Chapter I: Origin Of Our Idea Of God’s Existence (2)

Charles Darwin, in a letter written a year before his death,
referring to his doubts as to the existence of God, asks: “Can we
trust to the convictions of a monkey’s mind?” We may reply: “Can
we trust the conclusions of one who was once a baby?” Bowne,
Ethics, 3—“The genesis and emergence of an idea are one thing; its
validity is quite another. The logical value of chemistry cannot
be decided by reciting its beginnings in alchemy; and the logical
value of astronomy is independent of the fact that it began in
astrology.... 11—Even if man came from the ape, we need not
tremble for the validity of the multiplication-table or of the
Golden Rule. If we have moral insight, it is no matter how we got
it; and if we have no such insight, there is no help in any
psychological theory.... 159—We must not appeal to savages and
babies to find what is natural to the human mind.... In the case
of anything that is under the law of development we can find its
true nature, not by going back to its crude beginnings, but by
studying the finished outcome.” Dawson, Mod. Ideas of Evolution,
13—“If the idea of God be the phantom of an apelike brain, can we
trust to reason or conscience in any other matter? May not science
and philosophy themselves be similar phantasies, evolved by mere
chance and unreason?” Even though man came from the ape, there is
no explaining his ideas by the ideas of the ape: “A man ’s a man
for a’ that.”

We must judge beginnings by endings, not endings by beginnings. It
matters not how the development of the eye took place nor how
imperfect was the first sense of sight, if the eye now gives us
correct information of external objects. So it matters not how the
intuitions of right and of God originated, if they now give us
knowledge of objective truth. We must take for granted that
evolution of ideas is not from sense to nonsense. G. H. Lewes,
Study of Psychology, 122—“We can understand the amœba and the
polyp only by a light reflected from the study of man.” Seth,
Ethical Principles, 429—“The oak explains the acorn even more
truly than the acorn explains the oak.” Sidgwick: “No one appeals
from the artist’s sense of beauty to the child’s. Higher
mathematics are no less true, because they can be apprehended only
by trained intellect. No strange importance attaches to what was
_first_ felt or thought.” Robert Browning, Paracelsus: “Man, once
descried, imprints forever His presence on all lifeless things....
A supplementary reflux of light Illustrates all the inferior
grades, explains Each back step in the circle.” Man, with his
higher ideas, shows the meaning and content of all that led up to
him. He is the last round of the ascending ladder, and from this
highest product and from his ideas we may infer what his Maker is.

Bixby, Crisis in Morals, 162, 245—“Evolution simply gave man such
_height_ that he could at last discern the stars of moral truth
which had previously been below the horizon. This is very
different from saying that moral truths are merely transmitted
products of the experiences of utility.... The germ of the idea of
God, as of the idea of right, must have been in man just so soon
as he became man,—the brute’s gaining it turned him into man.
Reason is not simply a register of physical phenomena and of
experiences of pleasure and pain: it is creative also. It discerns
the oneness of things and the supremacy of God.” Sir Charles
Lyell: “The presumption is enormous that all our faculties, though
liable to err, are true in the main and point to real objects. The
religious faculty in man is one of the strongest of all. It
existed in the earliest ages, and instead of wearing out before
advancing civilization, it grows stronger and stronger, and is
to-day more developed among the highest races than it ever was
before. I think we may safely trust that it points to a great
truth.” Fisher, Nat. and Meth. of Rev., 137, quotes Augustine:
“Securus judicat orbis terrarum,” and tells us that the intellect
is assumed to be an organ of knowledge, however the intellect may
have been evolved. But if the intellect is worthy of trust, so is
the moral nature. George A. Gordon, The Christ of To-day, 103—“To
Herbert Spencer, human history is but an incident of natural
history, and force is supreme. To Christianity nature is only the
beginning, and man the consummation. Which gives the higher
revelation of the life of the tree—the seed, or the fruit?”

The third form of the theory seems to make God a sensuous object, to reverse the proper order of knowing and feeling, to ignore the fact that in all feeling there is at least some knowledge of an object, and to forget that the validity of this very feeling can be maintained only by previously assuming the existence of a rational Deity.

