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Such, then, are the general facts of religion, and the fundamental critical principles which justify and define its development. Religion is man's belief in salvation, his confident appeal to the overruling control of his ultimate fortunes. The reconstruction of religious belief is made necessary whenever it fails to express the last verified truth, cosmological or ethical.
The ethical ground of moral idealism is the virtual unity of life, the working therein of one eventual purpose sustained by the good-will of all moral beings. The cosmological proof lies in the moral fruitfulness and plasticity of nature. The historical proof lies in the fact of moral progress, in the advent and steady betterment of life.
The celebrated ontological or Cartesian argument for the existence of a Supreme Being is therefore insufficient; and we may as well hope to increase our stock of knowledge by the aid of mere ideas, as the merchant to augment his wealth by the addition of noughts to his cash account. SECTION V. Of the Impossibility of a Cosmological Proof of the Existence of God.
We need not wonder, therefore, if it is to Babylonia that the cosmological legends and beliefs of Phoenicia plainly point. The watery chaos out of which the world was created, the divine hierarchies, one pair of deities proceeding from another and an older pair, or the victory of Kronos over the dragon Ophioneus, are among the indications of their Babylonian origin.
To demonstrate the existence of a necessary being, I cannot be permitted in this place to employ any other than the cosmological argument, which ascends from the conditioned in phenomena to the unconditioned in conception the unconditioned being considered the necessary condition of the absolute totality of the series.
The etymology of Anshar is as obscure as that of most of the ancient gods of Babylonia, as of Sin, Marduk, Ishtar, and many more. But before leaving the subject, it will be proper to call attention to the rôle that a god Anshar plays in the Babylonian-Assyrian cosmological system. Anshar and Kishar are the second pair of deities to be created, the first pair being Lakhmu and Lakhamu.
These speculated on the origin of things, attributed it to spontaneous generation, the descent of man to evolution, entertaining the vulgar meanwhile with tales of gods and ghosts. Schrader: Die Keilenschriften. The cosmological texts now available were not written then. They are drawn from others that were. But there is a vignette that probably is of that age.
To establish the truth of the latter view, principles are requisite, which are not cosmological and do not proceed in the series of phenomena. We should require to introduce into our proof conceptions of contingent beings regarded merely as objects of the understanding, and also a principle which enables us to connect these, by means of mere conceptions, with a necessary being.
They are, doubtless, an outgrowth of the cosmological ideas of early man, and those who accept them must do so on the basis of belief in their probability; it is no longer permissible to claim for them the warrant of divine origin. Modern science stringently demands facts in support of any assertion, the word "faith" having no place in its lexicon.
Aralû is situated under the earth, and Mashu, reaching down to Aralû, must be again coextensive with the earth in this direction. The description of Mashu accordingly is a reflex of the cosmological conceptions developed in Babylonia. The scorpion-men pictured on seal cylinders belong to the mythical monsters, half-man, half-beast, with which the world was peopled at the beginning of things.
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