or regarding these facts as but part of a larger whole and to be interpreted in- its light. The first alternative still leaves the facts themselves untouched, except that it shrouds them in a yet deeper gloom. The second alternative lets fall on at least the edges of these dark facts a little light enough to save reason from staggering, enough to prevent hope from quite falling by the way.
See A. ~Ej. Taylor, Plato, pp. 489-493, for the sense in which Plato, working on a background of polytheism, is “the creator of philosophical theism.” Cf. Glover, Progress in Religion to the Christian Era, chap, vii, on “The Great Century of Greece.” ↩︎
See Hocking, Human Nature and Its Remaking, rev. edit., for a clear discussion of the two factors of determinism and choice, espec. chaps, iii, vii, ix, xi, xiv, xxi, xxvi, and xxxvi. ↩︎
See Sellars, Religion Coming of Age, pp. 173-177, for a good example of this tendency. “Modern thought,” says Sellars, helieves that it is “entirely feasible” that the lifeless may explain the living. The case is stated in a much more satisfactory fashion by Lloyd Morgan, in Life, Mind, and Spirit, in which, espec. in chaps, iii and x, he works out more fully some of the implications of his Emergent Evolution, chap, x dealing with “Divine Purpose,” which Morgan allows. ↩︎
See Biographia Literaria, chap, vi, Coleridge’s discussion, anticipating much modern criticism, of Hartley’s materialism. ↩︎
For a statement of this position that stands as a classic, see John Caird, Philosophy of Religion, chap. viii. Caird’s thesis, that of the Neo-Hegelians in general, is that “Finite Spirit or Mind presupposes Infinite Spirit or Mind.” ↩︎
See W. B. Matthews, God in Christian Experience, chap.-x, for a suggestive treatment of the thesis that God is independent of creation because, while he is under 69 p. 70 necessity to create, being a Personal Spirit, he yet freely chooses what to create (p. 208). ↩︎
See W. P. Tolley, The Idea of God in the Philosophy of Augustine, chap, v, for a clear statement based on a firsthand study of Augustine at this point. On Duns Scotus, see Etienne Gilson, La Philosophic au Moyen Age, pp. 225-244. With Duns Scotus, says Gilson, “la conception chr6tienne du Dieu innni et crdateur arrive pour la premiere fois a une pleine conscience d’elle mme” (p. 241). As to Calvin, anyone who has read his Institutes will realize that his main difficulty is in his acceptance of the authoritarian view of Scripture: his severely logical mind did the rest. See the whole of bk. i. ↩︎
Self -Deception, stanza iii. ↩︎
Philosophy of Religion, par. 45. ↩︎
See 1 Kings 18. 20-40; Psa. 115; Isa. 44. 12-20; Jer. 10. 1-16, etc. ↩︎
Of. Keats’ Hyperion, which tells of the fall of the Titans “Saturn … poor old King”; Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, which shows how the bound and suffering Prometheus at last deposes the tyrant Jupiter, who cries despairingly, “The elements obey me not”; and Mrs. Browning’s The Dead Pan “Gods discrowned and desecrated, disinherited of thunder.” ↩︎
Brightman (The Problem of God) is therefore right in saying that a God who is “a problem to himself” is also “a problem to us”; but when he still wants this doubly problematical God to be religiously adequate (as he does see pp. 189ff.), he overlooks the fact that such adequacy needs just the metaphysical basis of a God entirely sovereign which he has surrendered. ↩︎
The Intelligible World, p. 195. It is, of course, very far from being implied that books of the caliber of James, A Pluralistic Universe; H. B. Alexander, Nature and Human Nature; S. Alexander, Space, Time, and Deity; W. P. Montague, Belief Unbound, and Brightman, op. cit., all of which defend such ideas of God, are lacking in [ p. 71 ] intellectual power. It is their thesis, not their treatment of it, that is being criticized. ↩︎
Hope Evermore and Believe, stanza i. ↩︎
Meaning of God in Human Experience, p. 187. ↩︎
See Sleigh, The Sufficiency of Christianity, a study of Troeltsch, pp. 159-162, and the literature there cited. ↩︎
Carr, in Changing Backgrounds in Religion and Ethics, pp. 73ff., states the case as it appears to one who, though he writes that natural science has made God more remote, even “more problematical,” nevertheless still holds a form of theistic faith. Cf. Sheen, Religion Without God, chap, ix, on “The Fallacy of Inverted Belations.” ↩︎
Op. cit., vol. ii, bk. iv, chap. i. For a brief criticism of Alexander, see Harris, Pro Fide, 4th edit., pp. xxxivxxxvi. ↩︎
Julian Huxley’s autobiographical chapter, “Personalia,” in Religion Without Revelation, makes it plain that it was his “biological training” as much as any other one thing that led him to his complete repudiation of a personal or, as he says, “supernatural” God. ↩︎
The Christian God, p. 11. ↩︎
The Atonement and the Social Process. ↩︎
Beckwith, The Idea of God, has much to say as to the idea of God “deriving its meaning from social experience” (p. 61). Of. Ames’ chapter in My Idea of God, ed. J. F. Newton, and chap, ix, on “God and the Self,” in his Religion. ↩︎
See above, chap, i, notes 3 and 14. ↩︎
Op. cit., pp. 52-53. ↩︎
See Haydon, The Quest of the Ages, espec. chap, v, and cf. Schmidt, The Coming Religion, chap. xii. ↩︎
Op cit., pp. 171-176. ↩︎
See Fairbairn, The Philosophy of the Christian Religion, pp. 55-60, for a concise statement of this position as held in philosophical idealism. [ p. 72 ] ↩︎
Mysticism and Logic, pp. 55-57. ↩︎
See The Twilight of Christianity., pref. and chap, ix. Cf. the debate in the Forum, Sept., 1929, between T. W. Darnell and S. Parkes Cadman, on “Is Anything Left of Keligion?” ↩︎
See Moral Values and the Idea of God, espec. chaps, vii, viii, xi, and xx. ↩︎
See Essays and Addresses on the Philosophy of Religion, first series, pp. 93-94. ↩︎
The Modern Temper, p. 249, the concluding words of the book. ↩︎