Newman Smyth tells us that feeling comes first; the idea is
secondary. Intuitive ideas are not denied, but they are declared
to be direct reflections, in thought, of the feelings. They are
the mind’s immediate perception of what it feels to exist. Direct
knowledge of God by intuition is considered to be idealistic,
reaching God by inference is regarded as rationalistic, in its
tendency. See Smyth, The Religious Feeling; reviewed by Harris, in
New Englander, Jan., 1878: reply by Smyth, in New Englander, May,
1878.

We grant that, even in the case of unregenerate men, great peril,
great joy, great sin often turn the rational intuition of God into
a presentative intuition. The presentative intuition, however,
cannot be affirmed to be common to all men. It does not furnish
the foundation or explanation of a universal capacity for
religion. Without the rational intuition, the presentative would
not be possible, since it is only the rational that enables man to
receive and to interpret the presentative. The very trust that we
put in feeling presupposes an intuitive belief in a true and good
God. Tennyson said in 1869: “Yes, it is true that there are
moments when the flesh is nothing to me; when I know and feel the
flesh to be the vision; God and the spiritual is the real; it
belongs to me more than the hand and the foot. You may tell me
that my hand and my foot are only imaginary symbols of my
existence,—I could believe you; but you never, never can convince
me that the _I_ is not an eternal Reality, and that the spiritual
is not the real and true part of me.”

3. Not from reasoning,—because

(_a_) The actual rise of this knowledge in the great majority of minds is not the result of any conscious process of reasoning. On the other hand, upon occurrence of the proper conditions, it flashes upon the soul with the quickness and force of an immediate revelation.

(_b_) The strength of men’s faith in God’s existence is not proportioned to the strength of the reasoning faculty. On the other hand, men of greatest logical power are often inveterate sceptics, while men of unwavering faith are found among those who cannot even understand the arguments for God’s existence.

(_c_) There is more in this knowledge than reasoning could ever have furnished. Men do not limit their belief in God to the just conclusions of argument. The arguments for the divine existence, valuable as they are for purposes to be shown hereafter, are not sufficient by themselves to warrant our conviction that there exists an infinite and absolute Being. It will appear upon examination that the _a priori_ argument is capable of proving only an abstract and ideal proposition, but can never conduct us to the existence of a real Being. It will appear that the _a posteriori_ arguments, from merely finite existence, can never demonstrate the existence of the infinite. In the words of Sir Wm. Hamilton (Discussions, 23)—“A demonstration of the absolute from the relative is logically absurd, as in such a syllogism we must collect in the conclusion what is not distributed in the premises”—in short, from finite premises we cannot draw an infinite conclusion.

Whately, Logic, 290-292; Jevons, Lessons in Logic, 81; Thompson,
Outline Laws of Thought, sections 82-92; Calderwood, Philos. of
Infinite, 60-69, and Moral Philosophy, 238; Turnbull, in Bap.
Quarterly, July, 1872:271; Van Oosterzee, Dogmatics, 239; Dove,
Logic of Christian Faith, 21. Sir Wm. Hamilton: “Departing from
the particular, we admit that we cannot, in our highest
generalizations, rise above the finite.” Dr. E. G. Robinson: “The
human mind turns out larger grists than are ever put in at the
hopper.” There is more in the idea of God than could have come out
so small a knot-hole as human reasoning. A single word, a chance
remark, or an attitude of prayer, suggests the idea to a child.
Helen Keller told Phillips Brooks that she had always known that
there was a God, but that she had not known his name. Ladd,
Philosophy of Mind, 119—“It is a foolish assumption that nothing
can be certainly known unless it be reached as the result of a
conscious syllogistic process, or that the more complicated and
subtle this process is, the more sure is the conclusion.
Inferential knowledge is always dependent upon the superior
certainty of immediate knowledge.” George M. Duncan, in Memorial
of Noah Porter, 246—“All deduction rests either on the previous
process of induction, or on the intuitions of time and space which
involve the Infinite and Absolute.”

