Chapter IV: Religion's First Postulate: the Quasi-Human God

It is with purpose that I use the word _assumption_. As a matter of history, the existence of a quasi-human God has always been an assumption or postulate. It is something which men have all along taken for granted. It probably never occurred to anybody to try to prove the existence of such a God until it was doubted, and doubts on that subject are very modern. Omitting from the account a few score of ingenious philosophers, it may be said that all mankind, the wisest and the simplest, have taken for granted the existence of a Deity, or deities, of a psychical nature more or less similar to that of Humanity. Such a postulate has formed a part of all human thinking from primitive ages down to the present time. The forms in which it has appeared have been myriad in number, but all have been included in this same fundamental assumption. The earliest forms were those which we call fetishism and animism. In fetishism the wind that blows a tree down is endowed with personality and supposed to exert conscious effort; in animism some ghost of a dead man is animating that gust of wind. In either case a conscious volition similar to our own, but outside of us, is supposed to be at work. There has been some discussion as to whether fetishism or animism is the more primitive, and some writers would regard fetishism as a special case of animism; but it is not necessary to my present purpose that such questions should be settled. The main point is this, that in the earliest phases of theism each operation of Nature was supposed to have some quasi-human personality behind it. Such phases we find among contemporary savages, and there is abundant evidence of their former existence among peoples now civilized. In the course of ages there was a good deal of generalizing done. Poseidon could shake the land and preside over the sea, angry Apollo could shoot arrows tipped with pestilence, mischievous Hermes could play pranks in the summer breezes, while as lord over all, though with somewhat fitful sway, stood Zeus on the summit of Olympus, gathering the rain-clouds and wielding the thunderbolt. Nothing but increasing knowledge of nature was needed to convert such Polytheism into Monotheism, even into the strict Monotheism of our own time, in which the whole universe is the multiform manifestation of a single Deity that is still regarded as in some real and true sense quasi-human. As the notion of Deity has thus been gradually generalized, from a thousand local gods to one omnipresent God, it has been gradually stripped of its grosser anthropomorphic vestments. The tutelar Deity of a savage clan is supposed to share with his devout worshippers in the cannibal banquet; the Gods of Olympus made war and love, and were moved to fits of inextinguishable laughter. From our modern Monotheism such accidents of humanity are eliminated, but the notion of a kinship between God and man remains, and is rightly felt to be essential to theism. Take away from our notion of God the human element, and the theism instantly vanishes; it ceases to be a notion of God. We may retain an abstract symbol to which we apply some such epithet as Force, or Energy, or Power, but there is nothing theistic in this. Some ingenious philosopher may try to persuade us to the contrary, but the Human Soul knows better; it knows at least what it wants; it has asked for Theology, not for Dynamics, and it resents all such attempts to palm off upon it stones for bread.

Our philosopher will here perhaps lift up his hands in dismay and cry, "Hold! what matters it what the Human Soul wants? Are cravings, forsooth, to be made to do duty as reasons?" It is proper to reply that we are trying to deal with this whole subject after the manner of the naturalist, which is to describe things as they exist and account for them as best we may. I say, then, that mankind have framed, and for long ages maintained, a notion of God into which there enters a human element. Now if it should ever be possible to abolish that human element, it would not be possible to cheat mankind into accepting the non-human remnant of the notion as an equivalent of the full notion of which they had been deprived. Take away from our symbolic conception of God the human element, and that aspect of theism which has from the outset chiefly interested mankind is gone.