(_d_) Neither do men arrive at the knowledge of God’s existence by inference; for inference is condensed syllogism, and, as a form of reasoning, is equally open to the objection just mentioned. We have seen, moreover, that all logical processes are based upon the assumption of God’s existence. Evidently that which is presupposed in all reasoning cannot itself be proved by reasoning.

By inference, we of course mean mediate inference, for in
immediate inference (_e. g._, “All good rulers are just; therefore
no unjust rulers are good”) there is no reasoning, and no progress
in thought. Mediate inference is reasoning—is condensed syllogism;
and what is so condensed may be expanded into regular logical
form. Deductive inference: “A negro is a fellow-creature;
therefore he who strikes a negro strikes a fellow-creature.”
Inductive inference: “The first finger is before the second;
therefore it is before the third.” On inference, see Martineau,
Essays, 1:105-108; Porter, Human Intellect, 444-448; Jevons,
Principles of Science, 1:14, 136-139, 168, 262.

Flint, in his Theism, 77, and Herbert, in his Mod. Realism
Examined, would reach the knowledge of God’s existence by
inference. The latter says God is not demonstrable, but his
existence is inferred, like the existence of our fellow men. But
we reply that in this last case we infer only the finite from the
finite, while the difficulty in the case of God is in inferring
the infinite from the finite. This very process of reasoning,
moreover, presupposes the existence of God as the absolute Reason,
in the way already indicated.

Substantially the same error is committed by H. B. Smith, Introd.
to Chr. Theol., 84-133, and by Diman, Theistic Argument, 316, 364,
both of whom grant an intuitive element, but use it only to eke
out the insufficiency of reasoning. They consider that the
intuition gives us only an abstract idea, which contains in itself
no voucher for the existence of an actual being corresponding to
the idea, and that we reach real being only by inference from the
facts of our own spiritual natures and of the outward world. But
we reply, in the words of McCosh, that “the intuitions are
primarily directed to individual objects.” We know, not the
infinite in the abstract, but infinite space and time, and the
infinite God. See McCosh, Intuitions, 26, 199, who, however, holds
the view here combated.

Schurman, Belief in God, 43—“I am unable to assign to our belief
in God a higher certainty than that possessed by the working
hypotheses of science.... 57—The nearest approach made by science
to our hypothesis of the existence of God lies in the assertion of
the universality of law ... based on the conviction of the unity
and systematic connection of all reality.... 64—This unity can be
found only in self-conscious spirit.” The fault of this reasoning
is that it gives us nothing necessary or absolute. Instances of
working hypotheses are the nebular hypothesis in astronomy, the
law of gravitation, the atomic theory in chemistry, the principle
of evolution. No one of these is logically independent or prior.
Each of them is provisional, and each may be superseded by new
discovery. Not so with the idea of God. This idea is presupposed
by all the others, as the condition of every mental process and
the guarantee of its validity.

IV. Contents of this Intuition.

1. In this fundamental knowledge _that_ God is, it is necessarily implied that to some extent men know intuitively _what_ God is, namely, (_a_) a Reason in which their mental processes are grounded; (_b_) a Power above them upon which they are dependent; (_c_) a Perfection which imposes law upon their moral natures; (_d_) a Personality which they may recognize in prayer and worship.

In maintaining that we have a rational intuition of God, we by no means imply that a presentative intuition of God is impossible. Such a presentative intuition was perhaps characteristic of unfallen man; it does belong at times to the Christian; it will be the blessing of heaven (Mat. 5:8—“the pure in heart ... shall see God”; Rev. 22:4—“they shall see his face”). Men’s experiences of face-to-face apprehension of God, in danger and guilt, give some reason to believe that a presentative knowledge of God is the normal condition of humanity. But, as this presentative intuition of God is not in our present state universal, we here claim only that all men have a rational intuition of God.

It is to be remembered, however, that the loss of love to God has greatly obscured even this rational intuition, so that the revelation of nature and the Scriptures is needed to awaken, confirm and enlarge it, and the special work of the Spirit of Christ to make it the knowledge of friendship and communion. Thus from knowing about God, we come to know God (John 17:3—“This is life eternal, that they should know thee”; 2 Tim. 1:12—“I know him whom I have believed”).

Plato said, for substance, that there can be no ὅτι οἶδεν without
something of the ἁ οἶδεν. Harris, Philosophical Basis of Theism,
208—“By rational intuition man knows that absolute Being _exists_;
his knowledge of _what_ it is, is progressive with his progressive
knowledge of man and of nature.” Hutton, Essays: “A haunting
presence besets man behind and before. He cannot evade it. It
gives new meanings to his thoughts, new terror to his sins. It
becomes intolerable. He is moved to set up some idol, carved out
of his own nature, that will take its place—a non-moral God who
will not disturb his dream of rest. It is a righteous Life and
Will, and not the mere _idea_ of righteousness that stirs men so.”
Porter, Hum. Int., 661—“The Absolute is a thinking Agent.” The
intuition does not grow in certainty; what grows is the mind’s
quickness in applying it and power of expressing it. The intuition
is not complex; what is complex is the Being intuitively cognized.
See Calderwood, Moral Philosophy, 232; Lowndes, Philos. of Primary
Beliefs, 108-112; Luthardt, Fund. Truths, 157—Latent faculty of
speech is called forth by speech of others; the choked-up well
flows again when debris is cleared away. Bowen, in Bib. Sac.,
33:740-754; Bowne, Theism, 79.

Knowledge of a person is turned into personal knowledge by actual
communication or revelation. First, comes the intuitive knowledge
of God possessed by all men—the assumption that there exists a
Reason, Power, Perfection, Personality, that makes correct
thinking and acting possible. Secondly, comes the knowledge of
God’s being and attributes which nature and Scripture furnish.
Thirdly, comes the personal and presentative knowledge derived
from actual reconciliation and intercourse with God, through
Christ and the Holy Spirit. Stearns, Evidence of Christian
Experience, 208—“Christian experience verifies the claims of
doctrine by experiment,—so transforming probable knowledge into
real knowledge.” Biedermann, quoted by Pfleiderer, Grundriss,
18—“God reveals himself to the human spirit, 1. as its infinite
_Ground_, in the reason; 2. as its infinite _Norm_, in the
conscience; 3. as its infinite _Strength_, in elevation to
religious truth, blessedness, and freedom.”

Shall I object to this Christian experience, because only
comparatively few have it, and I am not among the number? Because
I have not seen the moons of Jupiter, shall I doubt the testimony
of the astronomer to their existence? Christian experience, like
the sight of the moons of Jupiter, is attainable by all. Clarke,
Christian Theology, 113—“One who will have full proof of the good
God’s reality must put it to the experimental test. He must take
the good God for real, and receive the confirmation that will
follow. When faith reaches out after God, it finds him.... They
who have found him will be the sanest and truest of their kind,
and their convictions will be among the safest convictions of
man.... Those who live in fellowship with the good God will grow
in goodness, and will give practical evidence of his existence
aside from their oral testimony.”

2. The Scriptures, therefore, do not attempt to prove the existence of God, but, on the other hand, both assume and declare that the knowledge that God is, is universal (Rom. 1:19-21, 28, 32; 2:15). God has inlaid the evidence of this fundamental truth in the very nature of man, so that nowhere is he without a witness. The preacher may confidently follow the example of Scripture by assuming it. But he must also explicitly declare it, as the Scripture does. “For the invisible things of him since the creation of the world are clearly seen” (καθορᾶται—spiritually viewed); the organ given for this purpose is the νοῦς (νοούμενα); but then—and this forms the transition to our next division of the subject—they are “perceived through the things that are made” (τοῖς ποιήμασιν, Rom. 1:20).

On _Rom. 1:19-21_, see Weiss, Bib. Theol. des N. T., 251, note;
also commentaries of Meyer, Alford, Tholuck, and Wordsworth; τὸ
γνωστὸν τοῦ θεοῦ = not “that which may be known” (Rev. Vers.) but
“that which is known” of God; νοούμενα καθορᾶται = are clearly
seen in that they are perceived by the reason—νοούμενα expresses
the manner of the καθορᾶται (Meyer); compare _John 1:9_; _Acts
17:27_; _Rom. 1:28_; _2:15_. On _1 Cor. 15:34_, see Calderwood,
Philos. of Inf., 466—ἀγνωσίαν Θεοῦ τινὲς ἔχουσι = do not possess
the specially exalted knowledge of God which belongs to believers
in Christ (_cf._ _1 Jo. 4:7—_“every one that loveth is begotten of
God, and knoweth God”). On _Eph. 2:12_, see Pope, Theology,
1:240—ἄθεοι ἐν τῷ κόσμῳ is opposed to being in Christ, and
signifies rather forsaken of God, than denying him or entirely
ignorant of him. On Scripture passages, see Schmid, Bib. Theol.
des N. T., 486; Hofmann, Schriftbeweis, 1:62.

E. G. Robinson: “The first statement of the Bible is, not that
there is a God, but that ‘In the beginning God created the heavens
and the earth’_ (Gen. 1:1)_. The belief in God never was and never
can be the result of logical argument, else the Bible would give
us proofs.” Many texts relied upon as _proofs_ of God’s existence
are simply _explications_ of the idea of God, as for example: _Ps.
94:9, 10—_“He that planted the ear, shall he not hear? He that
formed the eye, shall he not see? He that chastiseth the nations,
shall not he correct, even he that teacheth man knowledge?” Plato
says that God holds the soul by its roots,—he therefore does not
need to demonstrate to the soul the fact of his existence.
Martineau, Seat of Authority, 308, says well that Scripture and
preaching only interpret what is already in the heart which it
addresses: “Flinging a warm breath on the inward oracles hid in
invisible ink, it renders them articulate and dazzling as the
handwriting on the wall. The divine Seer does not convey to you
_his_ revelation, but qualifies you to receive _your own_. This
mutual relation is possible only through the common presence of
God in the conscience of mankind.” Shedd, Dogmatic Theology,
1:195-220—“The earth and sky make the same sensible impressions on
the organs of a brute that they do upon those of a man; but the
brute never discerns the ‘invisible things’ of God, his ‘eternal
power and godhood’_ (Rom. 1:20)_.”

Our subconscious activity, so far as it is normal, is under the
guidance of the immanent Reason. Sensation, before it results in
thought, has in it logical elements which are furnished by
mind—not ours, but that of the Infinite One. Christ, the Revealer
of God, reveals God in every man’s mental life, and the Holy
Spirit may be the principle of self-consciousness in man as in
God. Harris, God the Creator, tells us that “man finds the Reason
that is eternal and universal revealing itself in the exercise of
his own reason.” Savage, Life after Death, 268—“How do you know
that your subliminal consciousness does not tap Omniscience, and
get at the facts of the universe?” Savage negatives this
suggestion, however, and wrongly favors the spirit-theory. For his
own experience, see pages 295-329 of his book.

C. M. Barrows, in Proceedings of Soc. for Psychical Research, vol.
12, part 30, pages 34-36—“There is a subliminal agent. What if
this is simply one intelligent Actor, filling the universe with
his presence, as the ether fills space; the common Inspirer of all
mankind, a skilled Musician, presiding over many pipes and keys,
and playing through each what music he will? The subliminal self
is a universal fountain of energy, and each man is an outlet of
the stream. Each man’s personal self is contained in it, and thus
each man is made one with every other man. In that deep Force, the
last fact behind which analysis cannot go, all psychical and
bodily effects find their common origin.” This statement needs to
be qualified by the assertion of man’s ethical nature and distinct
personality; see section of this work on Ethical Monism, in
chapter III. But there is truth here like that which Coleridge
sought to express in his Æolian Harp: “And what if all of animated
Nature Be but organic harps diversely framed, That tremble into
thought, as o’er them sweeps, Plastic and vast, one intellectual
breeze, At once the soul of each, and God of all?” See F. W. H.
Myers, Human Personality.

Dorner, System of Theology, 1:75—“The consciousness of God is the
true fastness of our self-consciousness.... Since it is only in
the God-conscious man that the innermost personality comes to
light, in like manner, by means of the interweaving of that
consciousness of God and of the world, the world is viewed in God
(‘sub specie eternitatis’), and the certainty of the world first
obtains its absolute security for the spirit.” Royce, Spirit of
Mod. Philosophy, synopsis in N. Y. Nation: “The one indubitable
fact is the existence of an infinite self, a Logos or World-mind
(345). That it exists is clear, I. Because idealism shows that
real things are nothing more nor less than ideas, or
‘possibilities of experience’; but a mere ‘possibility’, as such,
is nothing, and a world of ‘possible’ experiences, in so far as it
is real, must be a world of actual experience to some self (367).
If then there be a real world, it has all the while existed as
ideal and mental, even before it became known to the particular
mind with which we conceive it as coming into connection (368).
II. But there is such a real world; for, when I _think_ of an
object, when I _mean_ it, I do not merely have in mind an idea
resembling it, for I aim at the object, I pick it out, I already
in some measure possess it. The object is then already present in
essence to my hidden self (370). As truth consists in knowledge of
the conformity of a cognition to its object, that alone can know a
truth which includes within itself both idea and object. This
inclusive Knower is the Infinite Self (374). With this I am in
essence identical (371); it is my larger self (372); and this
larger self alone _is_ (379). It includes all reality, and we know
other finite minds, because we are one with them in its unity”
(409).

The experience of George John Romanes is instructive. For years he
could recognize no personal Intelligence controlling the universe.
He made four mistakes: 1. _He forgot that only love can see_, that
God is not disclosed to the mere intellect, but only to the whole
man, to the integral mind, to what the Scripture calls “the eyes
of your heart”_ (Eph. 1:18)_. Experience of life taught him at
last the weakness of mere reasoning, and led him to depend more
upon the affections and intuitions. Then, as one might say, he
gave the X-rays of Christianity a chance to photograph God upon
his soul. 2. _He began at the wrong end_, with matter rather than
with mind, with cause and effect rather than with right and wrong,
and so got involved in the mechanical order and tried to interpret
the moral realm by it. The result was that instead of recognizing
freedom, responsibility, sin, guilt, he threw them out as
pretenders. But study of conscience and will set him right. He
learned to take what be found instead of trying to turn it into
something else, and so came to interpret nature by spirit, instead
of interpreting spirit by nature. 3. _He took the Cosmos by bits_,
instead of regarding it as a whole. His early thinking insisted on
finding design in each particular part, or nowhere. But his more
mature thought recognized wisdom and reason in the ordered whole.
As he realized that this is a universe, he could not get rid of
the idea of an organizing Mind. He came to see that the Universe,
as a thought, implies a Thinker. 4. _He fancied that nature
excludes God_, instead of being only the method of God’s working.
When he learned how a thing was done, he at first concluded that
God had not done it. His later thought recognized that God and
nature are not mutually exclusive. So he came to find no
difficulty even in miracles and inspiration; for the God who is in
man and of whose mind and will nature is only the expression, can
reveal himself, if need be, in special ways. So George John
Romanes came back to prayer, to Christ, to the church.

On the general subject of intuition as connected with our idea of
God, see Ladd, in Bib. Sac., 1877:1-36, 611-616; 1878:619; Fisher,
on Final Cause and Intuition, in Journ. Christ. Philos., Jan.
1883:113-134; Patton, on Genesis of Idea of God, in Jour. Christ.
Philos., Apl. 1883:283-307; McCosh, Christianity and Positivism,
124-140; Mansel, in Encyc. Brit., 8th ed., vol. 14:604 and 615;
Robert Hall, sermon on Atheism; Hutton, on Atheism, in Essays,
1:3-37; Shairp, in Princeton Rev., March, 1881:264.